The Growing Trend of Bot Clicks and How to Manage Deliverability

Marketing Cupcakes

Summary

In this week's episode James is going to share with you some of his insider experiences when it comes to eliminating bot clicks from your email campaigns. As email marketing is becoming more and more popular, bots are getting smarter and stealthier.

In various high-security industries such as healthcare, government and banking, security bots could lower your deliverability without you even noticing it!

Tune in now to find out how you can increase your email click-through rates as well as how to avoid getting flagged as spam by security bots.

Highlights

00:37 - Introducing James, the healthcare email marketing expert.

01:48 - What are bots and how do they affect your email deliverability without you knowing it?

02:40 - How security protocol bots can skew your click-through rate statistics.

03:31 - James' solution: taking email tracking to the next level.

04:14 - Best practices to increase email deliverability.

05:12 - How to avoid getting flagged as spam by adding that human touch.

Links / Resources

• More about adding the human touch to your marketing in Marketing Cupcakes episode 1.
• Google Analytics: https://www.google.com/analytics/
• Marketo: https://www.marketo.com/
• Pardot: https://www.pardot.com/
• Hubspot: http://www.hubspot.com/
• McAfee: http://www.mcafee.com/uk/index.html
• Symantec: https://www.symantec.com/
• Proof Point: https://www.proofpoint.com/
• ENDUUR: http://enduur.com

Transcript

Intro: Chances are your company's marketing efforts could be producing better results. We're here to help make your marketing smarter. Welcome to Marketing Cupcakes bringing you the latest in marketing analytics, data science techniques, integration challenges, guerrilla marketing techniques and more. Here are your hosts of Marketing Cupcakes, Dave and James Gilbert.

Dave: Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Marketing Cupcakes. I'm your host, Dave Gilbert and this is James.

James: Hey guys.

Dave: So today we're going to talk about something that I'm guessing a lot of you might not know a whole lot about yet. It's the growing trend of bot clicks and how you manage email deliverability. Because I didn't know a lot about this subject and James has some experience in this subject that I'm guessing a lot of you don't. And so he is going to talk a little bit about an area that he is really familiar with in the healthcare industry. And as you can imagine there's a lot of security protocols in the healthcare industry, you know, other industries would be like government or with banking and something that they've been doing to manage spam. And so James is going to talk a little bit about that, so we’ll turn the mic over him.

James: Hello everyone. So to start and as Dave mentioned healthcare is growing as far as the security goes. What they implement is on the back end of your email deliverability is pretty unique and it's growing to be a lot bigger. So one of the things that I wanted to talk about was what a bot really is and how it engages with your emails without you really knowing.

So we ran a lot of email campaigns in the healthcare industry and those particular people that we were sending them to had very unique security protocols within each of their ITs. So you can imagine that these big platforms, marketing automation platforms like Marketo and Pardot and HubSpot and all these big ones, you think that they would be able to track a bot and be able to give you unique insights into what those actually do.

What we found is that we needed to actually do some stuff on our end to make sure that we were giving the right results to our emails. So whenever we would send out en email we would see that it had a high click through rate and we were thinking oh, great, this email performed really, really well. And then we started learning more and more about bots. And learned that people that it showed in our marketing automation platform that actually clicked on an email really actually never opened it.

So then we started doing some investigation within our marketing automation platforms and what we found was that if a bot would be implemented and it would actually click on all of the links that were in your email to see if it was rendering on a page that was secure. And if the IT that it was being delivered to decided that it was not secure it would actually bounce your email into the spam box automatically.

And so what we were doing is we re-ran the analysis on our marketing campaigns that we ran email with and we found that those who actually opened the email oftentimes didn't click and we were getting clicks that people didn't actually open the email. So this is where we determined that it was finally a bot.

So one of the things that we did to implement to try and make sure that we had good deliverability on our emails is we implemented some tracking where you can put a unique URL that will allow you to build the workflow within your marketing automation platform to then track those automatically and then you can also work with those IT departments that you're delivering to if you have current clients or current customers that need to receive emails from you. We would work with our IT departments to get our domain whitelisted again. Because oftentimes those bots would prevent us from being able to be delivered to their inbox no matter what.

So a lot of us know about certain industry trends and certain things that we need to follow as far as email and best practices that are like not having as many links as you do text and making sure that your text is higher than your images and that you don't have as many images within your email. And some of the other things that you can do is tracking your bots and your clicks in your automation platform is really unique to the platform itself. When we used Marketo we actually had to build a smart list that showed all of our opens and all of our clicks. And we would not track and not present a click on an email unless they actually opened it as well.

So these are some of the things that bots can do to try and skew your statistics with your emails and especially since email is continuing to grow within the marketing industry, that is something that we all need to consider because this is going to get more and more difficult to manage that and to get around that.

If you've had a chance to listen to our first episode of Marketing Cupcakes, you'll know about the story of providing the human touch and that each person, each company, each person that you market to is very unique and needs that human touch. Well, the same thing goes with IT. They provide a little bit of a human touch when it comes to your emails. Each one has their own algorithm that they build.

Some companies might use McAfee, they might use Symantec. Other companies might use Proof Point and these other tools that sort of block your emails from being delivered to your clients and customers. They each have their own unique algorithm that provides a human touch. They might look at certain things in the subject line or a specific word that's in the subject line and decide okay, we're not going to let you send to us if you have that word in your subject line.

Other companies might have a different type of algorithm where they might look at marketing messaging versus sales messaging. If you have “buy now” for example in your email you might have a lower deliverability rate than having just a marketing type of message where you're promoting a product or you're promoting something but it doesn't have a buying message.

All of those things are taken in consideration with IT departments and their respective software that they use to spam and to make sure that you aren't flagged as spam you need to be following those best practices within your email. That's all I have for bots and how you can manage your deliverability.

Dave: And to make sure that you are managing your emails correctly and analyzing correctly your click-through rates and your clicks and it sounds like as email becomes more and more prevalent, especially in more secure verticals, it will become more and more important as marketers that we track this trend and implement those metrics so that we can actually measure correctly. And so thank you for listening, we’ll catch you next time on marketing cupcakes.

Outro: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Marketing Cupcakes an ENDUUR podcast with your hosts David and James Gilbert. For more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit http://marketingcupcakes.com/ If you enjoyed the show please subscribe and rate the podcast. We'll catch you next time on Marketing Cupcakes.