What is Bot Activity in Email Marketing?

Overview

Bot activity in emails refers to automated programs or scripts that interact with email campaigns in a way that mimics human behavior. These bots can perform various actions, such as opening emails, clicking links, filling out forms, or marking emails as spam. The purpose of bot activity can range from benign, such as email security scanners checking links for malicious content or email analytics services tracking engagement, to malicious, such as creating fake sign-ups, skewing marketing data, or conducting email-based phishing attacks.

Bots are not actual subscribers, so their actions result in misleading data and negatively impact the effectiveness and accuracy of email marketing efforts. Identifying and filtering out bot activity is essential for email marketers to maintain a realistic understanding of their campaign performance and audience engagement.

Bot Actions on Emails

Bots can perform a variety of actions on emails, including but not limited to:

Opening emails: Bots can automatically open emails, potentially inflating open rate metrics.
Clicking links: Bots can click links within emails, skewing click-through rate data and leading to incorrect conclusions about subscriber engagement.
Marking as spam: Some bots may be programmed to mark emails as spam, damaging the sender's reputation with email service providers and affecting deliverability.
Unsubscribing: Bots can automatically unsubscribe from email lists, harming the mailing list of a brand.

Not all reasons behind bot activity are sinister. There are scenarios where bot opens are a side effect of a feature intended to improve email users’ lives. Some examples are:

Mail Privacy Protection (MPP): This was a feature introduced by Apple in its iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey updates, primarily affecting the native Mail app. MPP masks users’ IP addresses and loads remote content privately in the background, essentially pre-fetching email content as soon as it reaches the inbox. Pre-fetching email content makes it difficult for email senders to track opens accurately since emails are automatically opened regardless of user engagement. For more information, refer to Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and Email Analytics.
Image pre-fetches / security checks done by mailbox providers: In an attempt to load the emails faster or validate the links included in the email for security, mailbox providers also tend to download content, which can result in pseudo-open signals being sent back to the marketing platforms.

Impacts of Bot Activity on Email Marketing

Distorted engagement metrics: Bots can generate fake opens and clicks, leading to inflated engagement metrics that do not accurately reflect an email campaign's performance.
Increased spam complaints: If bots are programmed to mark emails as spam, it can lead to an increase in spam complaints, harming the sender's reputation.
Reduced reach: Bots that result in unintended unsubscribes can seriously impact the reachable users. This results in the effort, time, and energy spent building a mailing list going to waste.
Decreased deliverability: High unsubscribes and spam complaints due to bot activity can negatively impact the sender's email deliverability and reputation with internet service providers.
Skewed A/B testing results: Bot activity can interfere with A/B testing by generating false positives, leading to incorrect conclusions and suboptimal campaign decisions.

Track Bot Activity on Email Campaigns by MoEngage

Through various measures, MoEngage can differentiate between bot email opens and ones coming from real end users. Tracking bot activity can help marketers understand the impact of the machine opens in the engagement analytics and measure authentic user opens. For more information on these metrics, refer to Email Campaign Analytics and Info.