Effects of Email Bots and Firewalls on Email Marketing

Firewalls versus email marketing is quite a combat. They are the formidable arch enemies of Email Marketing.

Many marketers use email open and click rates as primary metrics to measure campaign effectiveness. Every such campaign is used to send out an alert to sales about an enthusiastic lead who keenly wants to be contacted for a service or product.

However, when a marketer comes to know the performance of the campaign is not what it is showing, he is alarmed. The higher performance rate is an outcome of wrong open and click rates tracking, the excitement of a successful campaign is replaced by some questions: How did this happen? How does it affect my campaign performance? And, what is the solution? We’re here to highlight the possible ‘what’ and ‘how’ scenarios revolving around Email bots and Firewalls, along with the solutions, of course.
How did this happen? It happened due to email bots and firewalls, which are set up at the leads’ email servers whose task is to read through all emails before they reach the actual recipient.

Email bots and firewalls, what are they? They are scripts or logics added to the email server that stop any possible phishing, scam, or spamming email with or without an attachment and can result in a harm to the receiver’s system or network.

How do they affect my campaign performance? These email bots and firewalls read through the marketing emails and click each and every link inside the email, resulting in a higher number of open and click rate for your campaign. They befoul your metrics, botch your phased lead nurture program and fabricate positive triggers for action-based marketing.

What is the solution? The solution is precarious, not impossible though. There are some manual and some automatic ways to overcome this issue. We’ve broke down the answers into three solutions. Read on to determine the one that best fits your need or which combination of these which will work for you.

First Solution: Stop sending any alerts to your sales team to contact these incorrect leads. First, manually verify each open and click activity for every lead and find out for which lead the clicks for all links were recorded and that too within a minute. Once you find out the leads, you can then send a report with valid leads to your sales team to contact them.

Second Solution: Add a hidden link, which is not visible to a human being but a bot or a firewall, that can easily track it. Add a check inside your campaign not to send an alert for any lead who clicks on that link. It can be a little tricky as well, if the visibility check fails in any email client. The false link will be visible to a human being, resulting in the failure of the campaign.

Third Solution: Stop using open and click rates as the criteria to measure the performance of an email campaign. Instead, use ‘visit web page activity’. To make this solution secure, do add a CTA on the web page that is outside the reach of email bots and firewalls and closer to humans.

The effectiveness of a marketing campaign boils down to defining the cost to acquire a single new customer. So better the performance, better the revenue and lower the cost. Incorporate these solutions and you’ll see for yourself how, even with email bots and firewalls, you’ll have more of a coherent and consistent email marketing environment and less of a Wild West.

Need help to strategize and effectively implement your email marketing? Let’s connect then.