Overview
If you're noticing unexpected spikes in your email open or click rates—or seeing engagement metrics that don’t align with actual subscriber behavior—you may be encountering what's known as bot activity.
These "opens" and "clicks" are often not from real people, but from email security bots scanning the message for potential threats before it reaches your recipient. While this is a common practice to protect inboxes, it can impact your email marketing reports and make it difficult to interpret campaign performance accurately.
What Are Email Bots?
Email bots are automated security tools used by corporate firewalls, spam filters, and antivirus systems. Their purpose is to scan incoming emails for malicious links or attachments before delivering them to the end user. In doing so, these bots often:
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Open the email
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Click on multiple or all links
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Trigger tracking pixels or download images
These actions are not the result of human interaction, but they are still recorded as opens or clicks by your email reporting tools.
How Does This Affect My Email Reports?
You might see:
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Higher-than-usual open rates or click-through rates
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All or some links in an email being clicked, even obscure or non-prominent ones
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Engagement activity occurring within seconds of the email being sent
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Disproportionate activity from corporate or government domains
These false positives can make it challenging to:
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Accurately measure real subscriber engagement
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Run reliable A/B tests on Subject lines
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Understand which content or offers are truly performing well
What Can I Do About It?
While email bots are not something that can be fully avoided—especially in business-to-business (B2B) email communications—there are a few best practices and solutions that can help you minimize their impact:
Tips to Minimize Bot Interference
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Use behavioral tracking instead of just opens/clicks (e.g., track conversions or on-site behavior)
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Analyze click patterns—bots often click every link rapidly and at the same time. If you have Profile 360 on your license you can use Subscriber Profile to analyze this.
Still Seeing Issues?
If you're seeing consistent bot-related behavior or distorted metrics, it's possible that your organization’s email firewall is scanning links automatically.
To fix this, please reach out to your internal IT Team to whitelist Swift Digital on your email security platforms or servers. Whitelisting will allow our emails to bypass certain security scans that cause false engagement signals—ensuring your reporting reflects actual subscriber behavior.
If you need assistance with the whitelisting process or have any further questions, feel free to contact us at support@swiftdigital.com.au
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