The Rise of Exploitive Email Click Bots

Bots are having a profound effect on how the internet functions and may even outnumber people on some platforms like Twitter. Email marketing is not immune to click bots, with the newest activity being from bots that mimic human subscribers in order to collect information to power data service businesses.

The problem with these kinds of email click bots is that they create activity that inflates performance numbers and causes false positives that trigger automated campaigns and muddy targeting efforts. All in all, they simply make it more difficult to see how subscribers are truly responding. That can cause brands to make tactical or strategic changes that serve bots rather than actual subscribers.

Oracle’s Heather Goff, Bradford Johnson, Dan Deneweth, Wade Hobbs, Kent McGovern and I explore these bots in more detail, but let’s do so in the broader context of all email click bots. We think of these bots as falling into three categories, with each one requiring its own potential remedies:

• Beneficial Email Click Bots
• Malicious Email Click Bots
• Exploitive Email Click Bots

For full discussion of each of these kinds of bots and advice on how to respond to them…

>> Read the full post on Oracle’s Modern Marketing blog