Suspicious open rate? Click-through rate too high to be real? There are many email stats to keep in mind! The statistics for your marketing emails sometimes seem off the mark. This concerns all players (even our fellow global leader Hubspot), and the explanations are not always clear or obvious. An overview of the context and technological solutions to avoid statistical noise that frustrates our marketers.
Context and symptoms: statistics sometimes distorted because of robots
It may happen that, for some of your sent emails, you notice a highly inflated open rate or, on the contrary, one that is far too low compared with a campaign you may already have sent with another email delivery platform.
Same problem with clicks: you may find that some of your contacts have the suspicious tendency (and rightly so) to click on all the links in your emails.
This is indeed abnormal behavior and a real headache for the marketer trying to measure changes in the performance of their email communication. Worse still, when changing sending platforms, the statistics suddenly seem different, as if email deliverability were better or worse.
That may be the reason, but certainly not the only one.
Indeed, more and more firewalls or anti-spam solutions such as MailInBlack have the unfortunate tendency to scan all emails (opens) and check the content behind each link (clicks) in order to prevent users from being tricked by spam or phishing attempts.
So this starts from a good intention for the end user, but it undermines the marketer’s goals. So, what can we do with our statistics?
Solutions for excluding bot tracking
Excluding identified robots from statistics
The first solution is to exclude these robots (also called “bots”). This is sometimes possible because some are well known and have recurring identifiers (IP addresses, etc.), making them easy to filter out, that is, to exclude from the calculated statistics (clicks and opens in particular).
This can explain why, beyond deliverability quality, statistics can vary from one solution to another on the same contact database and with the same content. Indeed, the solution that blocks robots will have poorer statistics (fewer opens and clicks), but this data is more accurate.
However, not all robots are identifiable; even by doing this work upstream, some slip through the cracks.
Also read: Email marketing solution or marketing automation: why and how to choose?
The reCAPTCHA solution, anti-spam for forms
Fortunately, new technological solutions are opening up new opportunities to fend off robots. You are certainly familiar with Google reCAPTCHA integrated into forms (a feature available on Webmecanik Automation forms to prevent spam), a checkbox to validate that you are not a robot.
Obviously, we cannot ask users to fill out a form on every click in an email to verify that they are not a robot.
However, new technologies such as Google reCAPTCHA v3 make it possible to implement this same anti-bot system without any user intervention, that is, without having to click anywhere; it is completely transparent to them. A great promise.
Also read: Email spam?
Webmecanik Automation and improved statistical accuracy
So, what about your favorite French marketing automation software offered by Webmecanik?
We have always blocked the robots we know how to identify, whether for emails or page visits, in order to provide more accurate statistical reporting to our marketing users. You might think that this works against us because statistics after a tool migration may appear less impressive.
But rest assured, as always we believe that honesty and transparency are essential, and we are confident in our solution’s deliverability performance thanks to our French technology partner Mailjet, the European leader.
Also read: The best tips for improving the deliverability of your emails!
But that is not all. We are also working on new technologies that allow us to go further in the reliability of statistics, but once again and as always, by taking the time to think things through.
Indeed, Google’s solution seems promising but raises new questions regarding GDPR compliance. And this criterion is NON-NEGOTIABLE for us (make sure this is also the case for the solution you use).
Fortunately, there are alternatives to Google’s solution. So our R&D team is actively working on the subject to be able to offer this complete transparency and better statistics to our marketers. To be continued…
