How can Engagement Data keep your list healthy?

Last week we talked about the importance of knowing if your engagement data is real. This week we wanted to discuss the value of using that data to keep an email list healthy by filtering likely bots and removing hard bounced addresses.

Why does it matter if my email list contains bots? 

When bots are opening and engaging with your emails there are a few main problems that arise and make it more difficult to gain valuable insights from your whole data pool. Bot engagement will inflate your open rates while simultaneously decreasing the ratio of engagement to conversion. Bots on your list will also make it harder to see when changes in your strategy have an effect. A bot will open no matter the quality of the content provided to it. Finally, bots make it much more difficult to identify subscribers on your list who are actively engaged. Bot interactions make them appear to be your most engaged customers Your most engaged real customers are likely overshadowed when compared to their machine counterparts who won’t actually purchase anything. 

Here at AudiencePoint, we leverage several elements to effectively identify bots, including but not limited to: 

• Time between send and engagement
• Number of brands engaged with
• Date first seen 
• IP address (to filter out auto openers such as Apple Mail)

Why are hard bounces so bad? 

Keeping your email lists healthy is extremely important. Mailbox providers track messages which have hard bounced and count those bounces against your reputation as a sender. If your reputation falls low enough you might find that those mailbox providers keep all of your emails from reaching the final target. You might have bouncing addresses on your lists for several reasons. The bad address might be no longer active, have a full inbox, or it might just be that the email was never active in the first place. Regardless of the reason being able to identify and purge these bad addresses from your lists is needed to keep your lists healthy. 

Analyzing this incoming data is the key to keeping your list healthy. Bots don’t directly announce themselves but they can be found by analyzing your engagement data. Managing your lists ensures that your messages are sent to the subscribers you care about the most and not filtered out by email providers. AudiencePoint can help you Identify subscribers on your list which display bot behavior or will bounce before you even send an email.