Click Is The New Impression: Marketers Vs. Spam

As 2023 drew to a close, John, an email marketer, had good reason to pop off the champagne he’d been saving for New Year’s Eve.

His newsletters had begun clocking a 35% Open Rate and a mouth-watering 5% Click Rate. However, as time passed, the lack of conversions began to take its toll on John's enthusiasm.

\ The early thrill of high open and click rates gave way to frustration and disappointment.

Can you tell me what happened here?

\ SPAMBOTS - That’s What Happened Here.

\ Designed and operated by massive email providers like Google, Apple, Microsoft and third-party providers like Barracuda, Spambots open every email and click on every link to check for phishing and malicious links.

\ That’s all good, but a side effect is newsletter marketers’ inability to differentiate between a real click by a human and a spambot click.

This breaks all your drip campaigns, re-engagement efforts, and most newsletter advertisements you buy!

\ While you might now appreciate the gravity of the situation, almost every newsletter platform (like Mailchimp and SendGrid) is asleep at the wheel or basking in the (short-sighted) bump in ‘reportable stats.’

\

A more technical way to verify this is to check time on site. The spambot clicks will show up as visits that stayed for less than 5 seconds.

\ What Can You Do To Fix This?

\ Honestly, nothing!

\ Well, you can try the following:

\

• Increase link-click scoring time to 1 hour or even 1 day
• Embed a stealth link
• Clean up your list with a re-opt-in campaign

\ But good luck - ain’t nobody got time for that!

\ What you can do instead is advertise directly on websites that cater to your niche.

\ The CPMs would be lower, the CPCs would be lower, and the botclicks would be minimal.

\ In fact, if your audience is any of the following:

\

• Programmers
• AI/ML Enthusiasts
• Web3 Degens
• Cybersecurity Professionals

\ Or at the intersection of a combination of the above - our 4000+ sponsors seem to be in a sweet spot.

\ Here’s what this week’s sponsor has to say - ‘HackerNoon drives a lot of traffic for a very reasonable cost and the engagement is stronger than X and Reddit.’

\ I’m expected to create FOMO here and compel y’all to ACT NOW, but we’re not about all that.

\

:::tip Book a Meeting Here

:::

\ And if Advertising based on Intent, instead of cookies, or,

\ Advertising that generates a 0.20% CTR is what you’re looking for - I’ll see you at the meeting!

\ To the rest,

\ May the odds also be in your favor.