Our click rates unexpectedly spiked to 13-15%, with an open rate of 60%. We suspected bot activity, so in the following email, we hid a tiny dot and a small piece of text at the bottom, linking to it in the hopes of identifying and suppressing bot interactions. After reviewing the clicks, the email addresses seem legitimate, with some subscribers dating back two years.
I contacted Klaviyo support but it looks like there's no current way to complete prevent bot activity in emails.
We're still considering hiding a link within out emails that only bots would click in our next campaigns. This would allow us to segment those bots out and avoid sending future emails to them.
However, we're concerned about two things:
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Could this approach accidentally block real subscribers whose email accounts are sometimes accessed by bots?
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Even if a bot interacts with a subscriber's email, would the subscriber themselves still be able to see our emails?
We also noticed a significant increase in bot activity following the recent updates from Google and Yahoo. Could there be a connection between these events?
We'd appreciate any insights you can offer on these concerns.