Removing spam profiles that are hurting sender reputation
Hi all,
I am managing a client account that has recently had over 700 customer profiles added by a spam bot. Some of these seem to be ‘real’ addresses that are now receiving the welcome flow and either unsubscribing or submitting spam complaints.
We fixed the issue so there aren’t more fake profiles being added through Shopify, but what can we do to either mass delete or prevent the flow from running - but still have it run for genuine sign-ups? I’m worried that the negative responses from these profiles will harm my clients sender reputation and analytics.
Also, if anyone has suggestions on how to create a segment with these profiles (or to exclude them) I would love to hear it. I had originally created one with the definitions of: date range from when the spam started, and ‘hasn’t opened OR clicked email’ but now we’ve realised they are people and have been opening - which doesn’t help the segment and is now placing them in our engaged segment instead!
It’s been a bit of a nightmare so any tips, suggestions or experiences would be so helpful.
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Hey @Taysha
Welcome to Klaviyo community, and thank you for this question.
Yes we had this issue as well and we created an exclude segment to fix this, but first you need to find a pattern in the emails. we noticed that our emails had ‘fake mail’ in it. Please refer to the below screenshot
so we created a segment to exclude these profiles from campaigns with below definition » properties about someone>>Email>contains> fakemail - and exclude this segment from email campaigns
For flows, you can do the same, by adding a flow filter. However when using this in a flow, make sure you have the definition as » email» doesn’t contain» fakemail (which would mean klaviyo will only allow those profiles to enter the flow if their email doesn’t have ‘fakemail’ in it.
Thankyou for this. Unfortunately it won’t work for my issue as they are all unique emails eg. rebeccasmith@gmail.com etc.
well then I guess, if you can give them some months and see if they are generating any revenue for you or not. If not then you can create the sunset flow, give them one last opportunity to engage with your emails, maybe even give them a discount code to use and see if they place an order. if not then you can suppress those profiles after lets say 90 days or 120 days.
That segment should look something like this and you should export this segment as csv and suppress them. my segment uses 120 days but depending on what they are selling, you can also use 60, 90 days in the definition. If they haven’t opened or clicked any of your emails in the last 120 days then it is good to assume that they are no longer interested in your emails, so why pay for those subscribers if they are not engaged. Better to suppress them
I am managing a client account that has recently had over 700 customer profiles added by a spam bot. Some of these seem to be ‘real’ addresses that are now receiving the welcome flow and either unsubscribing or submitting spam complaints.
I want to clarify here that if the profiles are unsubscribing or submitting spam complaints, they are real people and not fake. In this case, I’d suggest enabling double opt-in to your list to prevent this from happening again. Profiles added to a list (real or not) who don’t confirm their subscription never will be subscribed, won’t be sent campaigns, and cannot impact your sender score.
For addressing the unintentional subscribers you do have, Arpit’s advice is great! You can also consider creating an unengaged segment and sunsetting them out.
Yes, just to clarify on my end - while some of these are real addresses, they’ve definitely been added by a bot and not intentionally subscribed. I was happy to leave them to go into our unengaged segment but when I realised they were opening emails and submitting spam complaints, I realised they would be hurting my clients sender rep.
Once I noticed the profiles, I did turn double opt-in on so it won’t happen again.
To remove the profiles all together, what I ended up doing was suppressing a segment with profiles added between the dates the bot was active (with the exception of approx. 5 genuine sign ups) so the welcome flow wouldn’t send to them.
Sure, we could’ve ended up with a bit of revenue from these profiles - but it wasn’t a risk I wanted to take. I just don’t think an unwanted subscription is a good first impression that would lead to a purchase.
Hopefully this is helpful for anyone else this happens to!
