Spambots are programs built with the intent of creating email lists to send spam to. These bots are designed to quickly crawl through the internet, picking up information through forms, contact sections, chat rooms and more. Since all emails are set up in similar ways, it makes faking an email very easy. That’s why programmers set up these bots. They can gather thousands of emails in seconds.
As a digital marketer, you are more at risk for attracting spam bots to your form's if you are doing affiliate marketing. It's often that some shady affiliate sources will push you fictitious email addresses because they want to collect a bigger payout.
Once a false email address enters your list, they hide in disguise and wait until you send out an email. This email will likely create hard bounce problems for you, and cost you extra money because you wind up paying for fake leads.
Have you ever heard the saying “Don’t kill the messenger?” Sometimes being angry at the person carrying the message is significantly easier than finding the root of the problem. That’s an excellent way to think about how spam bots can damage you, personally. Though the dangerous content isn’t coming directly from you, you are the closest link. ESPs can’t necessarily punish the spambot, but they can protect their users from the messenger (aka you).
If your email is linked to spam accounts, ESPs will likely hit you with a penalty or worse, blacklist your domain. When your domain is blacklisted, it's banned from any inbox connected with the ESP. You can imagine the damage this can do to your email campaign by wasting marketing dollars on messages that never make it into the user’s inbox. But the damage this does to your sender score is even scarier.
Your sender score is made up of six main aspects. Half of these points are linked to spam. Blacklists, spam complaints and mailing to spam traps makes up half of the pieces of your sender score puzzle. Your sender score determines whether or not your email will make it into a user’s inbox. The importance of avoiding spam traps can’t possibly be emphasized enough.
Say you send out an email to a spam trap. This alone with decrease your sender score. Spam traps will significantly damage your reputation. Gmail decides that you are simply too dangerous of a domain for them to allow you into their user’s inboxes, so they blacklist you. Though the other ESPs on your email list haven’t blacklisted you, your sender score will still take a huge hit and affect your ability to get into their user’s inboxes.
Once your email is rerouted to spam, your users don’t have a chance to see your messages which means that your user engagement is going to decrease dramatically. Guess what makes up another portion of your sender score? You guessed it, user engagement. That means that this one spam trap has negatively affected four of the six portions that make up your sender score. A smart marketer is panicking right now, and you should be. This is a scary thought. One wrong move could sink so many important factors of your business and potentially ruin your whole email campaign. But take a deep breath because there are ways to protect yourself.
One day we got a call from a prospective client. Their email list, which was regularly receiving 3,000 email registrations a day, jumped to taking in 12,000 email registrations a day. That massive increase, however, was no cause for excitement. A significant portion of these emails were spam emails because a bot was attacking their web form. This increase landed them on a blacklist. Their emails weren’t delivering, their engagement numbers had plummeted, and to put it quite simply, they were worried. Luckily, we were there to help.
With Xverify’s real-time verification, we helped them verify emails before they even got into their sales pipeline. Then, we helped them complete a bulk email upload to check all the existing emails on their list. From here, we eliminated the addresses related to spam from their list so they didn’t continue to send out messages to those dangerous emails, putting their new users at risk. Once these protections were put in place, our client applied to be removed from the ESP’s blacklist.
Since they had taken all of these measures to improve the quality and protection of their data, they were withdrawn from the blacklist and started to see their sender score and their user engagement take a turn for the better. With our unique data solutions, you have plenty of ways to catch spambots before they destroy your sender score, or to fix your sender score if those pesky spambots have already taken their toll. Don’t let your email campaign suffer when a solution and prevention is as simple as setting up an Xverify account.
Sign up for our newsletter
