I want to try tag-based opt-out for the first time, and offer an opt-out from a 5-part series of marketing broadcasts, but I have concerns that the opt-out link will be clicked by a bunch of bots and accidentally opt out some of my subscribers who didn’t want to opt out.
Is there any way around this?
(I also posted this as a comment on another thread, but I’m not sure if that was the best way for it to be seen!)
Hi Lisa,
That’s a solid question and one that’s really nuanced in practice for the reasons you mentioned.
In general consumer oriented lists, this technique is very effective as the number of link clicking security scanners is pretty small across those populations.
Where you are likely to run into different results is your higher concentration of B2B enterprise type users. Those are where more of the link clicking security bots are and you are going to get more errant clicks from those. I can see them in your click stats as they are statistically, much higher than normal and links are being clicked repeatedly for elements of your messages that I would not normally expect a user to click in every issue. You can see this in your stats by looking for links that end up getting clicked the same or similar number of times as other links. Making a segment based on those users, you can quickly see that types of domains that appear in those groups are all enterprise B2B type domains thru a couple of different providers.
The best way to safely do this for the majority of your subscribers, would be to use one of your most recent issues and create a segment of people that did not click one of those links. This will exclude all the people that have those security scanners and allow you to send a special message to the rest of your subscribers with those tag based opt-out items.
Another item that’s helpful to prevent security scan clicks… Make sure you’re linking words in your messages and not pasting in URLs directly. For example, instead of listing:
Visit my website: https://www.example.com
Instead do this:
The problem with listing our your domain in the first example above is because once our click tracking links get added, the visible link ends up being different than the actual link where someone is clicking to go. This can be a red flag to security scanners and make them more likely to scan those links and all the other links in your message.
Helpful! Thank you, Tom!
One more thing: looking back at recent emails, the click rate is between 3.1 and 10.6 percent. So I’m thinking I should pick one of the emails with the lowest click rates, because the segment will retain the most subscribers who didn’t click. Does that sound right?
Update: I attempted this process above, and I still got 45 clicks immediately upon sending. Including clicks on the opt-out link. So now I’m pretty sure bots just removed a tag from 41 people who may not have wanted it removed.
I’m poking around at the segments you created and I’m not seeing a segment where you carved out people that did not click one of those links. Bottom line, I think you missed the core segmenting step unless I’m just not seeing it.
It’s hard to help you here in a public forum as I don’t want to post specifics about subscribers sizes and message subjects and such without your express permission. I’m going to send you a direct email with some screenshots pointing you in the right direction.
I combined the core segment with another segment of users I was already emailing. I’ll look for your email!