Email marketing success in the bot era

Many brands are making decisions based on fake email data (and don't know it).   Here's a simple Klaviyo setting that 90% of brands ignore:   Excluding bot interactions from attribution.   I've been implementing this across all my clients lately, and it's a best practice that most brands just... don't do.   Here's the problem:   Bots are clicking your emails and SMS messages.   Not real customers. Bots.   This inflates your attribution and makes you think email is performing better than it actually is.   Maybe it's competitors checking out your campaigns. Maybe it's automated tools crawling your content. Maybe it's spam filters testing links.   The fix is dead simple:   Go into Klaviyo attribution settings → exclude bot interactions from clicked email and SMS metrics.   That's it.   Now your revenue attribution reflects actual human behavior.   The difference might be small (1-2% in most cases, some as high as 5%), but the principle is huge:   Make decisions based on real data, not inflated metrics.   Your attribution should show you where real customers are actually engaging and buying.   If you're using Klaviyo and haven't done this yet, do it today.   It takes 30 seconds and gives you cleaner, more accurate performance data.

Your emails are getting opened… but no one’s buying? Here’s why 👇 A client came to me recently, frustrated. Their email campaign was performing great—or so they thought. ✅ 50+% open rates ✅ 10+% click-through rates ❌ 0 conversions Before diving into their copy and CTA, I asked a simple question: Are these engagement numbers real? Turns out, they weren’t. When we dug deeper, we found that a huge chunk of those "opens" and "clicks" came from email security filters, not actual humans. Spam filters, security bots, and Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) were skewing the data, making their emails look like they were getting traction when, in reality, they were just noise in a spam filter’s pre-scan process. So before you rewrite your CTA for the 10th time or obsess over your copy, take a step back. 👉 Check if the domains opening your emails belong to corporate firewalls 👉 See if the click timestamps look unnatural (multiple clicks in the same second = bots) 👉 Compare reported clicks with actual website visits in Google Analytics Email deliverability isn’t just about hitting the inbox—it’s about reaching real people. And if your numbers are lying to you, no amount of copywriting magic will fix the real issue.

I got an email earlier this month from an old client: "Our revenue is dropping, but opens and clicks look fine." That must mean their copy isn't aligning, and subscribers aren't interested, right? Well, not necessarily... For DTC brands that rely on consistent email revenue, the first drop you will notice is actually revenue. It's a sudden drop. It used to be that you were able to use opens and clicks to see a downward trend before it hits revenue, but the rise of bots, opens and clicks are becoming less reliable. So what exactly happened with this client's account? AI-powered bots. If you are using any AI-powered software tools to "improve" your email segmentations or scrape data from your website to "enhance" your subscribers' profile know this: You are opening a giant portal for bots to enter your lists. So what do you need to do? 👉🏻 Watch your bounces - If you are seeing high bounces on the first emails in your flows, check your traffic. 👉🏻 Check your email campaign traffic - Your overall KPIs may look normal but when you break it down by MBPs or countries it can tell a whole other story. In this client's case, he was getting high bounce rates from another country that he didn't even sell in. When looking at the bots profiles, they all came from an AI-powered tool he had installed to help with "better" segmentations. He's losing around 20% of his email revenue at this point even though his opens and clicks look "normal." 👉🏻 Use AND segmentations - it's not "subscriber can receive email marketing" OR "opened or clicked (x amount of) emails in (x amount of days). It's "subscriber can receive email marketing" AND "opened or clicked (x amount of) emails in (x amount of days). This is one high-level segmentation condition. You need to apply layers of AND conditions for accurate segmentation. I get that AI is all the rage right now, and we all want to be efficient, but it shouldn't come at the expense of your email deliverability. Using a tool that was doing more damage than good caused him his domain reputation to take a hit. Luckily, we are fixing fast and he'll be able to recover his lost revenue. Tomorrow in my newsletter, I will be talking about better email segmentations and how to approach your list. Sign up and don't miss it. Need an email deliverability audit? DM me or book a call.