Email marketing is one of the most useful and effective strategies a local business can lean on to stay engaged with its customers. After all, 99% of email users check their email every day, and some as much as 20 times a day. But once you press “send” on those emails, how do you know if your customers are actually opening them and engaging with them?
Key Takeaways
- Email marketing helps local businesses stay connected with customers, but open and click rates don’t always tell the full story.
- Email security bots can automatically open emails and click links, inflating engagement metrics without any real human interaction.
- Bot suppression filters out automated activity to provide more accurate reporting and a clearer picture of campaign performance.
- Filtering bot activity can also prevent unwanted automated follow-ups and help businesses maintain healthier email lists.
- Using bot detection tools, monitoring unusual activity, and tracking meaningful conversions can help businesses better measure email marketing success.
- Hibu One simplifies email marketing with a fully managed Marketing Automation solution that works alongside your other digital marketing efforts.
Email open and click rates help you understand how your customers interact with the emails you send them.
But lately, those numbers aren’t always what they seem. Bot traffic online and in emails has become much more prevalent, with estimates showing that more than half of web traffic now originates from a bot. And those bots can inflate your engagement metrics.
Understanding what exactly bot activity is and how you can make sure your email data is accurate can help you make sure your email campaigns are running successfully.
[Related: Top 5 Ways Your Small Business Should Be Using Email Marketing]
What is bot activity in email marketing?
A “bot” (short for “robot”) is a type of automated software that runs over a network or the internet and is programmed to do certain tasks. When it comes to email, those bots are typically security software that’s programmed to:
- Open the email
- Engage with and click links inside the email
- Follow those links to their destination
- Download images in advance to help with load times
They do this to prevent links to malware or phishing attacks from entering a recipient’s inbox. Apple’s Privacy Protection policy is a good example.
This sounds great for the recipient, but the problem is that because bots simulate real user engagement so closely, they can trigger opens and clicks without a real person ever interacting with your email.
[Related: What Is AI and How Does It Work?]
How do bots affect your email open and click rates?
When the bots are exploring your emails, they cause false opens and clicks data to be recorded by your email tracking. This affects your rates in a few ways:
- Inflated open rates: Automated activity gets recorded alongside real opens by users, making it look like more people are opening your emails than actually are.
- Misleading click rates: Bots click your links to make sure they’re safe, but that can also make it look like your campaigns are more engaging than they actually are. A real person might have never even followed the link.
- Inaccurate reporting: Inflated engagement numbers can make it harder for you to evaluate your campaign performance and make informed marketing decisions.
The good news is that bot suppression solutions are available to help you navigate this new activity.
[Related: Your 2026 Local Business Marketing Outlook]
What is email bot suppression?
Bot suppression is the filtering, blocking, or removal of automated bots from your email analytics reporting. It filters out the opens and clicks from the security scanners and image pre-loads so that you’re only left with the data that matters most—the opens and clicks from real people.
This allows you to have a much clearer picture of the types of campaigns and content that your customers and potential customers find the most engaging.
Bot suppression doesn’t mean that bots are no longer interacting with your emails, but it does help prevent their activity from skewing your campaign results.
[Related: 3 Ways to Stay Engaged With Your Customers Without Spending More Time]
Why is bot suppression important for your business?
Separating the bot activity from real user activity is essential to understanding real user engagement:
- Accurate reporting: Helps prevent non-human interactions from skewing performance data, ensuring open and click rates reflect genuine human interest.
- Better automation: Keeps security bots from accidentally triggering automated email workflows (like clicking a Feedback star rating), sending unwanted follow-ups, or creating phantom customer journeys.
- More engaged lists: If a human is not engaging with messages, you don’t want to continue to send mail to that recipient. Mailbox Providers (Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo) penalize senders for mailing to contacts that don’t engage with messages.
[Related: 9 ways to keep your business’s email etiquette polished]
How can you reduce the impact of bot clicks?
While you can never completely prevent bots from interacting with your marketing emails, there are a few ways you can help reduce the impact of this activity:
- Use email marketing tools with bot detection: Choose an email marketing platform that can identify and filter suspicious activity from your reporting.
- Watch for unusual engagement patterns: A sudden spike in clicks or multiple links being clicked immediately after an email is delivered could be a sign of bot activity.
- Focus on meaningful conversions: Opens and clicks are helpful, but they aren’t the only meaningful metrics. Pay attention to actions like form submissions, appointment bookings, and purchases to see whether your emails are driving results.
- Regularly review campaign performance: Compare results across campaigns to identify unusual trends or inconsistencies. Consistent monitoring helps you spot bot activity.
Steps like these help you spend less time worrying about inflated metrics and more time understanding what’s actually working for your local business.
[Related: Explore Everything the Hibu One Inbox Can Do]
Let the experts at Hibu handle your email marketing
Email marketing is a worthwhile strategy for your local business—consumers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those that don’t receive email offers—but it can be a lot to handle when you’re busy running other parts of your business.
So let Hibu handle it for you.
Our Marketing Automation solution is included with the Hibu One platform, so you can effortlessly stay connected to your customers without worrying about segmentation, bots, sender reputation, or any of the other nuances that come with running an email marketing strategy.
And because Hibu One is a fully managed, all-in-one marketing platform, your email marketing also works together with your website, reviews and reputation, SEO, and paid ads to ensure a consistent experience for your customers.
Ready to learn more about Hibu One? Take a self-guided tour of the platform now or fill out the Get Started form for a free, no-obligation consultation.
