Email opens/bots in scoring model

Emily_Kucharczy
Level 2

Email opens/bots in scoring model

We assign behavior points when a lead opens an email (+1 point). Over time, we've noticed that leads who are opening these emails (and appear to be opening every one we send) but not clicking could potentially be from bots. What's happening is that these "email open only" leads in some cases are then meeting our scoring threshold and getting routed to sales as new MQLs. 

I'm wondering what others are doing to factor this potential scenario into their scoring model? I'm hesitant to remove scoring for opens altogether but am hearing feedback from our sales team that they don't believe these are "real" points of engagement and just bots. I think there have been some discussions on this in the past, but I'm not finding anything very recent. Thanks!

Emily Kucharczyk
2 REPLIES 2
Balkar_Singh
Level 9 - Champion

Re: Email opens/bots in scoring model

There're various signals we can look for - the opposite of this is also true (genuine opens which may not get tracked)

To reduce this, one way is to tie the opens with (click + visits pages) - what we get from there can go in different directions. E.g. if the count of opens reported decrease with a strengthened criteria, the false positives may have reduced. If we want to stick only to opened activity reported - we may want to see # of times someone has opened email activity in a certain duration, but has no other activity. I'd start with creating smart lists for these type of signals and see all who MQLed and then check with Sales if the people which the smart list give me look bogus. If Sales feedback suggests that these are bogus, we should consider suppressing such criteria s from being MQLed and use the same to adjust scoring methodology.

Ronen-Was-SRpro
Level 7

Re: Email opens/bots in scoring model

Hi @Emily_Kucharczy ,

 

You can get additional information from the discussions after the article - https://nation.marketo.com/t5/Product-Discussions/Bot-or-Not-Are-you-suffering-from-bot-clicks/m-p/9..., also a very good solution is to create a "Honeypot" link and each lead "bot" that will click it will be transferred to a specific list.

Ronen Wasserman