[Q&A Coffee Break] 07/25/23, 8am PST: Deliverability & Bots, Featuring Marketo Engage Champions!

[Jon_Chen]

Our third Adobe Marketo Engage Community Q&A Coffee Break featuring Marketo Engage Champions @Beth_Massura and @Ajay_Sarpal2 is now OVER. Thanks to all who attended or asked a question, and we hope to catch you at our next session! 

Email bot activity can artificially inflate email opens and click data, leading to inaccurate metrics and misleading performance analysis. Similarly, mastering email deliverability can help ensure that your marketing campaigns are reaching their intended audience. Learn how to optimize your email marketing campaigns by filtering out email bot activity and improving your email deliverability rate with Marketo Engage Champions and Experts Beth Massura and Ajay Sarpal in our upcoming Coffee Break on July 25^th.

You’ll have the opportunity to ask these two pros about their best and most effective techniques to identify and eliminate false opens and clicks, automate email deliverability management tasks, validate sources for hard and soft bounces, and so much more!

This is a text-only event that takes place only here on the Marketing Nation Community. Post your burning questions, hot tips, key takeaways, and let’s chat about them! Our experts will be interacting live for that hour, but the conversation can continue! 

For some guidance, here are some sample questions you can ask about:

• How do I know if I’m having a deliverability issue in Marketo?
• What are some foundational things I should do to support good deliverability?
• How can I find spam traps in my database?
• How can I stop bots from filling out my forms?
• How can you prevent and reduce bot form fills using Marketo best practices, such as form design, validation, progressive profiling, etc.? How does DMARC help in improving Email Deliverability?
• How to use reCAPTCHA to identify and filter out bot form fills in Marketo?

REQUIREMENTS TO PARTICIPATE 

• Must be signed into the Community during the 1-hour period.
• Must post an Adobe Marketo Engage question or comment on Deliverability and Bots.
• Must tag either or both Champs in your question (@Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5).
• Be sure to periodically REFRESH the page to see new questions and new responses in the thread!
• Please note this is a TEXT-ONLY event, meaning that there will be no webinar, video call, or recording. All questions and answers will occur on this thread!

FEATURED EXPERTS

Ajay Sarpal

Ajay Sarpal is a 4x Adobe Marketo Engage Champion and Co-Leader of Virtual Marketo Measure User Group and India Virtual Marketo Engage User Group. He has 9 advanced specializations on Marketing Automation and is ambidextrous in fixing broken Martech processes and bringing transparency/accountability on multi-channel Marketing revenue influence reports. Ajay is also a 3x Subject Matter Expert and a Marketo Certified Solution Architect who can design and implement complex marketing automation solutions. Ajay helps build Adobe Marketo Engage Certification exams (Professional, Expert, and Architect levels) and now runs his own consulting practice assisting clients in accelerating the demand generation and ROI tracking.

Beth Massura

Beth is deeply involved with the Adobe community as a 4x Marketo Engage Champion, Certified Master and Subject Matter Expert for the credential program. She has a passion for identifying opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness within the marketing environment. As a Senior Marketing Operations Consultant, she works with a variety of clients to troubleshoot and proactively address critical areas such as deliverability and database health.

[Beth_Massura · Accepted solution]

UPDATE: Register for the Learn from Your Peers Webinar on Deliverability happening September 7, 2023!

Hi everyone!

The Q&A coffee break went by so fast! Thank you so much for your questions. While we didn't get to all of them during the hour, we will do our best to follow up. Hope to see you on the Community in the future!

Cheers,

Ajay @Ajay_Sarpal2 and Beth @Beth_Massura 

[kdavid]

@Beth_Massura @Ajay_Sarpal2:

We are using Kickbox integration to confirm that our emails are deliverable and marked as "valid" before they send.  I noticed that a large number of our lead emails (between 15-30%) are being tagged as invalid. These lead emails are the individuals who completed an initial form fill, so assuming that they are engaged visitors.  This seems too high? Any recommendations or experience with Kickbox?  I also found out later that our CRM (Salesforce) already uses an email verification process as well (not familiar with which one they use).  So, is this redundant process for Marketo to do the same? BTW, in our stack...the leads are generated in SF first and then they get synced to Marketo.

Thx in advance for your help.

--Kate

[AjayS]

Hi, @kdavid 

The email invalid rate may depend on the quality and source of the email addresses that you collect on your forms. If you have a large number of invalid emails, it may indicate that your forms are not well protected or optimized for lead quality.

Some recommendations or tips to reduce the invalid rate and improve the accuracy of Kickbox are:

• Create a smart list and check when the leads filled out the form and marked as invalid by Kickbox. You may find some patterns or trends that can help you identify the source or cause of the invalid emails. For example, you may see that most of the invalid emails come from a certain domain, location, device, etc. You can use this information to adjust your form settings or filters accordingly.

• Implement reCAPTCHA v3 on your forms to weed out bots and spam. reCAPTCHA v3 is a score-based captcha service that helps protect your forms from bots and spam without challenging your leads with images, words, or mathematical equations. It assigns a score to each lead based on their behavior and interaction with your form. You can use this score to filter out suspicious leads or trigger different actions based on their level of trust. You can enable reCAPTCHA v3 on your forms in the Admin > Forms > reCAPTCHA Settings section in Marketo.

• Have the email verification tool in Marketo as form fills data first gets into Marketo thereafter syncs to Salesforce. This way, you can verify the email addresses before they get synced to Salesforce and avoid sending invalid or risky emails to your CRM. 

[S_Stumpf]

Hi @Beth_Massura and @Ajay_Sarpal2, 

This is not necessarily related to "bot" per se, but depending on the recipient email system, I've noticed that many email link click activities are being registered in activity logs 2x, despite this link is only clicked once. My suspicion behind this double registration of email link click activities are link verification and security checks. Like "MS Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection" feature. 
First it gets registered while this threat protection feature does it's thing and redirects + then the second time when the human does the click and hits the link destination. 
Is there a way to only register one email link click activity? From what I could see in activity details, both click activities are identical, with an almost identical timestamp. Only IP addresses might be the only difference. I haven't seen this behavior when mails have hit the inbox, only directly after a link click.  This does indeed throw off email performance and link reports - as @David_Lyons pointed out.

Thanks. 
Best regards, 

Sebastian Stumpf

[andrewfarm]

Hello @Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5! 

What (if anything) can be done to strengthen integrated reCAPTCHA v3 within Marketo forms? I'm noticing a lot of form fills that I suspect are bots, but they are receiving a 0.9 (Trusted) V3 score. Is there anything I can add to improve the evaluation accuracy of these form fills? Or is there a reliable secondary evaluation I can implement? 

Thank you! 

[AjayS]

Hi, @andrewfarm 

One possible way to strengthen the integrated reCAPTCHA v3 within Marketo forms is to use an email verification tool such as QuickEmailVerification. This software can help you verify the validity and deliverability of the email addresses that your leads provide on your forms post submission. It can also help you detect and remove bots, spam traps, disposable emails, role accounts, and other invalid or risky emails from your list.

[traba5058]

Is there any documentation on how to integrate QuickEmailVerification with Marketo?

[AjayS]

Hi, @traba5058 

This link should help you: http://docs.quickemailverification.com/integrations/integrating-with-marketo

[andrewfarm]

I will look into that option. Thank you!

[katiesharp]

We have a concern of junk data based on our email metrics lately and suspect some might be due to spam traps. How can we best identify these and weed out?

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @katiesharp ,

Check out our response to a similar question about spam traps. Hope this helps!

[katiesharp]

We recently had what seems like a random influx of "bot" activity suspected to be email provider security settings to check links. How can we identify these vs real humans?

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @katiesharp ,

We offered some suggestions in response to a similar question; please check out our reply there!

[Swethanraj]

Hi

@Beth_Massura  and @Ajay_Sarpal5  we came across certain bot activities in our recent email send, we saw that there were continuous clicks on each and every link of our email within few seconds, we assumed it was bot clicks and later we saw genuine clicks on specific links in our email after few mins we assumed it was human clicks as the clicks were only on specific links where person visited page and filled out form, in this case how can we analyze human vs bot clicks, is there any strategy in marketo to segregate human vs bot clicks. Also please help us with setting up reports for genuine clicks and opens. what strategies might help us to get accurate reports in clicks and opens

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @Swethanraj,

This is similar to another question on this thread; see our reply for suggested approaches!

[BBenemelis]

@Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5 How can I identify spam traps in our database? And once identified, what should we do with them?

[Beth_Massura]

Hi @BBenemelis there are a couple types of spam traps. Some were email addresses that were previously used by real people, but were deactivated due to inactivity. They are sometimes repurposed as spam traps to identify senders with poor database management practices. One way to identify them is finding records that had no activity and/or bounced continuously for a long time, then all of a sudden started accepting emails again. However, it's better to be proactive about removing inactive, unengaged records to avoid being "dinged" by sending to them once they've been converted to spam traps.

Another type of spam trap was never used by real people and was created solely as a spam trap. The way these might enter the database is through list purchases and otherwise questionable acquisition practices. (Please review your Marketo contract as there are terms relating to list purchases!) These usually have a greater impact, such as putting the sending IP on a block list such as Spamhaus. You often will get a notice from Marketo that you need to take immediate action, since this affects other Marketo customers' sending. You will need to try to identify and delete the record as part of the remediation process, and you may need to delete multiple possible records if it isn't clear which one is the spam trap.

The email deliverability power pack that was offered by Marketo (now Everest by Validity) provided some additional insights into which email campaigns sends hit spam traps, and that can help narrow down possible spam trap records.

[BBenemelis]

@Beth_Massura, @ajay_sarpal5) Do you know of any lower cost email deliverability platforms we can use for this? We are a nonprofit and the deliverability power pack is too expensive for us. 

Thank you!

[larsonian]

@Beth_Massura @Ajay_Sarpal2
Is there any way to identify within Marketo when emails are being sent to the junk folder by an ISP instead of the inbox?

[AjayS]

Hi, @larsonian 

This is a great question. The answer is yes 🙂

Marketo's deliverability tools is a paid feature that can help you improve your email deliverability and inbox placement. You can use this tool to test and monitor your emails and see how they are received by different email clients, as shown in the image below.

You may want to work with your Marketo Engage CSM to find the cost.