[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.

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!

[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!