Understanding Non-Human Interactions in Email Marketing

What are non-human interactions?

Non-human interactions refer to email activity, such as opens and clicks, generated by protective systems used by email providers and corporate environments to investigate inbound emails. These systems aim to mitigate spam, filter malicious or dangerous content, and enforce privacy measures.

How do these non-human interactions impact email marketing?

When an email provider downloads an email, protective systems may investigate the email and sometimes open and click on some or all of the links in an email. This would generate open and click activity that is tracked by Privy. We refer to these as “machine opens” and “machine clicks.” This is not an instance where Privy is recording phantom activity of any kind.

Machine opens and clicks can impact your marketing by giving an inaccurate sense of engagement. In certain cases, it may appear that a customer clicked a link in an email, but in reality a machine performed the click, and the user did not take any action.

It's important to note that the email addresses involved are typically valid and not bots. Not all customers or campaigns are affected. As an example, the same email delivered to the same audience could have different non-human interaction levels.

What has changed recently?

Privy has recently detected an increase in clicks and thus click rates from non-human interactions with certain email providers, such as Outlook and Hotmail. Email providers and security applications use a variety of ever-changing mechanisms to try to detect email that shouldn’t reach a person’s inbox.

Your email engagement metrics may be more or less impacted depending on the email clients used by your subscribers. Privy is working to mitigate this impact, though it is an industry-wide phenomenon and it is not possible to detect 100% of machine opens and clicks.

Strategies to mitigate the impact of non-human interactions

Many strategies that are used to improve deliverability may also help mitigate machine opens and clicks. Consider the following strategies:

Engaging Content: Craft compelling subject lines and content to encourage genuine opens and clicks.
List Hygiene: Regularly clean your email list to remove inactive or invalid addresses, improving overall deliverability.
Authentication Protocols: Implement email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to enhance deliverability and build trust with email clients.
Segment and Personalize: Use segmentation and personalization to target specific audience groups more effectively, boosting engagement rates.