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Will the real email opener please stand up?
Published 12 days ago • 2 min read
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👋 Hi Reader,
I learn something new every time, Adam Ryan from Workweek shows up on my LinkedIn Feed.
This week was no different.
Adam decided to call out the elephant in the room in the newsletter ecosystem: Bot Email Opens.
Adam's post on LinkedIn this week
Adam would know this firsthand.
Across its newsletter portfolio, Workweek does millions of email sends in a given month. So understanding what’s happening across the board and who’s opening their emails is the prime imperative for Adam, and I would argue, for any publisher or advertiser. Since they are the ones living, and paying a ransom, by that metric.
And that’s exactly what Adam’s article on AMO talks about.
Adam's Guest Post on A Media Operator
His call to action for every ESP is to allow publishers and advertisers to build their reporting to be cleaner when it comes to open rates on humans vs bots. He also offer Workweek’s open source bot filtering framework as a starting block for ESPs to adopt, without having to build from scratch.
All this is music to the ears.
Until you stumble across one consumer-facing point.
Not all bot actions are created equal
What if I, the reader, send these bots to read?
The argument I am trying to make is the shift in consumer behavior.
Up until 2023, the bot actions happening on my inbox were to protect the inbox - either from maleficent actors or spam (or both)
But with more people drowning in their inboxes and declaring email bankruptcy (I had to find a way to use this term I discovered not too long ago), they are going to let AI take the wheel on their personal productivity.
What this means:
Bot actions are moving from protective to productive intent
This means the bots or the agents I let into my inbox, and which are reading your newsletters, might be a great proxy for my own intent. I would like to read your email, just not spend as much time on it as before.
So the argument I am making here is this:
Even if I get transparent reporting from my ESP on human versus bot actions on my newsletter, I would not treat all bot actions as equal. Instead, I would dissect bot intent a couple of levels further, and build for it, rather than plan against it.
Are you thinking along similar lines to interpret your subscriber behavior too? I would love to talk to you.
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