Why fake signups to your online store suck and how you can stop them
Fake signups to your online store may seem great, but they can cause a lot of harm for your email marketing
Fake signups are a curse for many websites and online stores, as they inflate the actual number of signups and can cause havoc on your open and click rates.
For that reason, Soundest created the Spambot Hunter app to specifically find and eliminate these signups (for Shopify ecommerce stores only).
If you can fight these spam signups, you can have a cleaner subscriber list and get a more accurate idea of what your subscribers want.
What are fake signups?
Fake signups happen due to spambots that scour the internet looking for signup forms to fill in.
They often fill up these forms with fake email addresses or real email addresses that belong to people who may not want to get emails from your store.
The reasons these spambots want to fill in your forms with spam signups are varied.
One of the possibilities is that they are looking for weaknesses in your site and hoping to exploit it for further gain. It could also be to gather your email address and send you spam.
Another important reason is that the spammers (especially when they use real email addresses) want to damage your email campaigns.
For example, if someone receives an unwanted newsletter from you, they might hit the ‘Spam’ button. If this is done on a large enough scale, GMail and other sites could put you on their spam blacklist, which means none of your subscribers will see your emails anymore.
How do fake signups hurt my email campaigns?
While it may not seem like it, having a lot of fake signups on your subscriber list can hurt your email campaigns in many ways.
#1 Your emails go to spam
The most impactful way is through the process mentioned above, when a large number of fake signups (with real addresses) send your newsletter to the spam folder. This can trigger your subscribers’ email service providers to mark all your email as spam.
This means you’ll end up in the spam folder, and virtually none of your subscribers will see your emails.
#2 Your metrics are off
Another important thing to consider is that your metrics will be way off when you have large amounts of fake signups.
These spam contacts will not open your emails or click on anything, meaning your open and click rates will seem very low.
You could interpret this as a problem on your end (either the communication, prices or products), but your real subscribers might in reality love those things.
#3 You don’t have an accurate image of your customers
Lastly, you probably won’t have a good picture of who your real audience is. What do they like or dislike? With fake signups, it’s difficult to answer that question.
For example, imagine you sell products mostly geared to a specific location, like the US or UK. But if you notice that a significant portion of those (spam) contacts are coming in from a different region, you could change up your offering.
You may adapt your marketing, language, images, and many other things to appeal to your new audience, even though that audience isn’t real.
Those spam contacts never have and never will interact with your brand, but because you don’t know they’re fake, you may try to adapt your business for them.
This article originally appeared on Soundest’s ecommerce email marketing blog.
If you enjoyed this article, please recommend it to help others find it!
