In my last email, I told you how bot signups can ruin your email deliverability.
And I also gave you tips on how to fight them.
There is also one additional way you can easily filter out bot signups in your list. It involves a little bit of HTML/CSS knowledge, but if you don’t know how to do it, just explain it to your developer and he should know what to do.
OK, so, bots will always fill out all the form fields with some string.
Knowing that, you can create an additional field in your form and hide it with CSS. This is what’s known as a “honeypot field”.
So when people go to sign up through your form, they won’t see the field. The field will be left blank. But if a bot signs up, it will fill out all the available fields, even if hidden.
Then in your list, you can segment all the subscribers who have that field filled in and just remove them.
If you are using Drip, you can then set an automation to filter out all those who have the field set, so the list cleaning happens automatically.
If you are using a different email platform, check if they have honeypot fields implemented in their forms, you might not need to do this yourself then. For example, I know Mailchimp has that set already.
That’s it from me for today, rock on!
Zoran
P.S. Want to level up your email game? Let’s chat.