Don’t panic if your open rates suddenly plumet – it ends up they just weren’t that good before. Sorry.

Mailchimp are starting to roll out a new bot filtering feature to make their reporting more accurate.

A little while ago, I spoke on Instagram about why your open rates can look over inflated – too good, basically. And that’s because some email clients (that’s what we call the software you use to check your email) can effectively “click” on a link when it’s checking if it’s safe or not for you to click on.

And the problem with that, is that mailing list systems like MailChimp can often count that click as if a person clicked it. I know I was very excited about my click through rates on kit.com until I remembered they probably weren’t anywhere near as good and it was probably just fake security checking clicks. What reminded me was that it looked like people were clicking on my links the second I hit send on the email and it arrived in their inbox – like they were just sat waiting to hear my latest update! Alas, no.

Mailchimp are actually hosting a webinar for you to learn about what this new feature means and you can sign up here. They don’t usually send emails quite like they did for this new feature – perhaps it’s a new strategy and email template, or perhaps they’re bracing themselves for some backlash.

Let’s face it, lots of Mailchimp customers won’t know that their open rates were wrong in the past, and will freak out when they suddenly drop. And the only reason Mailchimp will be able to give them as to why they’ve suddenly dropped is that they weren’t right in the first place… that’s not really going to go down all that well!

But they’re leaning strongly into the notion that accurate data is what counts – and they’re right. So the webinar aims to educate people on how to “trusted, reliable data leads to smarter marketing decisions and better ROI”.