Beat the bots
It's all free, and there are no ads
46% of email traffic is spam and a huge, but ultimately unknown, quantity of this is driven by bots. Sadly, one way they fake legitimacy is to set up email addresses and subscribe to newsletters.
We have bot detection and removal along every part of our pathway, and we stop most of them at source.
All newsletters are reviewed by a human upon signup. Any that appear spammy or illegitimate are denied membership.
StopsIn the unlikely event that a reputable newsletter shows signs of bot activity, we'll immediately prevent it referring subscribers to others.
Blocking and rate-limitingEverything done on CrossPromo Club is monitored by our privacy-centric tools. If we spot a bot, we block it. If we spot anything suspicious, we rate-limit.
Bots are lazy and built for mass activity. By requiring new users to complete profiles and add information about their newsletters, we filter out most speculative bots.
Click fraud defencesWe deal in clicks. When a subscriber from one newsletter clicks through to a referral partner, that click is our basic currency. We take every reasonable step to make sure it came from a human.
Abuse reportingAll users can contact us about anything they consider suspicious. We review everything.
All subscriber lists suffer damage over time. Email addresses belonging to your best readers get hacked and lost to bots. Other inboxes become dormant and ESPs keep them as spam indicators. Bots will sign up and degrade your sender authority. Keeping your lists clean is imperative.
Many newsletter platforms allow you to monitor your subs' open rates. Some of them will be zero.
The tricky part is working out why. Some ESPs don't share open rate data, so one reason might be privacy. But there are two other reasons: dormant humans and potential bots.
Our advice is to send an "Are you still reading email" and remove those who do not respond.
Bot subscribers can quickly become dormant, and ESPs take dormant subs as an indication that you might be spam. Clean your list regularly.
Newsletter platforms have their own, often very good, defences to prevent bot subscribers. But these can also be a layer of friction to human subscribers, so they aren't always enabled by default.
Intelligently enabling things like reCAPTCHA, Turnstile and double opt-ins can help you avoid most bots.
No single defence against bots is impenetrable. So use several.
When bots subscribe, they can come in packs. The same bot origin might make several signups over a short time frame, so any unexplained spike is a red flag to investigate.
Maybe you've gone viral, and you're getting a flood of new human readers? Maybe it's a bot swarm? You can't know until you look. A few tell-tale signs of bots are:
Suddenly seeing lots of signups? Make sure they're human.
Every newsletter wants new subscribers, that's why CrossPromo Club exists. But not all subscriber acquisition channels are equal.
Generally speaking, the more focused a channel is on newsletter readers, the better it will be. The more "generalist" a channel - like poorly thought out ads - the greater the number of bots it will bring.
With CrossPromo Club, every human we show you to has already subscribed to other newsletters. That's laser focus.
Cross-promotions target existing newsletter readers. That's as good as it gets.