Have you heard of Mark Mustermann? No, not the muffin man, the infamous Mustermann profile that routinely spams Klaviyo and Shopify lists.
Modern DTC brands rely on email for both acquisition and retention, and many use Klaviyo to power their email and SMS campaigns. But there has been an explosion of fake and bot accounts spamming brands and retailers, as well as a rise in customers using duplicate accounts to take advantage of “first-time” buyer discounts and other promotions. Seemingly not impactful on the surface, these fake and duplicate accounts account for 30-40% of Klaviyo profiles and create many issues for brands by skewing marketing metrics, inflating costs, and jeopardizing data accuracy.
In this post, we will discuss ways to remove fake and duplicate accounts to prevent overage charges from Klaviyo and make decisions on accurate data. This article aims to help you identify fake accounts and notice patterns of abuse seen through customers taking advantage of discount policies integrated within Klaviyo.
Why are people creating fake and duplicate accounts?
People primarily create multiple profiles to take advantage of an existing policy or bypass restrictions placed by the brand to get some benefit. Several commonly used examples of fake and duplicate profiles:
Exploiting First-Time Buyer Coupons: Everyone has used an alternative email to redeem that 10-15% discount given to first-time purchasers; however, some individuals generate hundreds of fake accounts.
Using Bots for Exclusive Products: High-demand exclusive items, such as limited-edition sneakers, high-end electronics, or rare beauty products, often sell out quickly online. To secure these items before others, some individuals use bots that can create numerous accounts and complete purchases faster than humanly possible.
Accidental Account Creation: Duplicate accounts are sometimes created by accident, with users forgetting their login credentials and creating a new account instead of recovering the old one. Over time, this can lead to an accumulation of inactive accounts that skew user data and inflate the supposed customer base of a business.
Bypassing Blocked Accounts (i.e., Resellers or Serial Returners): When businesses block or ban users —for example, for reselling goods at a higher price or frequently returning purchases— they may create new accounts to continue these activities.
People create fake and duplicate profiles to exploit loopholes, bypass restrictions, and gain undue advantages. Some of these activities can violate customer-friendly policies impacting your profitability while undermining the integrity of digital ecosystems, skewing data, and disrupting fair business operations.
Why is it crucial to segment fake and duplicate accounts? How can Yofi help?
Identifying and segmenting fake accounts is crucial as they can distort:
- The understanding of who your genuine customers are
- The performance of your marketing campaigns
- The value customers find in your loyalty programs
- The profitability of your marketing efforts
- Forecasting for inventory
Yofi uses machine learning algorithms to help identify and isolate these fake accounts to protect the integrity of your data, marketing efforts, and customer analytics. We created the Yofi Risk Score that is natively integrated within Klaviyo to provide several advantages for our customers:
- Automatic Identification: Yofi uses advanced algorithms to automatically identify high-risk accounts, saving you time and resources spent on manual reviews.
- Reduction in Klaviyo Costs: By identifying and segmenting fake accounts, you save on Klaviyo charges for active profiles and sent emails.
- Accurate Marketing Metrics: By eliminating fake accounts, your marketing metrics become more accurate, giving you a clearer understanding of your real customer base.
- Protection of Profitability: Yofi helps protect your profitability by eliminating fake profiles that exploit promotional policies.
It is important to assess the accuracy of your Klaviyo to ensure that your customer understanding is correct and marketing efforts are directed toward genuine customers.
Removing fake and duplicate profiles improves customer understanding, data accuracy, and profitability:
Cleaning up your customer data by removing fake and duplicate profiles drastically enhances your business’ performance in three key areas:
Customer Understanding: An accurate representation of your customer base leads to a deeper understanding of their preferences and behaviors, enabling more effective and personalized marketing campaigns.
Data Accuracy: With a clean data set, your business metrics become more reliable, laying the foundation for informed and accurate business decisions. Yofi helps to improve your data accuracy directly in Klaviyo, as well as in ecommerce platforms like Littledata that unify data across sources and destinations.
Profitability: By eliminating fraudulent accounts, you protect your promotional offers and reduce potential losses. Additionally, you can save significantly on charges from platforms like Klaviyo that bill based on active profiles and sent emails.
In short, identifying and removing fake profiles is more than a simple housekeeping task; it’s a strategic move to boost business performance. With advanced tools like Yofi, this task becomes effortless, paving the way for better data integrity, improved customer understanding, and enhanced profitability.
This is a guest post by Jordan Shamir, CEO and Co-Founder of Yofi
