How Kit MCP saved me hours + bot filters are a game-changer! - Kit Certified Expert | Email Marketing Strategist John Bellingham

🕖 How Kit MCP saved me hours this week!

If you’re not familiar with Kit’s MCP, it’s essentially a way to connect your preferred AI/LLM engine (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to Kit.

Once connected, you have the ability to ask it questions and have it perform tasks for you (with your permission, of course).

I had an update to perform this week that would have previously have taken me hours, and I may have missed things.

My Update Task:

I changed the membership model for my Hub community from quarterly to annual. So, in writing hundreds of emails, I had made reference to the price to join – and each one needed to be updated.

👇 Enter, Kit MCP…

With the click of a button, every instance was updated for me. 👌

📈 Grow your network with this new Kit feature

Have you spotted another Kit creator you’d like to collaborate with?

The Creator Network now makes it much easier to get in touch.

Simply visit a creator’s profile, send a connection request with a short introduction, and wait for them to respond. If they accept your request, you’ll be able to exchange contact details and start exploring ways to work together.

Here’s how it works:

Visit the creator’s profile and send a connection request with a brief introduction.
The creator can review your request and choose whether to accept or decline it.
Your email address remains private until your request is accepted, giving both of you complete control over who can make contact.

It’s a simple, privacy-focused way to start conversations with creators you’d like to partner with.

🤖 Bot filtering is now possible in Kit

As you’ll know by now, email open and click rates are inaccurate for various reasons, including ‘bot’ activity.

What is ’bot activity’?

When you send an email to your subscriber list, invariably many subscribers’ emails will be subjected to automated checks (especially corporate email) to keep their respective internal systems safe and free from potentially malicious attacks.

These checks can include ‘opens’ and ‘clicks’ being registered, even before the intended recipient ever gets the email. This practice constitutes ‘bot activity’.

What’s the problem with bot activity?

Well, as an email marketer, our problem is not necessarily with the checks themselves, but with their potential ramifications.

↪ Bot opens

Having a report from your ESP (e.g. Kit) that states your email open rate as an artificially higher number than reality can be annoying, but not a disaster (I always recommend this number be tracked for trending purposes only, in other words, is the number improving or declining?).

↪ Bot clicks

These are more troublesome.

Here’s a typical scenario that can (and does) happen with bot clicks; you send an email to your list (let’s imagine you send an email to 500 subscribers); in the email, there is a link to click that triggers an action (e.g. a button that states ‘Click to Join the waitlist for my new community’ – when clicked, the subscriber is tagged and added to a sequence of emails that allude to them being interested in something they may not even have seen or read about – leading to confusion at best and becoming disgruntled and feeling like they’re being spammed, at worst.

Kit’s Bot Filters

This week, Kit has introduced two filters that can be turned on/off to suit your preferences, one for each; ‘opens’ and ‘clicks’.

Just for clarity, these filters cannot prevent the bot opens and clicks from happening, but it can help control how you deal with them in your email marketing system.

Update your bot filters in Kit

🫆 Add Your Own Logo to Kit Assets

One of the most requested features in Kit (according to Kit) is the ability to change the Kit logo (normally called a ‘favicon’) on web browser tabs to our own logo.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, see the image below where the Kit logo is visible in the browser tab;

So, due to popular demand, we can now add our own logo. Below is the same image, but this time, with my company logo;

It may not seem like a significant change, but when you have many Kit-hosted assets, including landing pages, product pages, and even your ‘Newsletter site’, it can help reinforce your brand and create consistency across your digital assets.

Add your logo to your Kit account