7 replies to this topic

[skipj]

Recently I've signed up with one of the popular email marketing services to handle my email subscription lists that are grow from my website pages. Prior to this I had my own homemade HTML form; not very sophisticated and no 2x opt-in feature.

Now that I have applied a double opt-in procedure I find that my email signups have been cut in half! It seems that lots of folks cannot get it together to click that opt-in email that gets sent to them. It's not because they mistype their address because when I had no opt-in under my previous system I had less than 5% bad addresses.

What can I do to regain my good email collection rate? Or do I have to live with a reduced rate so I can conform to good email list behavior?

Skip

[Randy]

You'll pretty much have to live with it, assuming you've explained prior to the signup that they'll need to watch for an email and click the link to actually opt in.

You certainly don't want to do anything less than a double opt in process. If you do you'll soon find your mailers getting reported left, right and center and your site will end up being on all of the spammer lists.

[Jarret]

Make it worth their time to subscribe.

If you can, try to give something away for free when they signup.

[Jill]

It sucks, doesn't it?!

What's worse is that it's mostly due to the confirmation email getting filtered by email spam filters.

As Randy said, make sure they realize they need to look for the confirmation email and that they will need to click something once they get it.

If you have the time and inclination, you could personally email those who didn't double opt-in and ask them to check their spam filters.

Other than that, there's not much you can do. Spammers have ruined this one for the legitimate email marketers many years ago.

[nethy]

I have also recently started working with an double opt in system. Anecdotally it seems we get about 60%-75% confirm.
The double opt in getting picked up by Junk is a problem, no arguments there.

But I actually wonder if the 40%-25% we lose are worth too much anyway. Maybe they are the borderline cases that don't read the emails or unsubscribe fairly quickly down the line. It seems natural that double opt in will boost your list quality. I'm not sure by how much though.

[Randy]

You've got a good point with the quality of a double opt in list as compared to anything less in my experience nethy. And I'm speaking only from the Hosting side of things in this one; a host that has feedback loops set up with several of the major ISPs so that I can shut down any of those few mailing lists I allow to be run from my servers in the first place if things start to go bad.

In the past I've seen huge differences in the number of spam reports I get via my feedback loops depending at least partly upon if the original list was double opt in or not.

With a double opt in and semi-regular newsletter sends I can count on getting maybe 1 or 2 of them per thousand getting reported by someone, somewhere I have a feedback loop set up. Without a double opt in I can pretty much count on at least 20 spam reports per thousand email sent hitting my mailbox.

FTR the reason I said double opt in is only part of the spam report equation above is I've seen a higher than normal spam report rate if someone does a double opt in like they should, but only sends out stuff 2-4 times per year. IMHO if you're not sending at least every other month you probably shouldn't bother, and definitely shouldn't send it from your own server. Those get more reported as spam too, probably because people forgot what they signed up for 3 or more months ago.

[skipj]

I have not tried to send any emails to my list so I don't have any spam filter stats or good inklings yet.

What I did hear from the group was that it is all about the content on the site/emails. (What else should I have expected from this group!)

So I tweaked the copy on the form, the welcome and the thank-you pages; "watch your spam filter...", "you are not finished signing up so click on this 2x opt-in email...", etc.

Successful opt-ins have skyrocketed - Thanks to all who have replied!

[Jill]

Successful opt-ins have skyrocketed - Thanks to all who have replied!