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In email fashion, double opt-in is the new black
by Marilyn Latham
You’re a hip email marketer, always up on the latest trends. Your newsletter is multipart-MIME, baby, and your list segmented nine different ways and twice on Tuesday. In short, you’re the bees’ knees of email – or so you thought.
Then, one day, reading the latest glossy magazine, Vague, on the hottest trends in marketing – you discover to your horror something that makes you so last week, so analog instead of digital, so web 1.0. You’re the Jan Brady of email marketing, and you didn’t even know it! Your email fashion crime? Your list is not double opt-in.
Because the reality is, we’re in the new millennium. Email marketing is an established, respected medium for promoting your products and services. Everyone has an email list these days. But what separates the Kate Moss’s from the Ugly Betty’s is their sign-up process. Your list MUST be double opt-in, or you’ll suffer the ridicule and derision of the email runway goddesses, your reputation in tatters, your voicemail without messages, your Saturday nights dateless.
Double opt-in is the new black. It’s “fashion forward.” As a matter of fact, it’s more than this season’s trend. It’s the one email trend that without question will never go out of style. Despite all the vagaries of the digital marketplace, the internet as superhighway, the ways of Web 2.0, double opt-in is a mainstay. The little black dress of your email closet.
It is only through double opt-in that we can be sure that our list members truly want us. No fickle subscribers there, taunting us by signing up for our list when they’re really not sure. No bargain basement, remnant email addresses for us! No! Our double opt-in policy assures us instead of only the most devoted subscribers, committed to our newsletter, awaiting our next mailing with taut anticipation.
In short, double opt-in is what makes us legit and what assures us that our subscribers are true devotees. It’s what puts our picture on the cover, so to speak, of email marketers, never in the “what was she thinking” section, anonymous, with a black mark covering our eyes.
Now that I’ve convinced you to jump on my bandwagon and join the rest of us email trend-setters, how exactly do you go about it? First of all, you never – I repeat never – buy or rent email addresses. Don’t even think about it. Like wearing dirty sneakers to a black tie event, it will not help your cause. You want your subscribers to come to you. So, market your newsletter if you have to. Market it on your own site and buy ads on related sites. Make sure your SEO program is all that it can be, and be patient.
When someone subscribes, there’s an additional step. Don’t just take their email. No, not yet. You have to send them a confirmation email. Only when they reply to this email do you add them to your list. This is double opt-in. Live it, learn it, be it.
Why is this so important? Because not only is it the gold standard when it comes to email marketing—setting you apart from those that will take an email address in order to send out a confirmation of an order, then add that person to their regular email list without their permission!—it helps to ensure that those people who are on your list are there because they truly want to be there. Not only did they take the initiative to sign up for your list, they took the next step of confirming their opt-in request. It helps to ensure that people are accidentally signed up, due to a typo in submitting an email address.
And all this helps to keep your lists clean. Fewer bounce backs, fewer unsubscribes, fewer spam complaints. And like the perfect handbag to go with the perfect strappy sandals that match the most fabulous little cocktail dress you’ve ever found on a sale rack… cleaner lists and more engaged subscribers are what we as hipper-than-thou email marketers want!
Marilyn Latham is the Marketing Manager for Lyris Technologies.
Contact us at editor@lyris.com to share your ideas. We may include it in the next issue of Making Mail Work!
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