Using confirmation to get good email addresses

For 25 hours the group De La Soul is releasing their entire catalog for free online. What none of the articles are mentioning is that they’re using this to build their database of email addresses in a way that’s going to result in a clean database of high value email addresses.
How are they doing that? By making sure the addresses belong to their fans before they actually give fans access to the catalog. Yes, they are using confirmation as part of their signup process.
If you go to their website: wearedelasoul.com you’re asked for an email address so they can send the downloads to you.
dls_website
The fine print is the interesting bit:

Once you click submit you’ll need to confirm your email address and we’ll send you the download links as soon as we can.
There are lots of people wanting the music so it might take a few hours!

After you submit the mail, you’re taken to a webpage that tells you what to expect. The interesting bit here is the suggestion to look in your promotions tab if you’re using Gmail. Although I’m hearing that it turned up in the updates tab rather than the promotions tab.
dls_confirmationmail
Thanks to Mailchimp’s awesome infrastructure, the confirmation email arrived by the time I switched windows to look at my mail client.
Another clear, well branded message that gives explicit instructions on what to do.
dls_confirmationmail
Finally, I got through the confirmation process and am now waiting to be emailed a link to what, I’m assuming, is my custom download site.
This is a great way for De La Soul to step onto the email stage. They now have a confirmed list of email addresses belonging to fans. They can use that list to keep fans updated and announce promotions. They don’t have to worry at all about sending any future emails to people who didn’t agree to receive the mail.
Fans get access to their music and songs. It’s a win-win all around and a great example of how confirmed opt-in can actually work.

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The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts.
I’m probably the first to admit that confirmed opt-in isn’t the solution to all your delivery problems. There are situations where it’s a good idea, there are times when it’s not. There are situations where you absolutely need that extra step involved and there are times when that extra step is just superfluous.
But whether a sender uses confirmed opt in or not they must do something to confirm that the email address actually belongs to their customer. It’s so easy to have data errors in email addresses that there needs to be some sort of error correction process involved.
Senders that don’t do this are leaving money on the table. They’re not taking that extra step to make sure the data they were given is correct. They don’t make any effort to draw a direct line between the email address entered into their web form or given to them at the register or used for a receipt, and their actual customer.
It does happen, it happens enough to make the non-tech press. Consumerist has multiple articles a month on some email address holder that can’t get a giant company to stop mailing them information about someone else’s account.
Just this week, the New Yorker published an article about a long abandoned gmail address that received over 4000 “legitimate” commercial and transactional emails.

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Logging in to unsubscribe

I have been talking with a company about their unsubscribe process and their placement of all email preferences behind an account login. In the process, I found a number of extremely useful links about the requirements.
The short version is: under the 2008 FTC rulemaking senders cannot require any information other than an email address and an email preference to opt-out of mail. That means senders can’t charge a fee, they can’t ask for personal information and they can’t require a password or a login to unsubscribe.
I’ve talked about requiring a login to unsubscribe in the past here on the Word to the Wise blog.
Let them go
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I’m not the only person, though, that’s written about this.
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