Confirmed Opt-In: An Old Topic Resurrected

Looking back through my archives it’s been about 4 years or so since I wrote about confirmed opt in. The last post was how COI wasn’t important, but making sure you were reaching the right person was important. Of course, I’ve also written about confirmed opt-in in general and how it was a tool somewhat akin to a sledgehammer. I’m inspired to write about it today because it’s been a topic of discussion on multiple mailing lists today and I’ve already written a bunch about it (cut-n-paste-n-edit blog post! win!).
Confirmed opt-in is the process where you send an email to a recipient and ask them to click on a link to confirm they want the mail. It’s also called double opt-in, although there are some folks who think that’s “spammer” terminology. It’s not, but that’s a story for another day. The question we were discussing was what to do with the addresses that don’t click. Can you email them? Should you email them? Is there still value in them?

We have to treat the addresses as a non-homogenous pool. There are a lot of reasons confirmation links don’t get clicked.

  • Some recipients aren’t going to click because they really don’t want the mail  and the extra step is too much effort. If the mail had just shown up they might read it, might even engage with it, but don’t want to actually have to make an effort to engage with the confirmation.
  • Some recipients aren’t going to click because they’ve already gotten what they want, like access to a website or a white paper or free download.
  • Some recipients aren’t going to click because they aren’t your customer. Someone used their email address to sign up and they sincerely do not want the mail.
  • Some recipients aren’t going to click because they never saw the mail. It may have gone to bulk, they may have not recognized the subject line and just deleted it, it may have ended up dropped on the floor. Whatever happened, it wasn’t seen by the recipient.
  • Some recipients aren’t going to click because there is no recipient. Sure, the mail is accepted by the receiving mail server, but the user never logs in, or it’s a spamtrap.

There is some value in the pool, but statistically, some of that value is negative. Each company needs to do their own risk analysis and determine what best to do with these addresses.
Different subscription techniques are going to generate different subscriber pools. Those different pools are going to have different risk profiles. Some subscription processes will generate more of one type of subscriber than another. That means the risk of mailing users who didn’t click on the link is going to vary depending on the pool.
Lots of “no recipients” on the list means sending followups is high risk. Lots of non-customers on the list, ditto. But if the pool is lots of people who can’t be bothered or missed the email the first time? That’s probably OK to mail once or twice.
Details matter.
Overall, the entire goal here is to get a list of email addresses that are owned by people who want mail from you. There are two parts to that: identity and permission. The identity part is tying the email address to the person who is your customers / subscriber / lottery winner / potential future customer who wants to know what you sell. The permission part is discovering if they want mail from you.
Traditional COI combines the identity and permission piece into one step. Send the person a mail and ask for permission to mail them more email. That covers the identity and the permission – if the person clicks you have both. But there are other ways to prove identity and there are other ways to gauge permission.

 

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Leaving money on the table

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This is a good time for all of us to consider how easy it is for a subscriber to change their address of record. Some senders just have the subscriber unsubscribe from one address and resubscribe for another. This sounds like the simplest way to do things, and it certainly doesn’t take much engineering effort.
But what information do you lose by simply asking subscribers to unsubscribe and resubscribe? It depends on what you’re tracking, but you do lose everything that you track. Preferences, interaction history, purchase history, it’s all gone. Providing a simple way to change an email address of record preserves the information related to that subscriber.
For some senders, keeping subscriber information through different ISPs and email addresses will pay for the development of a preference center. For others, there’s no real value there. How much money are companies leaving on the table by not providing a mechanism for recipients to change their email address?

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Confirmation Fails

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Confirmation is too hard…

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part.
I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm.
A couple years ago I was troubleshooting a problem. One of my client’s customer was seeing a huge percentage of 550 errors and I was tasked with finding out what they were doing. The first step was identifying the source of the email addresses. Turns out the customer was a Facebook app developer and all the addresses (so he told me) were from users who had installed his apps on Facebook. I did my own tests and couldn’t install any applications without confirming my email address.
Every Facebook user that has installed an application has clicked on an email to confirm they can receive email at the address they supplied Facebook. There are over 1 billion users on Facebook.
Clicking a link isn’t too hard for people who want your content. I hear naysayers who talk about “too hard” and “too much drop off” but what they’re really saying is “what I’m doing isn’t compelling enough for users to go find the confirmation email.”
This isn’t to say everyone who has a high drop off of confirmations is sending poor content. There are some senders that have a lot of fake, poor or otherwise fraudulent addresses entered into their forms. In many cases this is the driving factor for them using COI: to stop people from using their email to harass third parties. Using COI in these cases is a matter of self protection. If they didn’t use COI, they’d have a lot of complaints, traps and delivery problems.
The next time you hear confirmation is too hard, remember that over 1 billion people, including grandparents and the technologically challenged, managed to click that link to confirm their Facebook account. Sure, they wanted what Facebook was offering, but that just tells us that if they want it bad enough they’ll figure out how to confirm.
HT: Spamresource

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