March 18, 2017

Confirmed Email Opt-In: Is It Worth The Risk?

It’s been a while since we’ve discussed email opt-ins. You might have a general idea about confirmed opt-ins and what they are about.

Keeping up with the tradition of answering customer questions, in this blog post, we address confusions regarding confirmed email opt-in.

What Is It?

Confirmed opt-in is a process that includes sending emails and instructing recipients to click on a link in order to confirm they want the emails to keep coming.

Some people may also refer to them as double opt-ins; however some also consider this to be a spamming terminology. In reality, it has nothing to do with spam.

The question here is, what do you do with addresses that don’t click? Is there value in them? Should or can you email them?

Reasons Why Confirmations Are Not Clicked

There are plenty of reasons confirmation links are not clicked. Here are a few of them:

• At times, recipients might not click simply because they want to take the next step to engage with the email. If the email had just popped up, they might read it but clicking on a link to take the next step is not something they prefer to do.

• Some recipients might not click on emails because they have already gotten what they needed. This could be access to a free download, a website or a report.

• Recipients might also avoid clicking because they aren’t your customers. In fact, someone else (friend or family) used their email address to sign up and they genuinely have no interest in your emails.

• Recipients may also not click because they didn’t see them email in the first place. The email may have gone to junk folder, it may have been buried under heaps of other emails or they may have deleted the email without reading the subject line.

• At times recipients might not see the email because there is no recipient at the other end. The server may have accepted the email, but there would be no response. In some cases, it is also a spamtrap.

While there is some value in the pool, when it comes to crunching numbers, a part of that value is negative. Every company should conduct its own analysis and identify the best thing to do with the addresses.

Different kinds of strategies are going to create different kinds of subscriber pools. This means widely varying risk profiles. Some strategies might generate more of a single type of subscriber. Consequently, this means the chances of sending mails to users who don’t click depend largely on the pool.

The Final Word

The goal here should be to secure a list of email addresses that are owned by people who actually look forward to your mails. Doing so requires you to analyze two aspects to this—identity and permission.

The identity part requires you to link the email address to the recipient who is your subscriber or customer. The permission part is identifying if they really want the email.

So if confirmed opt-in worth it? Definitely. It blends both identity and permission into one single step. Drop them an email and at the end ask them for permission to send more of it. This covers both aspects, in a simple manner.

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