Why Double Opt-in is Better for Your Business
When it comes to deciding whether or not to allow your emails into your recipients' inboxes, ISPs don't really care whether your email message is single opt-in or double opt-in. Typically, ISPs are only concerned with complaints generated from emails you send.
The fact is single opt-in databases and purchased email lists are responsible for most of these complaints because the recipients failed to explicitly opt-in to receive information from you via a double opt-in or a closed-loop method. When marketing with a single opt-in database, eventually your email marketing initiatives may generate enough complaints to cause your messages to be blocked from arriving in the inboxes of your recipients.
For this reason, your email marketing strategy should have a focus on maximizing your marketing efforts to double opt-in email addresses.
Important Definitions
Single Opt-in: a process where users give permission to receive email from a specific entity by performing a single step such as filling out a subscription form on a website or a subscription sheet at a trade show explicitly granting permission to be emailed.
Double Opt-in/Closed Loop Opt-in: a process where users give permission to receive email from a specific entity by performing two steps: an initial subscription step followed by a confirmation step. For example, this could be done by filling out a subscription form on a website or a subscription sheet at a trade show, and then confirming that subscription via email.
The History of the Spam Problem
During the earliest days of email marketing in the mid 1990s, companies could purchase a list of email addresses and some inexpensive email broadcasting software for roughly $250. After sending a blast to 25,000 email addresses, a few thousand dollars in new sales could be generated in a 24-hour period as a direct result of the email campaign. A person could then repeat that same process continually and see the same amount of money pour in over-and-over again. In those earliest days of email marketing, spam was not an issue. Most people deleted the few pieces of unwanted email from their inbox and life on the Internet was happy for all involved, even without spam filters or spam complaints. Spam, at least when connected to unsolicited commercial email, was not even a household word yet.
Yet, as more and more people discovered how exceptionally profitable email marketing had become, spam proliferated to the point where many dreaded opening their inboxes. As a result, reasonable companies began to move away from purchasing databases and towards legitimate opt-in email marketing. Nevertheless, the spam problem continued to spiral out of control. A large anti-spam industry developed to combat this problem, offering various means to block, albeit imperfectly, unwanted email.
Today, according to government and analyst estimates, 70 percent of email messages sent daily are spam. ISPs, companies, and individual computer users have access to a virtual fortress of software that blocks a huge portion of unwanted email. However, even legitimate opt-in email is blocked during the imperfect process of protecting inboxes from spam.
Spam Filters Block Anything That They "Think" is Spam
Because it costs businesses, individuals, and ISPs so much time and money there is tremendous emphasis on stopping the occurrence of spam - especially at the inbox level. Sadly, there is no perfect formula for determining what is and is not spam. As a result, ISPs and anti-spam software use their own subjective formula of determining what exactly constitutes a spam email. There is one factor that in almost every instance will result in your email getting blocked - spam complaints. The single most effective weapon in decreasing spam complaints and increasing your long-term Return on Investment (ROI) is to use a double opt-in signup system for your email marketing efforts.
Spam Complaints from Opt-in Email Campaigns
Even if your database consists entirely of opt-in email addresses, your spam complaints still can meet or exceed an ISP's threshold as a result of your email campaign. If you meet or exceed that spam complaint threshold, an ISP or public black list could place a block not only your IP address, but also the domain name (e.g. www.companywebsite.com) you are sending email from, the domain name you are promoting as a landing page in your emails, and the coding and layout of your email template. This will essentially shut down your email operation as an effective marketing force.
The amount of spam complaints that can get your company blocked is not alarmingly large - only a handful of complaints could end up black listing an entire organization. Since most ISPs keep their blocking formulas secret, it is only possible to hypothesize how many complaints, or what the ratio of complaints-per-email-sent is that will cause you to get black listed. The important thing to remember is that you do not want any spam complaints.
In addition, anti-spam organizations and ISPs work together when deciding who to black list. If you are black listed by one ISP, you may find yourself black listed by most ISPs in a very short about of time - even if you had been sending opt-in email campaigns for years without any issues. Often, the main difference between being white listed one day and black listed the next is the entrance of spam traps into your email database.
Spam Traps
A spam trap is an email addresses that is placed within a database to poison it with a contact that is virtually guaranteed to cause a spam complaint. If you have too many spam traps within your email database you will be black listed.
Spam traps can be added to your database in many ways. A few of them are covered below:
- Automated Spam Traps: Hardcore anti-spammers consider anything that is not double opt-in or closed-loop opt-in spam. Industry insiders have discovered that there are servers, most likely setup by these "hardcore" people/organizations, which search the Internet and sign up for mailing lists via any single opt-in form they can find. When an organization sends out an email campaign to their database they are also emailing the spam traps that have been seeded into their list. The spam traps will automatically take the message when it arrives and report it as spam to ISPs, black lists, and other anti-spam organizations.
- Malicious & Manual Spam Traps: There are also people that maliciously enter spam-trap email addresses into opt-in databases. Sometimes these people are disgruntled employees or unethical competitors; the results of their spam complaints are equally as devastating to your database.
- Accidental Entry Spam Traps: With a single opt-in form, people can mistakenly add someone else's email address by accidentally mistyping their own. The natural result is that someone will receive an email from you that they do not want. Another type of "accidental entry spam trap" is when someone signs a friend, relative, or acquaintance up for a mailing list that he/she did not want to be signed up for.
Had the list owner user used a double opt-in system in all of the above examples, they would have either completely eliminated or greatly reduced the possibility of the spam complaint occurring as a result of a spam trap.
In the unlikely event that you would ever receive a spam complaint from a double opt-in email, you would have much better leverage working with an ISP to resolve an issue based on the fact that your subscribers confirmed their subscription.
Remember that your goal is to make sure that everyone within your email marketing database wants to receive your email communications. By achieving that goal, your email will be successfully delivered to your subscribers' inboxes instead of being automatically trashed or sent to the bulk folder. Using double opt-in email communications pretty much ensures that any responsibly run email campaign will not cause enough issues to warrant a black listing.
Creating an Effective Double Opt-in System
Any good double opt-in system should have these important features:
- It allows recipients to opt-in quickly via an online form.
- Only a few questions should be asked at signup. Asking too many questions at signup will discourage potential subscribers.
- A notification should be given to the recipient both before and after completing the online form informing them that they will not be added to the database until they confirm their subscription.
- A disclaimer should be placed on the website telling the subscriber that their information will not be shared or sold to any 3rd party. This will help to improve enrollment rates because your subscribers believe their email address will not be spammed.
- There should be a link to your company's privacy policy. This can help your standing with ISPs when they decide if your company's operations are legitimate.
- The link to confirm the subscription, placed within your recipient's confirmation email message, should be unique to the subscriber. This will prevent the confirmation of someone else's subscription.
- Keep track of the information that a subscriber entered when they logged into your system. In addition to their name and email, you should also include their IP address, the address of the opt-in web page, and the date and time of their opt-in. In the unlikely event that the person would ever issue a spam complaint, you would have solid data that you could show ISPs and black list administrators that would help you in quickly resolving the issue.
Getting New Subscribers into Your Double Opt-in System
Your newsletter must offer something to your subscribers so they will want to receive your emails. Virtually all emails you send should offer a combination of subscriber relevant self-promotional incentives for your message recipients to act on such as discounts, promotions, special offers, and information that your subscribers will be very interested in. For example, Fathom's news offers an 80% to 20% information-to-promotion ratio that is popular with our recipients.
In addition, if you want to grow a potent double opt-in marketing database you must advertise it. By placing a prominent link to subscribe for your newsletter on every web page of your site, you should notice a significant increase in new subscribers and sales as a result.
In February 2005, JupiterResearch listed search engine marketing (both organic search engine optimization as well as pay-per-click) as one of the most cost-effective but underutilized tactics in growing an email list. Other tactics that have been proven successful are direct marketing, online advertising, tradeshows, and cross-promotions.
Conclusion
When marketing via email, it is more beneficial for a company to do so through double opt-in means. It is a powerful weapon towards ensuring that everyone on your email list wants to receive your email communications. As a result of marketing to a double opt-in database, your messages should receive few spam complaints and your email will have a much better chance of being given a welcomed spot across the Internet in the inboxes of the world. In the end, marketing is all about a good return on investment (ROI), and that is exactly what you get with double opt-in email marketing.
