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How Does A Double Opt-In Help Keep Your Email Spam Free?

Email marketing should be a core component of any online marketing campaign. Email gives
marketers the ability to connect directly with leads, which is all good if the lead wants to be
connected with, but if they don’t, it can have negative implications for a business’s reputation
and the deliverability of its email. Think about what the ideal mailing list looks like. The dream
list consists of email addresses that correspond to individuals who are interested in the products
a company sells. There’s at least a chance that sending an email to these people will result in
an open and a purchase. There are three basic approaches to building an email list: no opt-in,
single opt-in, and double opt-in. I’m not going to talk about the first of these: the no opt-in
approach amounts to building email lists without the permission of users — a practice which is
almost indistinguishable from spamming.

Single opt-ins are a popular option with marketers. A single opt-in occurs when someone
submits their email on a web form, signaling they’re interested in receiving emails from a
company. A double opt-in is the same as a single opt-in with the addition of an extra check. An
email is sent to the submitted address. To be added to the email list, the lead has to click a link
in the email. Each approach has clear benefits. Single opt-ins are quick and there’s no likelihood
of confusion. Studies have shown that single opt-in processes result in more sign-ups. With
double opt-in processes, a large percentage of potential leads don’t complete the second step.

Single opt-ins also have clear negatives. An email address might land on a single opt-in
emailing list without being submitted by its owner. Spambots, scammers, and fake subscribers
are common — as are misspelled email addresses. Single opt-in processes produce email lists
with a lot more noise in them then double-opt in processes. That noise can have disastrous
consequences for a company’s ability to get email delivered. If your email list contains
addresses of people who aren’t interested in your product and didn’t intend to sign-up, you’ll
send them emails they don’t want to receive. In many cases, the receivers’ reaction will be to
mark the email as spam, sending a signal to email inbox providers and blacklist maintainers that
your IPs and domains are spam sources.

Marketers I’ve talked to about this issue often complain double opt-ins reduce their sign-up
rates. They’re right, it will — but that’s the point. The goal of email marketing is to send
messages to promising leads. Total number of sign-ups is a great vanity metric, but it has almost
no bearing on whether an email list is an effective marketing tool. A list of 1,000,000 random
emails is useless compared to a list of 10,000 leads who have expressed an interest in the
products being marketed. Using a double opt-in has two major upsides: it improves the quality
of your email lists and it reduces the chances that your ability to send email will be hurt by the
perception that you’re sending spam.

About the Author

Ciara Noonan -- Ciara works as a tech writer for MailChannels, a provider outbound email
filtering and email delivery solutions for service providers. Follow MailChannels on Twitter at
@mailchannels and check out their blog, http://blog.mailchannels.com/.

55 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – March 2017 Edition
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