Double opt-in, confirmed opt-in, email address verification, whatever you call it -- nobody ever universally agrees on whether or not you should do it. I see a lot of people in the anti-spam community try to recommend it based on their feelings. They relate specific experiences where a company annoyed them by not confirming subscriptions. Interesting, but it doesn’t always speak to senders in the language they need to hear. Unhappy anecdotes don’t provide the necessary info to convince marketers, who generally work by way of a data driven decision making process.
- What makes response rates go up and down?
- What’s the risk of not doing double opt-in?
- How does it actually correlate to lost sales or lost revenue opportunity?
A lot of blacklists will list you only for not doing double opt-in. Does it hurt? If they list you, you’re cut off from only the list’s users, and the more draconian lists that do that are generally very lightly utilized, having absolutely very little effect (if any) on deliverability and email performance. If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter.
It’s nice to see that in some instances, a double opt-in model can be shown to improve ROI. This is important data that more anti-spam groups and double opt-in advocates need to collect and publicize. It speaks to marketers in their own language.
It’s also true that double opt-in isn’t perfect, from a marketer’s perspective. Not everybody can figure out how to confirm, no matter how easy you make it. And, confirm emails get eaten by bad spam filters sometimes, just like regular emails.
With all of that in mind, can you make double opt-in work for you? Have you tested it recently? If so, what were the results? If not, what about it didn’t work for you?
