Improving Your Marketing Results With A Double Opt-in Campaign

These days, in order to properly perform Email marketing… you NEED to get users to “opt-in”.

“Opting in” is just a way for your Contacts to agree to receive marketing emails… which is a really simple concept, BUT… there’s a bit more to it than people just opting in and you spamming them with sales offers.

 

So let’s go over something called a “Double Opt-In”, which is also referred to as a “Confirmed Subscription” or “Close-looped opt-in”.

 

What Is A Double Opt-In?

A “Double Opt-in” is really just a confirmation that verifies a Contact wanted to actually receive marketing emails. The name might sound kind of fancy, but it’s really just common-sense and fairly self-explanatory.

 

Why Are Double Opt-Ins Useful?

A lot of opt-in campaigns aren’t very clear about the fact that a Contact is signing up to get their inbox spammed with sales offers…

Those people usually end up getting spammed with offers they aren’t interested in, which doesn’t result in sales, and you run the risk of them reporting your messages as spam.

This is harmful in a number of ways, including:

A.) The end-consumer has a poor experience by getting spammed.
B.) The company is paying for spots on their Contact list, so disinterested Contacts cost them money.
C.) Email deliverability drops because Email providers don’t want to spam people.
D.) In countries where Email regulation is strict, it’s harder to prove that a person actually wanted to receive marketing materials through Email.

 

A Double Opt-In eliminates a lot of that by making sure the person is actually interested and that they understand the consequences of staying opted in.

 

Tips For Using Double Opt-Ins

• CRM tools, like Keap, can score leads to show you which leads are more “hot”.
  Optimizing your offers for leads that are “hot” will make conversions more likely to happen. A person who agrees to receive your marketing materials TWICE is pretty much waving a big giant red flag in your face saying “Take My Money, PLEASE!”

 

• Be careful of how you implement the automation of your Double Opt-In!
  It may seem like a good idea to add a Double Opt-In into all of your lead magnet campaigns, but you might be setting yourself up for problems.
  
  If the creation of your Double-Optin is done poorly, you can end up interfering with content delivery, OR doing more work than you really need to.
  
  As far as content delivery goes… if you force people to verify their opt-in before you send them whatever resource they were interested in, then they may get frustrated and lose interest… so in other words, they’ll be gone forever.
  
  On the work side of things, creating a separate Double Opt-In campaign instead of creating a Double Opt-In element inside each marketing campaign can save you hassle in the long term.
  
  You can just run multiple lead magnet campaigns through the same external Double Opt-In campaign instead of creating the Double Opt-in process inside of each individual campaign.

 

• Don’t be worried about missing out on customers.
  Sometimes, our obsession with vanity metrics clouds our judgment. By requiring people to opt-in twice… you’ll definitely miss out on a few potential sales eventually.
  
  But that’s not as bad as it sounds… You’ll also avoid maintaining a massive list of Contacts that you’re paying to send Emails to.
  
  You don’t NEED to make every single potential sale possible… That’s what you’re attempting to do when you send offers out to anyone you have access to without vetting them at all. Having your targeting figured out and sending sales offers to people who will actually purchase your products is a much more elegant and efficient way to go about it, and it saves you money and hassle by reducing the number of Contacts you have to pay for/manage and reducing Email deliverability issues.
  
  Think of it this way… we charge $500/month to keep people’s Contact lists clean… They wouldn’t be willing to pay that much money for a service like that if all Contacts are valued equally. Some Contacts are just worth getting rid of, so it makes sense to do it automatically and as soon as possible in the process.

 

Help Setting Up A Double Opt-In Campaign

While it’s possible to manually vet your leads, the best way to do it efficiently is with automation.

 

If you’re having issues figuring out how to handle opt-ins and double opt-ins, don’t worry… we do that kind of thing for a living and we can help.

Just get in touch with us and we’ll help you figure it out.