Email marketing, while an incredibly effective marketing channel for engaging your audience and influencing sales, is ultimately, only as valuable as your contact list. If no one is opening your emails, it doesn’t matter how interesting or fun your email content is.
Double opt-in verifies that your contact wants your marketing emails before you officially add the contact to your list. This ensures that your list has highly engaged contacts who are excited to receive your emails. While you may lose additional subscribers in the short term, the long-term benefits of list quality, deliverability, and reputation far outweigh the initial trade-off.
Keep reading to learn about the gold standard of email list building, how double opt-in works, and why it matters.
With single opt-in, subscribers are added to your list immediately after submitting their email address with no additional verification steps required.
You may think, “Why is a double opt-in necessary? If they subscribe, isn’t that enough to add them to my email list?” So let’s talk through a few possible scenarios.
Scenario 1: The promotional-only email address
Let’s say someone is on an ecommerce site and the brand offers 20% off the first purchase if they subscribe to the email list. The user doesn’t really want marketing emails from this brand, but they do want the coupon so they enter an email address that they only use for promotional emails. This way they get the coupon code without having their primary inbox overwhelmed by unwanted emails.
Without double opt-in, the brand ends up sending emails to this email address for weeks (maybe months!) before the email service provider tells them to remove the contact from their list.
Scenario 2: The typo
Perhaps someone signs up for your emails, but either accidentally or purposefully inserts the wrong email address. By using the double opt-in method, you catch invalid email addresses early and keep your contact list clean. With the sign opt-in method, you may end up sending emails to the wrong email address for weeks.
Scenario 3: Accidental signup
If someone accidentally signs up for your emails, the double opt-in gives them the opportunity to easily opt out of your list. In this scenario, you avoid spam complaints from unwanted emails.
The benefits go beyond weeding out fake email addresses and spelling mistakes. By using double opt-in, companies experience better email engagement, follow data privacy standards, and protect your email program from spam complaints and spam traps.
Double opt-in significantly improves the quality of your email list in several ways. First, it ensures that all email addresses are valid and active, as subscribers must actually receive and open the confirmation email. This leads to higher open, click-through, and deliverability, creating an all-around healthier email program.
In a privacy-conscious world, double opt-in helps maintain compliance with major regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which requires explicit consent from EU subscribers. Additionally, double opt-ins make proving subscriber consent much easier for compliance regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act
Double opt-in serves as a solid defense mechanism against various forms of list abuse. By preventing the subscription of spam trap addresses and blocking malicious bulk signups, you protect your IPs from being block listed and avoid tanking your sender reputation.
With a double opt-in confirmation email, less is more. You want to make sure that the email is clear with action-oriented subject lines (e.g. Confirm your subscription to our newsletter) and an obvious call-to-action (CTA) to verify your email address.
While you want to include elements of your brand like your logo and colors to make sure that the email is recognizable, overall the simpler the email the better!
To maximize confirmation rates, set up automated double opt-in emails so that users receive the email while the signup is fresh in their minds. We recommend adding a sentence to the signup page so users know to check their email to verify the subscription.
When someone clicks on the CTA button in your email, direct them to a clear confirmation page that shares their opt-in was successful. Within the confirmation page, you could even share additional resources to get them engaged with your content.
Design your confirmation email and page to be mobile-friendly. Test the experience on different devices and screen sizes to ensure that when your users are on the go, they can easily access your communications.
Keep an eye on subscription rates. If you see a steep decline from your single opt-in to double opt-in subscription, review your double opt-in process to ensure there are no obstacles, like poor email delivery or an incorrect link that are preventing your contacts from subscribing.
While tips and processes are helpful, it can be useful to see what double opt-in emails look like in the wild. Here are a few double opt-in examples to show you how simple these emails are to create.
Using brand colors and featuring the Mount Lai logo are the main design choices for this simple opt-in email. Otherwise, your attention is drawn to the large CTA button. The text below the button provides additional context, sharing that you’ll only be subscribed if you click the button. Simple, and straightforward, while clearly recognizable as a brand, makes this an excellent double opt-in email.
With the plain text format and clear subject line, the 303 Construction Services company takes on a no-nonsense approach. While a logo to provide some brand recognition would be a nice touch, the recipient immediately understands the purpose of the email.
Of the the three, this email is my least favorite because you wouldn’t know who is sending it outside of the from name (which I removed for the purposes of this article). While double opt-in emails can be simple, they still need to be informative and clearly state what you are subscribing to if you click on the CTA button. This email misses the mark by not clearly displaying the brand or company name.
Improved deliverability, higher engagement rates, and stronger legal compliance make it an essential tool for serious email marketers. But remember that building a quality email list is a marathon, not a sprint. While double opt-in requires a bit more set up and the list growth can be slower, the long-term benefits outweigh these temporary drawbacks.
