Want to see a spectacular use of confirmed opt-in? Go to HistoryBuff.com and sign up for its monthly newsletter. I have no idea yet if the newsletter is any good, but its registration process ensures a clean list through confirmed or double opt-in and does a great job of heading off the downfalls of using the two-step process for new signups.
Many marketers are understandably hesitant to use confirmed opt-in where new subscribers must respond to a confirmation e-mail in order to be added to the list. The confirmation message may be overlooked or lost in the recipient’s spam folder, resulting in a lost would-be new subscriber.
However, HistoryBuff.com seems to have found a way around confirmed opt-in’s pitfalls. After the new registrant supplies an e-mail address and hits “enter,” the site immediately returns a glaring white screen with the words “STEP TWO” followed by the new registrant’s e-mail address in plain, black, couldn’t-miss-it-if-you-wanted-to, 18-point type.
The message then explains the confirmed opt-in process:
“If you provided the correct e-mail address, you will receive an e-mail shortly with confirmation instructions. You will not become a subscriber until you confirm in the next step. If you do not receive an e-mail with the confirmation link, you did one of the following:
“Entered your e-mail incorrectly. (Check for spelling. Email addresses NEVER begin with “www”.) “
Conveniently, the e-mail address the new registrant entered is displayed on top of the message so large, a typo would be impossible to miss.
The message continues with a second possible reason the registrant may not receive the confirmation message: “Your e-mail account has anti-spam filters. (You need to enter the e-mail address “[email protected]” in your “Buddies” or “White List” to receive e-mail from. Do this and then try again.)”
OK, so there’s a sentence fragment that should have ended with the word “us” or “HistoryBuff.com.” We’ll forgive them that.
And the best part of HistoryBuff.com’s confirmed-opt-in warning page is it contains no designer self-indulgences—you know, the pretty colors, graphics and fonts too many designers just can’t help themselves from adding—that would get in the way of the message and its goal. It’s simply big black type on a plain white screen.
Rick Brown, proprietor of HistoryBuff.com, said he implemented confirmed opt-in to eliminate the 50 or so fake signups his 8,500-name subscriber list was getting per month.
“There were so many people signing up with fake/invalid e-mail addresses [such as] [email protected]. Also, some had typographical errors e.g. donald@yahoocom or [email protected],” he wrote in an e-mail exchange with this newsletter. “A lot of time was spent weeding these out.”
As a result of implementing double opt in, confirmation e-mails to invalid new registrants bounce back as undeliverable and the garbage addresses don’t end up in HistoryBuff.com’s file.
“The confirmation is set so that if they confirm within 72 hours, the email address is automatically added to the database,” wrote Brown. “If they do not confirm within the 72 hours, their e-mail address does not get added to the database.”
HistoryBuff.com’s new-registrant warning screen is a great example of implementing confirmed opt-in—a process that by definition results in a typo-free, squeaky-clean list—while heading off its pitfalls.
Go to HistoryBuff.com and check it out.
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