Double opt-in: what is it, and why do I care?

OK, so in my last post I mentioned I was happy to run into a case of double opt-in. I wanted to be clear that this was basically the ONLY thing this Internet marketing effort did RIGHT, and explain why.

The point of all marketing is to get someone's attention, create a positive impression, and to attempt to leverage that into at least one sale (preferably a lifetime of sales). That's your mission, that's your ONLY mission, anything that interferes with that is to be avoided. Double opt-in is your best tool for that.

First, let's review opt-out. Opt-out is when you're included in something (in this case, an emailed marketing list) without any action on your part. This is your (landline) phone company's strategy: They sell (yes, they make money from it) your phone number to marketing companies and then these same marketers call you at dinnertime and try to get you to use a new phone company (who will then do the same...). The beauty of the phone company's model is they get paid by both ends: By the marketer that wants to annoy you, and by you so you can have a phone which marketers will use to annoy you. If you get an unlisted number, they won't sell it, but that costs you more every month. The Phone Company is frequently evil and this is lucrative for them, but that's not the point.

The point is you have to take action to get OFF the list (you opt "out" of the list), such as getting an unlisted number or requesting the marketer to take you off the list, or pressing "3" (or whatever) when the recording offers the opt-out option, or by contacting the national do-not-call registry. It's very annoying in telephone-land, on the Internet this means 95% of all email was spam at one point (maybe worse now). Compared to telephone operator time (or even telephone operator robot time), email is stupidly cheap, so the problem is much worse, as anyone who's had an email address for a couple of years can tell you (especially if your ISP sucks at Spam Filtering).

So, for the person trying to do Internet marketing successfully, this is just an expensive way to get ignored: You're either spam-filtered or at best you become one of thousands of messages that your potential customer has to sweep out of her inbox before she can get to email she cares about. If you're noticed at all, it'll be negative attention, generating a rotten first impression and if she remembers you at all, it'll be as that dude that sent her all those spam messages that she discarded along with the ads for porn and cheap viagra. You don't want to keep that kind of company in the customer's head, so don't use opt-out, ever. By the way, if the shopping cart page on your Internet store has a prechecked "contact me about stuff" option on the page that the customer must uncheck, then you're doing opt-out, it's just a "fine print notification" type of opt-out, and should be ashamed of yourself (and your marketing efforts will ultimately be expensive and ineffective, which serves you right).

Opt-in is better, but it's far from good enough. You have to take some action to get on the list, but on the anonymous Internet, this bar is pretty low. The classic example is "enter your email address to get our newsletter". The problem is that on the Internet, no one can assume you're you. There's no way to prevent a trickster from entering anybody's email address into the page and hitting submit. Some miscreants (not me, I swear) think this is a funny trick. It's the Internet equivalent of signing your mean neighbor up for lots of magazines and catalogs. Again, the costs are lower on the Internet, which means the volumes are higher, and you're back in amongst the pornagra ads, getting no or negative attention, and therefore wasting all your Internet marketing budget. So don't use opt-in, ever.

Confirmed opt-in is even better: The customer must enter their email address into a subscription page, and you immediately send him a confirmatory email that says "Somebody (hopefully you) entered your email into our subscription page, and you're now receiving our newsletter. If this was a mistake, or you've changed your mind, click *HERE* to unsubscribe". Again, you'd think that this is enough, but it's not. The Anonymous factor on the Internet strikes again. Just as you didn't know whether the customer was really booyah@whateveremail.net, he doesn't know if this confirmation is really from Widgets, inc. Maybe you're just an evil spammer who is using a fake unsubscribe link to confirm that booyah@whateveremail.net is a real email address with a real, actual, person who can read behind it. Evil spammers turn around and sell lists of confirmed email addresses for MORE, and the result is more Pornagra ads. So we've all learned the hard way not to click on links that may be untrustworthy, just like we've learned not to eat candy off the sidewalk. It's much safer for your potential customer to just avoid you, either by abandoning their email address entirely, or by training their spam filter to automatically ignore you. Result: 100% of what it costs to do this is wasted.

Double opt-in is another step up, and is the only way to go. Here's how it works: your subscription web page says up front in big print "we use double opt-in for your comfort and convenience", and offers a place for the customer to enter their email address, along with whatever explanatory text you need to explain and reassure the customer that you're taking their trust in you seriously. When they hit "submit", the ONLY thing they will ever get is an email sent to that address that says "we want to be sure you REALLY want our newsletter. We use double opt-in to prevent pranksters from signing people up who don't want our newsletter. If you *don't* want to be on our newsletter mailing list, do NOTHING, and you *won't* be added to our list. If you are really you, and if you really do want our newsletter (which will come about 2-3 times/month), then click this link to start your subscription." The newsletter will only go to the customer if they request it TWICE. That's how it works. Before we talk about why it's the ONLY way that REALLY works, let's address a common objection:

"It's too many hoops for the customer to jump through". No, it's not. Anybody who can't follow this set of instructions won't be able to order from your e-commerce site anyway. Anybody who WON'T follow this set of instructions doesn't really want your newsletter that badly at all, and would just ignore it if they got it. You want everyone on your mailing list to eagerly devour your insightful, amusing, and informative newsletter, and order everything on it. The person who got half way through the double opt-in and gave up isn't this person, and will never be. You're wasting a 100th of a cent every time you send them an email, and this adds up.


Why it works:

This is one way you can show the customer that their trust is important to you. There's no way for you to smile and offer positive body language over the Internet (yet, they're working on it), so humans have come up with other signalling mechanisms. One of these is double opt-in. It says Your email address is valuable to me, and I will be trustworthy, and I want you to SEE me making an effort to be trustworthy, because I want there to be no doubt in your mind.

This is also a way you can reinforce the fact that your newsletter isn't just a bunch of lame ads (OH, BTW, your newsletter has to be more than just a bunch of lame ads. More about that later). Reinforce the fact that your newsletter is itself a valuable interaction for your customer, full of insight, humor, and valuable information.

Finally, this is the ONLY way to make sure (double sure) that your newsletter mailing list has ONLY addresses on it which represent real people who are really interested in what you have to offer. Emailing THESE people will be effective, will lead to sales, will prevent wasted marketing expenses. Emailing anybody else is a waste of your advertising budget. Don't waste your resources. Don't end up with a reputation as a Pornagra spam artist. Don't make a bad first impression. Don't use anything less than double opt-in.

I ought to talk more about how to make SURE anybody doing Internet marketing is REALLY doing double opt-in, but I've rambled on long enough.