Puzzlingly low Aweber confirm rate?

Hi Thaddeus

Actually, the above article that I quoted from the Aweber help section contradicts the stat you gave above. Take another look ...

Those are the words of Aweber.

THEY say ONLY 68% of people enter a valid email address.

If that's the case, even if you had 100% of genuine people confirm, your optin rate would probably be no better than 68% and I think, normally, that's what mine is.

Will

EDIT: I checked - normally, mine is 57%

Ralph, Oh?

Which am I, Ralph? Am I still uneducated on the issue, despite having just shy of 15 years experience in email publishing? I think you'll have a hard time convincing anyone I've been forced to it, given that I was running confirmed opt-in lists as long as 16 years ago. (Discussion lists in 1995. They don't count as email publishing.)

Why do you make these absolutist comments which can so easily be demonstrated to be false? Wrong, unless you add significant qualification. This depends a lot on the process. Sometimes the niche, but mostly how you handle the sign-up process, and what expectations you set while your subscribers go through it.

Folks, be very careful of these generalizations when they're stated as absolutes. For example, you'll hear people insist that long copy reduces opt-ins, and that you have to have a graphically beautiful site or you won't convert.

I use one of the ugliest black-and-white subscription pages you'll ever see, and it's over 2000 words in length. A little over 60% of the people who hit that page fill out and submit one of the three forms on it. And 85% of those confirm their subscriptions.

Now, the only place that confirmation might reduce the total number of subscribers is in that last stage. But it's a pretty well accepted notion that between 5% and 10% of addresses submitted through a web form that involves a subscription incentive are bad, either because of a typo or the user deliberately dumping in a bogus address.

Keeping that in mind, I'm not really losing a whole lot of subscribers by requiring a confirmation, am I?

Why? I have a second ugly page they see right after they submit the form: That's here.

Feel free to swipe as much of the language on that page as you like. It works.

Sure, I could make it prettier, but why bother? It does the job pretty well, and it's a great example for folks who think pretty pages are somehow required for successful systems.

Confirmation rates are a function of a number of things. Good targeting of traffic, a solid offer, a clear call to action, an easily understood and well-explained process, and getting the confirmation email delivered promptly.

Oh... and back to Ralph's comments: Those numbers are for a list hosted with Aweber.


Paul

That's my understanding, but I freely admit that I'm offering no proof of it at all, and I may be mistaken.

Sorry - I just don't know this. But I'm pretty sure an Aweber "tech support" person will know it in a second ...

They do recommend it. And one can envisage the various possibilities with single opt-in lists, applicable to some of their customers, that might make that a preferable overall policy for the company. It certainly isn't preferable to me, though.

True, but then again, the weight of opinion in the Warrior Forum is that syndicated content is duplicate content, that .info domain-names don't rank as well as .com domain-names, that backlinks on the pages of .edu sites are worth something extra just because of the extension of the domain on which their sites sit, that spun article content somehow confers some magic benefit over unspun content to the backlinks in the articles' resource-boxes, and a dozen other weird and wonderful beliefs straight out of the Urban Myth School of internet marketing. No offense to anyone, but that doesn't actually make any of them correct. And they're not correct.

I hear you there. In my opinion, this is because we all tend to look for them in the wrong places, to judge them indirectly, circumstantially and by reasoning which commonly rests on mistaken attribution of causation.

On some subjects, fact is comparatively hard to come by, while opinion is everywhere, and typically masquerading as fact.

You seem to be doing well, there.

I'm sorry I don't know the solution here, and I don't fully understand what's happened and why. My point is that I don't, myself, believe this is a problem which a switch to another autoresponder will help. Have you asked GetResponse whether your list would have to re-opt-in if you moved it? That would surely be a pretty decisive factor, here? Another possibility, though, might be to duplicate your current set-up, starting a new list at GetResponse for new subscribers, and sending everything out twice. Inconvenient for sure, but if there is a deliverability problem at Aweber (which applies only to broadcasts and not to follow-up series?!) that might at least minimise it, to some extent? It doesn't sound a very palatable or plausible solution, either, I do see, but at least it might avoid the dramatic "list-moving" problem? :confused:

Can't wait to see that. Genuinely independent research on a critical area. Absolutely terrific, and I wish you a following wind.

Don't suppose you have any opinions on my domain low number shocker? I'm reading the senderscore FAQs at the moment, but they are quite quiet on concrete advice!