Single or double opt-in

Here is my issue with single opt in and please tell me how this isn't a concern.

John Doe opts into your list to get your free report but doesn't want to be bothered with your emails so he puts in the email address of somebody who he can't stand. We'll call him Jim Smith.

Jim Smith now gets your email. It is an email that he never asked to receive. In reality, you have just spammed Jim Smith. Jim Smith now reports you to your list manager. In my case, it's Aweber. If you get enough of these complaints you can lose your autoresponder service.

How is this NOT a legitimate concern?

As it is, using confirmed opt-in, I actually get an occasional spam complaint and even with just one or two within a few month period I get that stupid Aweber warning that if I get too many of these I can lose my account.

So how is the real possibility of sending out technical spam to somebody not a concern?

I would love to hear the explanation to this.

Personally, I would never use single opt in. Ever.

This is exactly the kind of statement I was referring to, in my comment above, about this subject inevitably bringing out the all the "mistaken reasoning" and "fallacies".

The point you're missing, Vishwa, is that if you use single opt-in, all those "genuine list subscribers" will still be included on your list anyway. They won't have been "scared away" by the fact that you're using single opt-in, will they? Using single opt-in instead of confirmed opt-in won't ever lose you a single person. It can only gain you some people.

It would really help you to read this thread carefully rather than repeating all this erroneous stuff which you've seen people saying elsewhere.

You're telling me. "Name personalization"?? Let's not even go there (unless we want to sound like an insurance salesperson and wave a big flag saying "I'm just a spammer trying to sell you things" at all our subscribers).

I've never used double optin, always single with no issues.

I personally think it would result in missing out on lots of subscribers,

as many times I just haven't bothered confirming when joining a list myself,

so why expect others to.

That doesn't have anything to do with single or double opt-in. You can have unsubscribe options with either opt in methods.

You should always give a user an option to unsubscribe otherwise you are technically breaking the law.

I have doing single opt-in but have started with confirmed opt-in when I first started.

I think that with single you can just do some list hygiene every once in awhile
to get rid of the unresponsive subs that doesn't open anything in a month.

It depends on what you are doing because I know that if
I did double opt-in when doing a paid traffic campaign (PPC/PPV) it would be a disaster.

Well, please excuse my mentioning that I don't believe this for a moment.

Not if you go about your email marketing sensibly.

What you'll have is a smaller list.

I think it's just one of the "big myths of autoresponders", several of which have already appeared in this thread with their relentless inevitability. The process of confirming their email address does not make people any more responsive. Why would it? It seems to me to be on a par with imagining that people are somehow, magically, less likely to hit the "spam" button in future if they'd confirmed their email address at the time they opted in. I don't believe that either. I don't think people who hit the spam button know or care whether they're single or double opted-in to the list. There are a lot of such beliefs around, though. They've all emanated from the Urban Myth Scool of Internet Marketing and are lovingly regurgitated and propagated - without ever having been based on anything realistic at all - by the adherents of the course-materials.

This is an old, but always interesting debate.

Integrity and professionalism is super-important to me, and I only want people on my list who want to be there. So I used to do only confirmed opt-in. Yes, I might have fewer subscribers, but at least they were people who wanted to be on my list.

And then I started running PPC ads to build my list.

In my personal experience building my list, most people do NOT confirm their subscription. Either they're too lazy, the message went to spam, they changed their mind, etc. Thus, I was actually throwing money away on those people and I was NOT happy about it.

I have a very old AWeber account where I still pay just $20/mo, no matter how many subscribers I have. And they used to REQUIRE us have confirmed opt-in, so I didn't have the option to turn confirmed opt-in off.. So I called them to complain -- loudly -- about losing money on PPC.

They showed me how to turn off confirmed opt-in. The only catch was that I had to create a new list. I couldn't undo the confirmed opt-in on the list I'd been using.

People may put in a throwaway email address, but I've never heard of someone putting in someone else's name and email on my list. And I haven't noticed any difference in responsiveness or quality with single opt-in. All confirmed opt-in did for me was leave me with a smaller list and cost me more in marketing dollars.

However, I do a couple of things with single opt-in:

1. New subscribers get the freebie via email, NOT on the thank you page. So it does them no good to give me a fake address, or a friend's address if they really want what I'm offering.

2. The autoresponders new subscribers get is a multi-step sequence very specifically designed to build value by providing resources to them, helping them solve their biggest problem. The sequence leads to a one-time-only special offer for new subscribers.

This helps keep our spam complaints low while still also driving sales for us.

3. As others have mentioned, I do occasional list hygiene, deleting people on my list who haven't opened my emails in a while. I'm also on a lot of other people's lists and have seen them do occasional "Do you still want to receive emails from me?" campaigns. If I don't respond, I'm automatically deleted.

I think this is a better way to handle it. And I haven't seen any difference in spam complaints, etc.

While Steven Wagenheim's point about people putting in a friend's address is valid, it's also miniscule -- hardly worth worrying about if you're doing any volume at all. But the IM market is much tougher, too.

How you handle it will vary according to your audience and what you're selling. I'm not in the IM market at all, which helps a lot.

I give away very valuable freebies and have invested a good amount of money in design too. I'm looking to build a long-term business relationship with my subscribers/members and have invested accordingly. People subscribing for the freebie and then immediately leaving hasn't been much of a problem for me.

People who take the freebie and then cut and run like Steven Wagenheim hold no interest for me. There will always be a certain percentage of people who do that, but fortunately, it's miniscule (so far) for me.

I own a trade association for a specific industry and we work hard to position ourselves as a resource for our members. If they immediately unsubscribe as soon as they get the freebie, it either means 1) we didn't offer what they needed/wanted at that time or 2) they're in the percentage of people who are just looking for as much as they can get for free. We don't serve those people and work in such a way as to repel those people as much as possible.

In any case, we don't do confirmed opt-in anymore. Single opt-in only.

Hope that helps!

Michelle

LOL, let the onslaught begin

Well, it's certainly "sub-optimal", to put it mildly.

I admit I never do this: I email them the download link and let them take it themselves. (My reasoning is that if I attached the free report to an outgoing email, it wouldn't hit their in-boxes so often - it might end up under "spam"/"bulk"/"junk" or whatever.)

Nope. Nice try, but I'm afraid not. That's equally true of single opt-in.

Nope. Sorry, but that one's completely illogical, too: not even a nice try, there.

Key concept: the process of confirming their email address doesn't actually make anyone into a "better" subscriber than they would otherwise have been: they're still exactly the same person, if you just add them to the list without asking them to do that.

Hmmm I think your missing the point... spam complaints have nothing to do with it.

The likelihood is that you don't get many spam complaints because the majority of your emails are just being binned by the email provider. your large numbers actually work against you in this instance not for you.

Lets say you have a list of 15k

5k of them are on gmail
5k on yahoo
5k of them on aol

all it takes for everyone of your 15 k list to never get an email from you is 5 bad emails to each provider
yahoo (and all the others) will monitor your bounce rate and if you go over 1 in a thousand bounces they will just divert all the email coming from you into the bin.

And... that wont stop happening until you are consistently below the 0.01% of bounces they screen for.

Its never been about the size of your list, it's always been about the number that actually gets delivered

Robert's points are quite enlightening. But Alexa's point about being in niches where subscribers are less likely to put in fake email addresses is also key.

If I were building a list catering to people interested in "rearing chickens" I'd go single optin. But for list building in the IM field, I'd more likely go for confirmed optin (because of Robert's points)