Single Opt-In Versus Double Opt-In

The first rule of an email marketing driven website is that your list of qualified subscribers is your "bread and butter" .  You recommend products to your list, they buy the products, and you make money off your affiliate program links.

However, populating that list is something of an ethical dilemma.  You want to make sure that your list is populated with quality subscribers. You've already heard about how to use squeeze pages to get peoples email addresses…but unless you have some method of confirming the email address, you're only buying trouble.

Single opt-in used to be the rage in the mid-90s, when internet marketing was in its infancy.  You get an email address (some even harvested them from news groups…) and you send a message to it, people respond, you make money.  That's how it was supposed to work, anyway.

You can see the actual results of this course of action whenever you open your inbox, or look at your web mail account and see hundreds or thousands of spam emails filtered out.

Single opt-in can be a hazard to your business and can get you shut down if you are not careful.

What you need to do when getting someone signed into your list is send an email confirmation that  the subscriber must click on to confirm their subscription.  This is called "double opt-in".  It filters out the people who put bogus email addresses up, and ensures that your list is clean. 

Think about it… You want the people on your list to be people who are interested in your offerings, who will stick with you in the long haul.  It doesn't matter how big your email list is if the majority of addresses on it are dead end accounts. 

There's another excellent reason to go with double opt-in subscriptions beyond the straightforward business case:  More ISPs are cracking down on spam emailings.  The one vendor you cannot afford to offend, or make abandon you is your Internet Service Provider.  They track how many "bounced emails with identical subjects" come back to your account, and will shut you off without any notification if they think you're doing a spam assault. 

The third benefit of double opt-in is legitimacy.  Most major internet businesses out there are not using single opt-in any more.  Consumers expect to get a confirmation email, proving that you're a legitimate business who takes their time seriously.

Setting up a double-opt-in subscription system does require that you write a simple welcome message.

Here's a basic example:

"Dear <name>, in order to use our services, we have to be certain that you're giving us a valid email address. Please click on the link below to complete your registration." 

Something else you should do with your email list is provide, at the bottom of every email you send out, a way for someone to unsubscribe that doesn't cause them to jump through lots of obstructions.  Easy opt-out options help your list clean itself – after all, if they want off your list, they're not going to buy anything you recommend anyway.  All you're doing by not letting them unsubscribe easily is giving them a reason to mention your business in a negative light on blogs and forums about the products you sell.

In the end, there are established, and well recognized, good business practices for being an ethical internet marketer.  It's always in your best interests to follow them, to make this work for you.  Your customers will stick with you if you do so, and will leave within moments of you stepping off the straight and narrow.