In reading your comment and looking at your account, it seems like 2 separate issues are being brought up here:

* You don’t feel confirmed opt-in is appropriate for your business

* You want to capture subscribers through a 2-page/form process so that you can get their postal details (for sending a catalog) on a separate page from where you capture their email address, and haven’t yet been presented with a way to do so.

I’ve sent you an email with some thoughts/suggestions on each of these issues. It’s a bit long for me to repost in its entirety, but I do want to address your comments on confirmed opt-in publicly.

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Your extra incentive need not be a report (though I think that approach can be applied successfully to many consumer products). It could just as easily be a coupon, or a free sample (or a voucher for a free sample).

With respect to importing and confirming subscribers, I would be curious to see where you are getting that 50% figure. Confirm rates vary based on a number of factors, including how you go about confirming your subscribers. As you can see from the stats we cite here, it is possible to realize significantly higher confirm rates than you mention.

A few things to keep in mind for migrating your subscribers:

* Don’t just import them without any advance notice. Use your current email platform to let them know about the move/change/upgrade before it happens. Give them an approximate date for when they can expect to get the confirm message.

* What’s in it for them? Offer an incentive. Reference the incentive in your pre-migration emails. Get people excited!

* Help them identify the confirm message by showing them what it looks like - you can do this through text, pictures or even audio/video.

Since you also communicate with your subscribers offline, I would also put references to your emails in those communications. If you send a letter/postcard/catalog, mention the emails in it and offer a URL where they can sign up for those.

Ultimately, only you can decide if you should use AWeber. While I certainly hope that you continue to use our service, if having to confirm your subscribers when you migrate them is a deal-breaker for you, then perhaps we’re not a good fit for each other.

Hope this helps!

I’m not sure there’s just one email metric that I would look at for your campaigns, because each one tells you something different.

Stats on overall conversions (orders, referrals, phone calls or whatever else your ultimate goals for a subscriber may be) give you a broad view of how well your campaigns are doing.

However, other metrics can show you how well individual parts of your messages are performing. For example, each of these stats can tell you something:

* Open Rates
* Click Throughs
* Clicks-to-Opens (open % divided by click %)

By identifying individual parts of your campaigns to improve, you can test and tweak your way to better overall conversions.

Come to think of it, we should do a full post on this

As far as getting more confirmations, I disagree with your suggestion that there’s nothing to be done.

Our confirm rate wasn’t always this high — we’ve gotten it to where it is now by continuously evaluating our thank-you page (which in my opinion is more important than the wording of your confirm message, although both definitely matter) and our confirm message text. We’ll continue to make changes to try to get it higher.

1) I don’t think I’ll ever stop wanting to increase my open rate Given the frequency that we send and the type of information, though, I’m not displeased with that open rate.

I think with this blog it’s all about what we write — do readers find it useful *and* compelling? So our open rate is directly tied to the quality of our posts, and we focus on writing better posts.

2) Subscriber-specific open and click tracking isn’t something that’s available currently, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it show up on our feature list in the future…

First - It doesn’t fit my business model to offer them a free report (we are in retail sales of a cosumer based product).

Second - I considered 2-stepping the sign-up, but AWeber stopped that -addind additional information to an account through a second form cannot be done. THIS WOULD WORK!

Third - By importing my existing list, I WILL LOSE about 50%. They already opted in. asking them again will piss many of them off. It’s making me rethink AWeber as the right choice for our service.

Double Opt is a double edged sword.

I am so glad that Amel asked you the question about the open rate.
Yes, this has been very critical for Internet Marketing success.
May be more that the number of new sign-ups in several cases.

1. Build on your number of 37.1%, are you happy with the number or you
would like to increase it? What/how you intend to increase that number, if you are planning to?

2. How could we search through the Aweber system and delete some of the emails which have NOT "read" our email? Is that doable on the system. If it is NOT, I would like to add that on a Wish List of the new features that Aweber’s client would appreciate.

Best regards

I then started re-directing them to a web page containing a video of the email I was sending (to confirm) and on-screen instructions on how they should confirm subscription.

After they have subscribed and ‘confirmed’ they then get their giveaway.

I just checked my confirm rate for last 30 days, it is 67% but I think I can get it higher.

I don’t have long-term stats in front of me right now, but our avg. open rate for our more recent blog broadcasts (over the past month and a half) is 37.1%

Maintaining high open rates is a challenge. I heard one marketer describe it as "running to stand still" - as your subscribers age (as more time passes since they signed up), their interest in your messages may wane, making them less likely to open. So it gets harder to get them to open your emails.

For more on this, check out this oldie but goodie (2nd post we ever made on this blog):

Open Rates By List Size.

Murray,

You bring up an interesting point — we’ve mentioned before in this space that asking for too much information will keep some people from signing up.

I hadn’t considered the possibility that doing so might actually reduce the confirm rate for those who do fill out the form… probably because my thinking was that those who would fill out a longer form out would be particularly interested (why else would they fill out the whole form?) and thus likely to confirm. It’s possible that for some people, that may not be the case, for the reasons you highlighted.

There are times when a low signup percentage is the senders fault. If I have received an email from you, for the first time, and I think I might be interested in what you have to offer, I’m not going to give you any more personal information than you need to be able to send me the offer. I have had people want my home address, phone number, cell number, etc., just to send me a free report. All you need is my name and email address. If I like your offer, I will respond - if I don’t like your offer, I will respond.

Some of these internet marketers have no idea what building trust is all about. They want to grab what they can up front, and then wonder why you don’t subscribe, or don’t jump right on what they are pushing.