1) If you’re using Confirmed Opt-In, you have verifiable proof that your subscriber requested to receive your email. Additiaonlly, if someone else forwards an email to their friends, you’re not the sender of that forward, your subscriber is, and the complaint would be against them.

2) The confirmation message can only be sent once. Sending it repeatedly goes against the intent of using Confirmed Opt-In in the first place.

One key to maximizing your confirm rate is to provide a compelling incentive to subscribers when migrating. Reminding them why they signed up in the first place helps, but you don’t have to stop there - give people something extra (free bonus, report, coupon… whatever you have that you feel is appropriate and they would respond to) for making the move with you.

For more on migrating your list and Confirmed Opt-In, check out these pages:

Knowledge Base: What Should I Consider When Importing?

Recorded Video of Our Confirmed Opt-In Seminar

I have two questions:

1. If a DOI subscriber forwards a newsletter to several friends, and one or more report it as "spam," will you or the ISPs call us "guilty"? Or will we be legitimately excused because we only sent it to DOIs?

2. If we went with you and tried to DOI our existing list, we would want to send them DOI reminders every other day for like, two weeks, until they pay attention and take action. Would you allow us the freedom to work harder than average to remind people to subscribe? We’re working with busy, distracted Californians primarily, and when we tested an opt-in system a few years ago, we abandoned it because of the extremely low response rate. Even donors of our organization, who obviously support us and want our emails, didn’t opt-in again because they were too busy.

Thank you.

I’ve even gone so far as to discourage Yahoo users from subscribing and to use different email address, like a hotmnail or gmail account.

I’m amazed and hom many non-verified subscribers I have on my list, especially since I mainly give out free reports to get people to join my mailing list.

So, the traffic is targeted and I use default welcome messages for verification purposes.

Personally, I think the issue is with Yahoo, hotmail, gmail etc, and their filters. Aweber has a great tool for checking SPAM scores, so the only thing that can be the issue is the email providers, and not Aweber.

And I doubt there’s anything Aweber can do to make things better, but
we can always hope.

Congrats on 30k customers!!!

As I noted in my above response to Dan, we feel that to preserve the highest level of permission, it’s important to treat customer and prospect lists as distinct requests for information, adhering to the idea of "one subscription, one list."

It’s not that you "have the customer sign up again" to the same list; rather, when someone makes a purchase from you, your relationship with them changes (as opposed to in the example you give where your relationship with your bank did not change), as does the information you’re sending them. That in our view constitutes a separate list requiring a separate permission.

Some of the larger ISPs like Yahoo! can occasionally take quite some time to put messages in the inbox. I can think of more than a few times working with customers where a missing message that seemed to have disappeared into thin air appeared minutes — or in some cases — hours later.

In your case, however, it seems you’ve waited some time already for these messages to appear.

Now, the appearance of your confirmation message in the spam folder would seem to point to an issue with your campaigns deliverability that may or may not be isolated to only this message.

This means that its quite possible that other messages would have the same fate more than likely, even if confirmation messages were not sent.

If I were in your position, I would try:

* Tweaking/modifying the customization of my confirmation message to see if there’s something specific in there triggering a filter

* Checking the reply address and name associated with my email

I think this issue could use some attention from someone here (assuming that you are an AWeber customer), so I’ve sent you an email to get some more specifics from you about your account.

I’m sorry to see you’ve had this issue, but I’m willing to bet we can get to the bottom of this pretty quickly.

I regularly get asked by my bank to update my data, if not I may not receive access to certain services - this being so even though my data has not changed in 10 years! I resent the fact that they OBLIGE me to fill out the same form every 6 months and wonder what kind of fool sits behind that desk - I do not want my customers to think that of me or my business.

Is there no way that aWeber will allow transparent transferrals of names to new lists as I have mentioned.

Eg: creation of a child lists so that the name can only be moved down to populate a new customer lost and not be placed on a different unrelated list which is what the intention of aweber is for those who may be less than scrupulous. I am sure this would not be technically too difficult and would be of use to many marketers.

I waited and waited and no confirmation came. Finally, I found one confirmation in the bulk folder amidst all the junk mail he receives. I am still waiting for the other two confirmations to come through. Either yahoo ate those confirmations, or they were accidentally deleted amongst the 400 spam emails.

So how do you know when someone really wanted to be a subscriber and just never got the confirmation?