Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Confirmed Opt-In Protects Against Spamza and Other Malicious Sites

by Justin Premick on September 2nd, 2008

In the many discussions I’ve had about Confirmed Opt-In, and why it’s key for anyone doing email marketing, there’s one point I’ve found many people just don’t believe:

When you run your campaigns as single opt-in, you run the risk of people or scripts maliciously signing up other people’s email addresses to your list – meaning you’re spamming them.

Unintentionally, yes, but it’s still spamming, because that person who you’re now emailing never signed himself/herself up to your list.

For many people, the idea that someone would use their signup form to sign up someone else’s email address just makes no sense.

Well, you’re right – it doesn’t make sense.

But it happens, sometimes on a grand scale.

Continue reading “Confirmed Opt-In Protects Against Spamza and Other Malicious Sites”


Comments: 11

Tags: ,


Want Subscribers to Confirm? Get Creative!

by Justin Premick on April 17th, 2008

Would you spend money on pay-per-click ads (i.e. Google Adwords) and not bother to optimize your landing page content?

What about the price of your product, or incentives you use to build urgency — they affect your conversion rate, so you probably test them, right?

Now… what about your confirm rate? If you could do something to influence the percentage of people who confirm their signups to your email campaign, you would… wouldn’t you?

I recently came across an AWeber user who was frustrated with his confirm rate. As I talked with him, I realized that a lot of you may be missing the same opportunities to get more of your website visitors to confirm.

Continue reading “Want Subscribers to Confirm? Get Creative!”


Comments: 59

Tags: ,


Sending to Yahoo? Confirmed Opt-In Is The Way To Go

by Justin Premick on December 7th, 2007

If you’ve ever spoken with anyone here at AWeber about what you can do to maximize your email deliverability, you’ve probably heard us say “use Confirmed Opt-In.”

While it’s certainly not the only thing you can and should do (check out our Email Deliverability Guide for more tips), it’s a best practice that clearly correlates to more email getting to the inbox.

And as time goes on, it’s become less of a suggested best practice, and more of an ISP requirement.

Just ask Yahoo!

Continue reading “Sending to Yahoo? Confirmed Opt-In Is The Way To Go”


Comments: 12

Tags: ,


Migrating Your List? Remember To Tell Them…

by Justin Premick on December 5th, 2007

Jumping FishOver the past few weeks I’ve come across a lot of businesses talking about migrating their email marketing campaigns — either from in-house systems to hosted solutions (such as AWeber), or between hosted solutions.

Once you’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade your mailing capabilities, it’s tempting to focus on doing so quickly. After all, if you’re unhappy with an email system, why would you want to spend any more time at all using it?

Today, I want to highlight a common mistake that we see businesses make as they migrate their lists:

Continue reading “Migrating Your List? Remember To Tell Them…”


Comments: 9

Tags:


How Good Can Your Confirm Rate Be?

by Justin Premick on October 19th, 2007

Something a little different for Friday:

We get a lot of people asking what a “good” confirm rate is — out of everyone who signs up to your list, what proportion will open the confirm message and click on the link to activate their subscription to your list?

So, I thought I’d share some of our own results, from our own blog’s email subscribers.

Continue reading “How Good Can Your Confirm Rate Be?”


Comments: 13

Tags: ,


Confirmed Opt-In: Help Your Subscribers Confirm

by Justin Premick on August 30th, 2006

I took a support call recently where the customer was concerned about using Confirmed Opt-In with her subscribers. She remarked at one point:

“My subscribers aren’t web-savvy, and they don’t know what double opt-in means.”

She brings up a good point: language that is understood among one group of people (in this example, senders of opt-in email) may not be understood by another group (such as your subscribers).

When telling your subscribers that they need to click a link in the confirm email, your wording will affect your confirm rate.

The challenge — to explain to your subscribers what happens after they submit their email address in your signup form — sounds daunting, but it’s really quite manageable.

Continue reading “Confirmed Opt-In: Help Your Subscribers Confirm”


Comments: 18

Tags: , ,


Verified Opt-in Reduces Unsubscribes & Complaints.

by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) on March 31st, 2004

Results of a study conducted by AWeber identified that a verified opt-in AOL subscriber is significantly less likely to unsubscribe in the first 60 days of publication than a single opt-in subscriber.

Statistics were run on a random sampling of approximately 200 AWeber client opt-in email lists of AOL subscribers added in the past 60 days having received a similar volume of emails over that 60 day period. Each subscriber visited a client website and typed in their name and email address requesting to be added to their sales follow up process or newsletter. Since we also record and receive statistics from AOL’s “this is spam” button we included the percentage of those subscribers who also complained the messages they opted into were spam.

Continue reading “Verified Opt-in Reduces Unsubscribes & Complaints.”


Tags: , ,


footer