Email Advice in Your Inbox Volume 37

A few topics divide opinions in the email world. We’ve seen some regarding resending emails, tracking open rates, and cold emails.

One that often stirs up quite a bit of discussion is the choice between single opt-in and double opt-in for email senders.

Today we’re putting these two head to head in a showdown for the ages, and if you played Mortal Kombat as a kid (or still do) then you’re going to love this one 🥋

Ready to rumble?

Choose your fighter

Let’s quickly discuss these two schools of thought, and how these differ for email senders as a starting point.

Single Opt-In

Think of single opt-in as a “quick striker.” Subscribers who sign up are immediately added to your list without needing to confirm their email addresses first.

This has a few strengths:

• Faster subscriber acquisition.

• A more frictionless sign-up process.

• A chance to grow your list more quickly.

• No specific additional steps for new subscribers.

• Higher conversions on your email sign-up forms and pages.

These all seem great (in theory), but there is a reason why most email senders choose double opt-in instead, including:

• Less confirmed engagement from subscribers.

• Higher risk of fake or malicious email addresses.

• Paying for subscribers who may not be engaged at all.

• Increased chances of forgotten sign-ups and spam complaints.

• The longer-term impact on your overall deliverability due to all of these.

There are further advantages and disadvantages, but these are generally what you can expect when you leave sign-ups unconfirmed.

Double Opt-In

Double opt-in, on the other hand, can be thought of as a “defensive master”. The process your subscribers go through to sign up defends your email environment from potentially unwanted or junk sign-ups by having them confirm that they’ve opted in.

If we consider the strengths of this process, we get:

• Higher-quality and verified email subscribers who engage off the bat

• Reduced spam complaints (if you send good emails)

• A level of subscriber commitment and action

• Compliance with most email regulations

• Lower bounce rates overall

There are also very few drawbacks to double opt-in, however, here are a few things to consider:

• Subscribers may miss verification emails in the flurry of their inboxes

• Verification emails may wind up in the spam/ junk folder

• Extra friction in the sign-up experience

• (Potentially) slower list growth

As you can tell, both have pros and cons, so which option works best?

Let’s put them head-to-head.

Round 1: Select your arena

When it comes down to choosing which route to take, we often advise that email senders consider three key things:

☝️ Is double opt-in an ESP or legal requirement? There are a few countries that interpret data protection laws as requiring double opt-in (Germany, we see you).

Certain email platforms require this as a standard. If you fit either of these criteria, then your choice has been made for you.

✌️ How protected is your sign-up process? One of the big risks for single opt-in followers is having junk enter your email list in the form of unwanted sign-ups, bot sign-ups and having folks try their luck for freebies.

There are ways to prevent this at the point of sign-up (more on this below), which may lessen the need for double opt-in, but these depend on how you approach this process and what measures you have in place to prevent junk from joining your lists.

👌 What are your email goals and capabilities? If your goal is gaining a large volume of subscribers across broader niches, and if you have the technical capabilities to prevent junk sign-ups, then single opt-in makes a ton of sense.

Conversely, if you want an easier way of keeping out bad emails and are certain that your confirmation emails are landing safely in the inbox, then double opt-in is recommended.

Round 2: Making the right moves

Deliverability is your main concern overall. The goal is to get into and stay in the inbox, and your choice here may impact that based on how your audience reacts to future emails.

That also means keeping your overall email strategy solid, which is something we’ll explore further this year.

The right moves to make, regardless of your choice, keep deliverability at the forefront of your email planning.

There are two elements you can use to further bolster deliverability in this process.

These work well for single opt-in senders, and act as a great additional layer of defence to double opt-in users:

• Using CAPTCHA: Pretty much everyone knows how Google CAPTCHA works, but having this in place is a great way to avoid bot sign-ups or folks who accidentally fill in forms using autofill.
  
  Here’s a great article on implementing this.

  
  

• Email validation: Tools like Bouncer, for example, validate the authenticity of emails and ensure toxic email addresses are scrubbed from a list before you add them to your list.
  
  These could include using an API to stop compromised email addresses, widely used generic emails and often misspelt domains (Gmal vs Gmail as an example), in real-time.

As you grow in your email knowledge, and as your audience needs and behaviours change, you can adapt to behaviours and preferences while still keeping your emails in the inbox.

Final Round: Who wins?

The only way to determine whether your chosen method is effective is to examine your email and landing page stats.

Here are a few things to look at to guide your decision-making:

1. List growth: How quickly is your audience growing, and are there many drop-offs during the sign-up process?

2. Engagement: Are those sign-ups opening, clicking and engaging with your emails? More importantly, does the overall percentage remain consistent, despite your audience growing?

3. Audience quality: Are you seeing increased bounce or spam complaint rates, or is there an increased unsubscribe rate from new audience members?

4. Conversions: Are subscribers taking the actions you intend them to take, and is the revenue per subscriber growing?

These are broad questions but might help give you a starting point for defining where you can begin.

This takes some work, but the benefits are huge if you focus on this!

Our Double K.O Approach

Want to know what we do for this newsletter? Here’s a quick bit of inside info:

• We use single opt-in for most pages we can protect with CAPTCHA and our email validation, which eases friction and the need for double opt-in.

• We use double opt-in for unprotected pages and base that on the entry source (with strict manual checks in place per subscriber).

• We have an engagement metric per subscriber that needs to be reached before we begin the communication that sunsets their subscription.

• We run a manual metrics check monthly to identify subscriber drop-off, our landing page and lead magnet strategy and our link tracking.

This may sound like a lot of effort, but these emails average a 45%+ open rate at all times, with our recent Volume generating a click rate of over 16%.

Those numbers are pretty good for our goals and constantly climbing.

FINISH HIM! 🏆

Our advice to end this bit of knowledge - Choose the opt-in method that aligns closest with your email objectives and audience expectations.

Though we take a slightly different approach, we’d have to give the win to double opt-in as the safest, most reliable way to protect your reputation and engagement.

It’s also not okay to opt-in subscribers who aren’t aware that they’re opting-in, or if you’re assuming they can simply be added to your emails. Remember this.

Put your audience, and their experience, at the forefront of your chosen strategy.

Have today’s insights helped you make a more solid choice? If yes, pop us a mail here to let us know 💌

What’s happening in email right now?

The year is already in full swing and we’re practically saying goodbye to January. Here are a few of our favourite links from across the email world, carefully curated just for you:

• Interesting audience growth strategies (via Growth In Reverse)

• Escaping the content rut…and spam folder (via Send It Right)

• Build landing pages that convert (via Newsletter Operator)

• Persuasion principles for email (via Email Expert Africa)

• Ultimate guide to Dark Mode for email (via Litmus)

(Do you have any links you think would add value to the community? If so, email us here. We’d love to include them!)

On a lighter note: Errbody starting a newsletter

The drama with TikTok in the US has the rest of us watching on, with great amusement we might add 😅

That said, we’ve all been evangelising the importance of building a newsletter, especially if your content business is built around social media channels.

The team at Beehiiv showed absolutely no hesitation in their delight at how things are unfolding with a few entertaining posts like these over the past few weeks.

(PS: Build emails like ours by clicking here)