Building An Audience Using Confirmed Opt-in Email Newsletters

(Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes)

Here’s 3 reasons why email lists are a great way to build an audience:

1. You can write material in advance for automatic delivery on a set schedule.
2. Split-testing allows you to test the effectiveness of different versions of your sales copy.
3. With effective list-building techniques, high quality prospects and customers will select themselves into your email list because they want what you have to offer.

The ONLY type of list you should consider when you’re just starting out is the confirmed optin list. Confirmed opt-in, or “double opt-in” email lists require each person on the list to perform two actions:

1. They have to enter their own email address to request to be on the list, and
2. They have to confirm that they want to be on the list by clicking through a confirmation link in an email that’s sent to them after they sign up.

There’s several reasons why this works really, really well, some of which are psychological. I won’t discuss those reasons here, perhaps in Website In A Weekend newsletter.

Confirmed opt-in isn’t quite a legal requirement for email marketing, but it’s pretty darn close.

If you look at the footer on every email that I send using a list management service (currently AWeber), you will see two things:

1. Unsubscribe link allowing any recipient to unsubscribe from not just the list that the email came from, but every list they’re on operated by that emailer. Example: if you are on Super Tuesday list, and on Website In A Weekend list, clicking the unsubscribe link from one email would take you to a web page allowing you to unsubscribe from both.
2. Each email has a valid postal address in the footer. This *IS* required by the law.

The best and fastest example you could possibly find is to sign up for the Website In A Weekend newsletter, and examine each email.

Recipient confirmation provides better prospects

Confirmed opt-in protects the email recipient. Because the recipient has to go to some extra trouble to sign up, they get the opportunity to “cool off” between signing up for the list and confirming their subscription.

From experience, I know that about 10-15% of people do not confirm for most lists. This is not a bad thing, if they won’t confirm, they are unlikely to be motivated customers, and you safely exclude such people from your list of prospects.

Using the double opt-in process, once the recipient actually gets your email, they’re more likely to remember signing up for it.

How double-optin protects you

Confirmed opt-in protects you, the list owner, from getting complaints about email spam. Your email list readers may find it difficult to pursue legal action against you as a spammer, for whatever reason (I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice), when there is a clearly documented trail of actions proving they asked to receive your emails.

Howver, it still happens. It even happened on one of my private lists once. As it turns out I know who did it, and it’s small loss for (i.e., good riddance). Why people report as spam something they signed up for is beyond me, but it does happen.

People will also use the “Report As Spam” when they want to unsubscribe. This is a short term issue for a list owner, because nobody really wants stupid or lazy people on their email lists.

If it happens too many times on your lists, a reputable company like AWeber that has very high deliverability, is going to contact you to see what the problem is. If you’re not a spammer or scammer, they will help you figure it out.

If you are a spammer, they will yank your account for violations of their Terms and Conditions.

People that make a habit of unsubscribing using “Report as Spam” this a few times will start to have deliverability issues for email they want to receive. ALL lists they subscribe to end up filtered out, then they have to go to a lot of trouble to whitelist their emails.

On the other hand, unsubscribing should be super simple. If you’re on a list you want off of, and they make you jump through a lot of hoops to unsubscribe (like logging into website, needing and account and password), you have every right to mark such material as spam, and you should.

Hooking up your email autoresponder

Once you get your AWeber account, you’ll need to create two pages for handling your email list, which you can do right now:

1. The first page is where AWeber returns the person who signed up for the mailing list. I call my page “Subscribers,” but you could call it “Thank You,” or whatever. The important thing is that the page makes sense to you, and will make sense to the new subscriber. You probably want to turn off commenting on this page, it should be irrelevant. Feel free to put a freebie here as well.
2. The second page is for people that resubscribe while they are already subscribed. I call this page “Already Subscribed.” Again, call whatever makes sense to you and won’t confuse the existing subscriber. Turn comments off here too, and again, consider throwing in a freebie for those folks so motivated they subscribe twice!

If you have any other tools that usually appear on your pages, such as social media widgets, these are unnecessary as well. I like Joost de Valk’s “Sociable” plugin in part because I can control whether or not it appears on a page-by-page level.

Since these are “pages” in WordPress, they are going to have some default behavior, which might not be what you want. I use a spiffy plugin called “Exclude Pages” which allows me to control which pages are displayed in the page widget. Also, you want to exclude them from any user menus. In some themes, such as the Thesis theme used here, pages are excluded from menus by default, you have to select them in, so it may not be an issue. You should double check in any case.

Get started on your email list now!

It’s easy to get started: go to AWeber, sign up!

And if you’re serious about building an audience, you need to do it right now. Speedy execution is a hallmark of successful people, and it’s a skill that can be learned. In fact, signing up for AWeber was my first action when I committed to fast execution.

You should do this now… so that you can get on the learning curve early. Operating a mailing list isn’t that difficult… but learning the techniques for building your business with a mailing list will require experience and practice. You have no time to lose. Do it now.

Tagged as: Autoresonder, AWeber