The Importance of Double Opt-in for Your Ezine…

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One facet of Ezine marketing often overlooked is the importance of using double opt-ins for your Ezine, rather than single opt-ins. So what’s the difference between the two?…

“Single opt-ins” are subscribers who opt-in on a form on your website and immediately are enrolled in your Ezine’s normal mailing process.

While this makes it much easier for subscribers to begin receiving your E-zine, it is also considerably more prone to abuse.

For instance, you have a competitor who wants to put you out of business, all they have to do is scrape a list of email addresses from various places around the Internet – and then begin filling them into your opt-in form.

Since subscribers do not have to go through a confirmation process, they will immediately begin receiving your Ezine.

After 2-3 issues, there’s a good chance that many of them will report your Ezine as spam, since they have no interest in reading it and since they actually didn’t sign up for it in the first place.

Now, while this sounds frightening as an E-zine owner, this case is often considerably over-stated. This rarely happens. And, if someone is out to get you this bad, there’s a good chance they’ll find a different way to do it – to destroy your business or at least attempt to do so.

Now, the alternative isn’t great, either, but it is clearly the better option.

“Double opt-ins” are subscribers that are required to fill their details into an opt-in form and then confirm that they opted-in from their email address. If they don’t confirm it, then they won’t actually receive your Ezine, which means there’s a much smaller chance you will get reported for spam.

However, there is a downside to this alternative: if you don’t carefully explain to your customer that they will be receiving this confirmation page, they might think it is spam and delete it.

In fact, you may find that as many as 1/3 of your subscribers will not double opt-in.

In the end, however, this may be a gain, rather than a loss. If someone isn’t web-savvy enough to differentiate an opt-in email from spam, there’s a chance they might end up reporting your E-zine as spam sometime in the future, rather than simply opting out.