Triple Opt In?
I signed up for a slew of gaming emails last year. We were working for a few video game production houses & developers and I was researching their competitors. I was trying to gain insight into what worked for their competitors and where they fell on their faces. I took notes vigorously of how email for video games worked.
The majority of the competitors had decent email programs. Most had a painless sign up process, engaging emails and all were CAN-SPAM compliant. I also found that they—collectively—know when to scale back their sends when a subscriber isn’t responding or when they’re inactive.
This morning, I was checking my “B2C Emails” folder and I noticed that for some reason or another my SEGA emails were going to my personal account. For the sake of consistency (and unhealthy OCD patterns), I needed to change this to my work email address. Upon logging back in, I did so… and it was rather painless.
Shortly thereafter, I received another email from SEGA… this time asking me to re-opt-in.
The copy reads:
“To activate your account and join the SEGA PASS community
click the confirmation link below:“
What? Why? My account is already active! To SEGA this means that since I updated my address, I need to re-double-opt-in… or triple-opt-in, as it were. It seems like this is either a matter of list integrity or a redundancy issue they didn’t test for. I think a quick and easy fix to this confusion would be a change in copy… Maybe something along the lines of:
“Thanks for updating your profile. Confirm your change below:“
What do you think? Am I wrong to be annoyed by this? Or am I just being overly critical?
Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 09, 2009
Comments
Perhaps they could come up with specialized copy; what they sent you appears to be the same copy they send at double opt-in. But I would cut them some slack. Someone could sign in with their real email address and opt-in. Later, if they were imature and wanted off the list, they could enter someone else’s email address as a prank. Not a big deal but it is probably the logic behind their actions.
Posted by wbw_Jeff on 06/09/2009 01:36 PM
They should have specialized copy for this instance. They should be able to tell the difference between the initial sign up and a user preference change… but I understand your logic behind them sending the confirmation as a means to prevent any shenanigans. It makes sense… just wasn’t well executed in this case.
Posted by Bryan Quilty on 06/09/2009 01:46 PM
We send confirmation emails to people who update their email addresses, mainly because it prevents someone from signing up a second email address without their knowledge or confirmation. But we try to word it such that it’s obvious what’s happening, rather than starting the process anew. That kind of copy is pretty important to avoid confusion, so I think you’re justified in your criticism here.
Posted by Justin on 06/09/2009 01:09 PM