MindComet

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?

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Posted by Bryan Quilty on Jun. 09, 2009

Is Double Opt In Dead?

The Email Evolution Conference wrapped up just a few days ago in Scottsdale, AZ. I really wish I could’ve been there to soak up all of the rich information and keynotes they had to offer. But since I couldn’t make it, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the outcomes of some the sessions.  A whole slough of topics were covered—more specifically being opt-in standards and practices.

Now there’s always been a debate between single and double opt-in methods… There are pros and cons to both, but DOI has been the agreed standard among the majority of email marketers for some time now.  But as it turns out, DOI as the standard may be a bit outdated.

I understand why most would think this is outdated and inefficient… it’s an extra step the user has to take to receive emails from your brand. This lends itself to minor list growth, which is really never a positive thing.  The potential drop-off of DOI has the potential to be pretty high.  For example, it could fall into the spam folder.  It also has the potential to be delivered, but end up overlooked by the perspective user—forever sitting in email sign-up purgatory.

Furthermore, many spammers use “double opt in emails” as a ploy to dupe unsuspecting email addresses into signing up for services they never asked to be apart of in the first place. This of course cause ISPs to block any email that may be considered a DOI message.

But with all this, I’m not sure that this being a blanketed, core practice for everyone to follow is the best idea, as Bill McCloskey reported. This should all be done on a case-by-case basis, depending on what your campaign’s goals are!

If you’re looking to send your message to as many people as possible—no matter what their demographic or background is—then yes, by all means use single opt in.  But if deliverability is important to you and your clients, then I believe precautions need to made in order to lower your bounce rates and consequently raise your open and click-throughs.  One way this can be done is to employ the DOI method of user acquirement.  It’ll weed out inactive and invalid addresses, and you’ll have a much stronger and reliable list.

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Posted by MindComet on Feb. 13, 2009