The quality of your subscriber list is of paramount importance to your reputation score. Unfortunately, nearly all subscribe forms will get about 5-20% of submissions which are invalid email addresses and this can adversely effect the deliverability of your campaigns. So how do you prevent valid email addresses from ending up on your lists?
Double or confirmed opt-in
The best way to ensure you're not adding invalid email addresses to your list is to require all new subscribers to confirm their subscription after they sign up. All good email systems will provide this feature and may call it "double opt-in" or "subscription confirmation".
The double opt-in method is email marketing best practice and has the benefit of ensuring that the email addresses subscribers provide are indeed valid ways to reach them.
Tip: using a double opt-in process can further reduce data loss. When someone subscribes and lands on your "thank you" page, you should inform them that they are about to receive a confirmation email from you. Point out that if they don't receive that email, it might be due to them mis-typing their email address - in which case they should return to your sign up page and enter their address again!
What about having two email fields?
In some cases, subscribe forms require you to enter your email address twice - in the hope that you don't enter an incorrect address. Whilst this may reduce some errors, we still believe that double opt-in is best practice because:
- not everyone will be willing to enter their email address twice, so you may lose some potential subscribers;
- many people will simply copy and paste their email address from the first field into the second - meaning if the address is wrong, it's wrong in both fields and your website won't pick up the mistake;
- you still don't know if the two email addresses being entered in the form fields actually belong to the person completing the form.
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