Every Download a Confirmation

We often talk about confirmed opt-in (aka “closed-loop opt-in” or “double opt-in”) as the gold standard for address acquisition for permission-based mail.
It’s not the only way to gather permission, and in some ways it’s a rather blunt tool that can discourage people from completing a sign-up process if it’s done badly – the confirmation email isn’t sent immediately, it goes to the recipients spam folder, they don’t have any reason to go and look for it, …
When it’s done well, though, it’s excellent.
Tor.com, the site for science-fiction and fantasy operated by publisher Macmillan, just did it very well with an ebook giveaway.
Last year they published Every Heart a Doorway, a novella that won several awards and caused quite a bit of buzz in the SFF community, partly because it’s very good and partly because it’s author, Seanan McGuire, has some serious social media chops. The sequel, Down among the Sticks and Bones, is being released in the next month or two.
Perfect timing for a time-limited giveaway of the first book, tied to signing up for their mailing list.

The signup form is on a page dedicated to the giveaway that talks about the book and sets some expectations about the mailing list. The form itself makes it very clear that you’ll need to enter a real email address to get the ebook download, so me@privacy.net is less likely to subscribe.
People aren’t required to sign up for the mailing lists to get the download. This isn’t a barter, a mailing list signup for a book, rather it’s putting the opportunity to sign up for the mailing lists in front of people who are self-selected to be interested in the content. That probably reduces the “how many people signed up” metric somewhat, but I bet the “how many new subscribers are still signed up in a month” numbers will look very healthy.
It provides some options. Do you want weekly content? Monthly? Both? You know that you’re not going to end up on a thrice-daily list from Macmillan and all their affiliates.
The confirmation email landed in my inbox within a few seconds after I clicked the “Sign Me Up” button. That’s important. If it takes even a few minutes I might have moved on, and wouldn’t be looking for the confirmation mail if it had ended up in my bulk folder.

And the confirmation mail isn’t a “click here to confirm your subscription” yawnfest. The subject line is “Download EVERY HEART A DOORWAY by Seanan McGuire Now” and the body content is on-brand and includes the front cover of the book.
Way more compelling.
It’s still solid informed consent from me, and confirmation that I, the owner of the email address, want on the list. (And, yes, the download link has 56 bytes of opaque hex-encoded data in it, so I know they’re tracking that.)
This is how it should be done.
(And, if you like fantasy you should head over to Tor and sign up for their promo. Seanan writes some amazing things, and I’m not just saying that because she’s a friend.)

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Logging in to unsubscribe

I have been talking with a company about their unsubscribe process and their placement of all email preferences behind an account login. In the process, I found a number of extremely useful links about the requirements.
The short version is: under the 2008 FTC rulemaking senders cannot require any information other than an email address and an email preference to opt-out of mail. That means senders can’t charge a fee, they can’t ask for personal information and they can’t require a password or a login to unsubscribe.
I’ve talked about requiring a login to unsubscribe in the past here on the Word to the Wise blog.
Let them go
Questions about CAN SPAM
One click, two click, red click, blue click
How not to handle unsubscribes
I’m not the only person, though, that’s written about this.
The FTC has written about it in the FTC CAN SPAM Compliance Guide for business

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A new twist on confirmation

I got multiple copies of a request to “confirm my email address” recently. What’s interesting is the text surrounding the confirmation request.

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Confirmation is too hard…

One of the biggest arguments against confirmation is that it’s too hard and that there is too much drop off from subscribers. In other words, recipients don’t want to confirm because it’s too much work on their part.
I don’t actually think it’s too much work for recipients. In fact, when a sender has something the recipient wants then they will confirm.
A couple years ago I was troubleshooting a problem. One of my client’s customer was seeing a huge percentage of 550 errors and I was tasked with finding out what they were doing. The first step was identifying the source of the email addresses. Turns out the customer was a Facebook app developer and all the addresses (so he told me) were from users who had installed his apps on Facebook. I did my own tests and couldn’t install any applications without confirming my email address.
Every Facebook user that has installed an application has clicked on an email to confirm they can receive email at the address they supplied Facebook. There are over 1 billion users on Facebook.
Clicking a link isn’t too hard for people who want your content. I hear naysayers who talk about “too hard” and “too much drop off” but what they’re really saying is “what I’m doing isn’t compelling enough for users to go find the confirmation email.”
This isn’t to say everyone who has a high drop off of confirmations is sending poor content. There are some senders that have a lot of fake, poor or otherwise fraudulent addresses entered into their forms. In many cases this is the driving factor for them using COI: to stop people from using their email to harass third parties. Using COI in these cases is a matter of self protection. If they didn’t use COI, they’d have a lot of complaints, traps and delivery problems.
The next time you hear confirmation is too hard, remember that over 1 billion people, including grandparents and the technologically challenged, managed to click that link to confirm their Facebook account. Sure, they wanted what Facebook was offering, but that just tells us that if they want it bad enough they’ll figure out how to confirm.
HT: Spamresource

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