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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Don't leave that money sitting there

The idea of confirming permission to send mail to an email address gets a lot of bad press among many marketers. It seems that every few weeks some new person decides that they’re going to write an article or a whitepaper or a blog and destroy the idea behind confirming an email address. And, of course, that triggers a bunch of people to publish rebuttal articles and blog posts.
I’m probably the first to admit that confirmed opt-in isn’t the solution to all your delivery problems. There are situations where it’s a good idea, there are times when it’s not. There are situations where you absolutely need that extra step involved and there are times when that extra step is just superfluous.
But whether a sender uses confirmed opt in or not they must do something to confirm that the email address actually belongs to their customer. It’s so easy to have data errors in email addresses that there needs to be some sort of error correction process involved.
Senders that don’t do this are leaving money on the table. They’re not taking that extra step to make sure the data they were given is correct. They don’t make any effort to draw a direct line between the email address entered into their web form or given to them at the register or used for a receipt, and their actual customer.
It does happen, it happens enough to make the non-tech press. Consumerist has multiple articles a month on some email address holder that can’t get a giant company to stop mailing them information about someone else’s account.
Just this week, the New Yorker published an article about a long abandoned gmail address that received over 4000 “legitimate” commercial and transactional emails.

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The sledgehammer of confirmed opt-in

We focused Monday on Trend/MAPS blocking fully confirmed opt-in (COI) mail, because that is the Gold Standard for opt-in. It is also Trend/MAPS stated policy that all mail should be COI. There are some problems with this approach. The biggest is that Trend/MAPS is confirming some of the email they receive and then listing COI senders.
The other problem is that typos happen by real people signing up for mail they want. Because MAPS is using typo domains to drive listings, they’re going to see a lot of mail from companies that are doing single opt-in. I realize that there are problems with single opt-in mail, but the problems depends on a lot of factors. Not all single opt-in lists are full of traps and spam and bad data.
In fact, one ESP has a customer with a list of more than 50 million single opt-in email addresses. This sender mails extremely heavily, and yet sees little to no blocking by public or private blocklists.
Trend/MAPS policy is singling out senders that are sending mail people signed up to receive. We know for sure that hard core spammers spend a lot of time and money to identify spamtraps. The typo traps that Trend/MAPS use are pretty easy to find and I have no doubt that the real, problematic spammers are pulling traps out of their lists. Legitimate senders, particularly the ESPs, aren’t going to do that. As one ESP rep commented on yesterday’s post:

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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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