What’s the best opt-in method?
Kickbox interviewed a bunch of us to find out what methods of opt-in we recommend. Go check it out.
What’s your favourite method of opt-in?
Related Posts
Necessary but not sufficient
- laura
- May 27, 2016
With all the emphasis on getting the technical right, there seem to be people who think their mail will be delivered as long as the technical is right.
Getting the technical right is necessary for good inbox delivery, but it’s not sufficient.
The most important part of getting mail to the inbox is sending mail users want. In fact, if you’re sending mail folks want, interact with and enjoy then you can get away with sloppy technical bits. Look, major players (eBay and Intuit) have invalid SPF records, but we’re all still getting mail from them.
There are also a lot of folks who are doing everything technically perfectly, but their mail is still going to bulk. Why? Because their recipients don’t want their mail.
Permission is still the key to getting mail to the inbox. In fact, permission is more important than getting all the technical bits right. If you have permission you can play a little fast and loose with the technical stuff. If you have the technical stuff right you still need permission.
Confirmed Opt-In: An Old Topic Resurrected
- laura
- Mar 1, 2017
Looking back through my archives it’s been about 4 years or so since I wrote about confirmed opt in. The last post was how COI wasn’t important, but making sure you were reaching the right person was important. Of course, I’ve also written about confirmed opt-in in general and how it was a tool somewhat akin to a sledgehammer. I’m inspired to write about it today because it’s been a topic of discussion on multiple mailing lists today and I’ve already written a bunch about it (cut-n-paste-n-edit blog post! win!).
Confirmed opt-in is the process where you send an email to a recipient and ask them to click on a link to confirm they want the mail. It’s also called double opt-in, although there are some folks who think that’s “spammer” terminology. It’s not, but that’s a story for another day. The question we were discussing was what to do with the addresses that don’t click. Can you email them? Should you email them? Is there still value in them?
We have to treat the addresses as a non-homogenous pool. There are a lot of reasons confirmation links don’t get clicked.
Active buttons in the subject line
- laura
- Jul 7, 2017
This morning I waded into a twitter discussion with a bunch of folks about some issues they were having with delivery to gmail. The discussion started with a blog post at detailed.com describing how some senders are seeing significant drops in open rates. I thought I’d take a look and see if I can help, because, hey, this is an interesting problem.
I signed up for a bunch of the mail that was seeing gmail problems and discovered that one of them had the confirmation link in the subject line. How cool is that?
I’ve known about the Gmail subscription line functionality for a while, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in the wild.
The action is in a <div> tag at the bottom of the email. Gmail has been allowing actions in subject lines for a while, this is just the first time I’ve seen it used for subscriptions. It’s so cool.
Want to add one to your post? Instructions are available from Google on their Email Markup pages.