Losing Forty Per Cent of Your Sign Ups Can Be a Good Thing

Sure the double opt-in sign up form is a cumbersome pain. It adds one more step in the already difficult process of getting people to sign up to your list. Gone are the good old days when a person simply filled out a form and they were automatically included in your mailing list. That was it. Basically it was just one step - fill out a form. But with the advent of the double opt-in list, the whole game was changed. It now has become a two-step procedure and you might be surprised by how many subscribers this extra step will cost you.

For those of you who are not familiar with a double opt-in signup form it is really quite simple. A potential subscriber fills out a form and then gets an e-mail which basically says someone has signed up for a mailing list using this e-mail. If you wish to subscribe please click the confirm link in the e-mail. It doesn’t sound like to much work but speaking from personal experiences 4 out of 10 people who filled out the initial form never bothered to confirm their signup. In other words, the double opt-in cost me 40 per cent of my signs ups. And that is good news.

You see, mailing lists are not all about quantity but rather quality. Just as your subscribers want quality content, you want quality subscribers. Those 4 out of 10 people who never confirmed their signups were never going to make great customers anyway. If you need a more fiscal reason why a quality list is better than quantity, most autoresponder services charge you by the number of subscribers.

You might be wondering why these subscribers never confirmed their signups and while one will never know for sure, there are some likely explanations. The following are the most common reasons.

They never received the confirmation mail because either their e-mail blocked it or they gave a bogus e-mail address.

They entered someone else’s name and address into the form instead of their own.

They changed their mind about signing up.

Now if your e-mail sign up had been a single opt-in, then these four addresses would have been included in your list. You would have subscribers who were not getting the e-mails, subscribers who weren’t overly interested in getting your e-mails, or subscribers who had not signed up for your e-mails; which could lead to threats of spam.

With the double opt-in form you have only the subscribers who want to be subscribers. Your list may be smaller in size but it is far richer in quality.

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