Confirmed Opt-In aka Double Opt-In Benefits

IMPORTANT UPDATE: We have released a checklist/guide on deliverability which includes our current perspective that our users should implement a Double Opt-In strategy in 2024. It is the best way to ensure that your users are receiving email that is both wanted and expected. This guide is a work in progress and will have more updates to come, please check back later!

This year, we are prioritizing deliverability as the most important principle at Bento and are aiming to work with all customers to be ahead of the pack.

One area that all users can work on is ensuring that when you send out email it is going to subscribers who both want and expect to see your email in their inbox.

Sending email that is both wanted and expected is critical when running any email marketing program, more so now than ever before.

The Gold Standard

Whilst there are various methods used to build and maintain an email list, one of the best is to implement a Confirmed Opt-In strategy (or more commonly known as Double Opt-In strategy).

It's the one way to ensure that you are building a marketing list of high quality contacts who want to hear from you.

It is the gold standard when it comes to list building and strongly encouraged by blocklist provides such as Spamhaus (recommended reading). It is also encouraged by all inbox providers too.

How does COI/DOI work?

Once a contact submits an email on your website, whether automatic or manual, you send them an initial email that requests they confirm/consent to further emails.

Once they click that link or engage, they can then be sent marketing emails.

If they do not engage, then you can unsubscribe them.

Simple!

Why does this work so well?

The internet is filled with bad actors, and those bad actors may submit emails without the permissions of their owners. If you begin to send emails to those users, constantly, you will most likely see an increase in spam complaints and/or a blocklist listing.

This is expensive and time consuming to resolve.

It will also have an impact on your revenue whilst the issue or blocklist listing persists. In addition to this, a lack of action in 2024 will also see stronger block enforcement from the likes of Google and Yahoo.

Can't you help fight this spam?

Over the years, we've tried harder than you could possibly imagine to stop spam sign-ups whether that be the implementation of the Bento Spam API, aggressive rate limiting, and protection of our forms, automatic detection of listbombing attempts, or other strategies.

There's been a lot of sleepless nights fighting and learning how to block these bad actors, but we will always persist!

Unfortunately, whilst all those tactics help none of it has been as effective as implementing a Confirmed Opt-In process. There's a reason it's so strongly recommended.

It's truly the only way to ensure that your users are getting the emails they both want and expect.

Benefits of Confirmed Opt-In and Double Opt-In

Other than being able to sleep well at night, there are many!

1. By verifying each subscriber, your list becomes cleaner, eliminating inaccuracies such as typo errors in email addresses, which could otherwise inflate your list with non-deliverable contacts.

2. Subscribers who actively confirm their interest are more engaged, leading to higher email open rates over time and, consequently, better deliverability scores. Oh and more revenue!

3. Implementing this process safeguards your list from fraudulent subscribers, spammers, and automated bots aimed at compromising your email deliverability. A clean list devoid of invalid email addresses ensures genuine subscribers receive your emails and can access your products with ease, maintaining the integrity of your deliverability.

How to get started with COI and DOI

In Bento, you are able to toggle your account to set all new subscribers to unsubscribed first. You can then set up an automation to send an email based on an event or form submission which requests the users consent. Using a link trigger in the same automation, you can then subscriber (or tag) the user.

Other users prefer to create Confirmed Opt-In flows specific to certain opt-ins or lead magnets. Bento gives you this flexibility, but we encourage you to spend a day or so sitting down to map out every way a user is opted in and ensure that, for your marketing email, those users expect, want, and have consented to those emails.

Need help?

As mentioned in the newly created deliverability checklist our team is here and dedicated for every single customer to help them set up an effective double opt-in strategy for their business. Please schedule a call or reach out to [email protected] to talk about ideas to implement today.