When someone new signs up to receive your emails using your E-Broadcaster signup screen, they will receive a welcome email on your behalf. Starting today when you create a new sign-up menu, that email includes a new link that lets the subscriber actively confirm his or her opt-in. It’s an easy but increasingly important step in the permission process, and it gives you the option of sending future campaigns to everyone in your audience who’s signed up, or to only those folks who’ve taken the extra step of confirming their desire (and ability) to receive them. Over time, you’ll be able to put this new information to more and more use.
Here’s how it works:
-> In the welcome email we send to new subscribers, you’ll notice a new confirmation link and a request that the subscriber confirm his or her opt-in by pasting that link into his or her browser.
-> Back in your audience groups, you’ll notice a new column called opt-in confirmed. (Like other columns, you can choose to display this column or hide it.) When someone new confirms his or her subscription, a check mark appears in that column. View that member’s full record, and you’ll see exactly when (day and time) he or she confirmed.
-> You can find everyone in your audience who has (or hasn’t) confirmed their opt-ins using advanced search and segment. From any audience screen, click advanced search and then use the opt-in status field to find everyone in your audience whose status is either confirmed or unconfirmed.
-> You can also invite current audience members to confirm (or renew) their existing subscription at any time. Let’s say you’ve been building your list for years and feel it’s time to do a little spring cleaning, or let’s say you haven’t emailed your audience in a long time and worry that some folks have moved on. Why not ask them to renew their email vows? Using the editor’s personalize menu, you can drop the new opt-in confirmation link into a campaign (just like you’d personalize your campaigns with first names) and ask that your recipients take a minute to click it. Then send a ‘last chance’ follow-up to the folks who have yet to confirm a week or two later.
Remember that the new confirmation feature will only work when you create a new sign up menu, and that double opt-in is not a requirement – it’s an additional option you can use to find and target the most interested members of your audience. Contact us if you want to add this new feature into existing sign-up windows.
