Techniques to Improve Double Opt-In Confirmation Rates

Do you have a double opt-in mailing list? You quite possibly have no idea what percentage of your leads actually complete the confirmation step when subscribing to your list. Fellow Indie Hacker @emilepetrone recently posted about his rates being as low as 10%!

Confirmation Rates Are Probably Lower Than You Think

The average rate varies considerably, but something in the range of only 50-70% completing the confirmation step is pretty typical. Depending on who your ESP is, you may have difficulty determining what your number actually is. ConvertKit is one of the few that share those numbers on a dashboard; with some others you may be able to extract it via the API or other means.

Mailchimp themselves stopped recommending double opt-in lists in 2017 because their own data showed that confirmations on their double opt-in lists had dropped to 37%.

Why You Should Probably Still Have a Double Opt-In List

Once you know how poor confirmation rates are, you may think you should bail on your double opt-in list and switch to a single opt-in. But there are a few good reasons to not be hasty here.

Single opt-in lists are frequent targets of list bombing. Malicious attackers submit email addresses en masse to as many lists as possible in hopes of flooding people's inboxes, often to bury fraud notices on credit cards that they have compromised. If you're sending daily emails to large quantities of people who didn't sign up for your newsletter, you're highly likely to get marked as spam and your deliverability will take a hit.

Or worse, you can end up with Newsletter Ninja getting emails from you unintentionally, and tweeting about it in addition to marking you as spam:

A double opt-in list can also save you considerable money. Most ESPs charge per subscriber, regardless of whether that subscriber opens or even finds your email. A double opt-in list ensures that your subscribers can at least find your emails, so there's a chance of them reading subsequent messages. So you won't be paying for emails that are all getting funnelled to spam.

Reasons for Low Opt-In Rates

There are many reasons that people don't complete their double opt-in, but most can be attributed to one of the following:

1. The signup is actually a spambot or similar malicious signup
2. The email address was incorrectly typed
3. The subscriber changed their mind
4. The subscriber didn't realize they had to confirm
5. The subscriber got distracted and never looked for the confirmation email
6. The subscriber never found the confirmation email

Most ESPs will lead you to believe that reasons 1-3 are responsible for most incomplete signups. But the number of spam addresses and bounces in a single opt-in list is almost never as high as the rates we see for confirmation failure in a double opt-in list, so there's big a disconnect there. Reason 3 may happen very occasionally, but very few people are likely to change their mind in the 60 seconds it takes to confirm a subscription, so this doesn't make much sense either. So reasons 4-6 are the real culprits you need to deal with.

Tips for Increasing Opt-In Rates

Okay, the part you've been waiting for: How the heck do I fix this? Here are my top tips for increasing your double opt-in confirmation rates.

1. Make sure people know they need to confirm.

This seems like a no-brainer, but too often there's default text that says "thanks for signing up!" that you forget to change, or something similar. Make absolutely sure that after you collect their email address, the text they see next explicitly directs them to go find your confirmation email in their inbox, and lets them know that their confirmation isn't complete until they do. Headlines like "One more thing..." or "Almost there..." are good starting points.

2. Remove distractions.

If you actually want people to confirm their subscription, don't just pop-up a banner that says "check your inbox" but then leave the rest of your website there to distract them. After sign-up, you should send them to a dedicated page that has practically nothing on it except your logo and text telling them they need to confirm.

3. Tell leads what to look for.

Inboxes are messy; very few of us ever get to inbox-zero. If you want people to find your confirmation email, tell them exactly what to look for. For example:

Look for an email from news@mycompany.com with the subject line "Important: Confirm your subscription".

4. Send from a verified domain.

A large number of the leads who don't complete their subscription will do so because your email was marked as spam. There are a lot of reasons this may happen, and the odds of it will depend on a lot of factors including your ESP and what email address they're sending the email from.

Some ESPs may tell you that you shouldn't send from a verified domain unless you're over a certain threshold of emails per month, but most agree that sending from a verified domain will increase your deliverability. Without one, your ESP will have their domain in the return-path, but your domain in the from field; this is the same technique that is used in spoofing and phishing emails, so many mail providers are rightfully wary of it and treat emails like these suspiciously. Truthfully, sending from a verified domain is the only way for you to have ultimate control over the deliverability of your email, regardless of who your ESP is, so it's a good practice to start sending from a verified domain at the very beginning, and build a reputation that helps your deliverability as you send out great, engaging emails.

Check your ESP for instructions on how to verify/authenticate your email domain. It will usually involve adding an entries to your DNS records, which are usually hosted where you purchased your domain. Don't be too scared if you're non-technical, most ESPs have good guides that will walk you through this or even if they don't, you can find guides elsewhere and use them, just use the values given by your ESP for the added records.

5. Tell leads to check their spam folder.

Regardless of whether the email comes from your or your ESP's sending domain, it may still get marked as spam. Remind subscribers on the "Almost there" page to check their spam folder, and remind them to mark you as "not spam" so that future emails will end up in the inbox where they belong.

6. Create an "open loop".

People like resolution. Find a way to motivate people to finish the opt-in in order to get a sense of completion. A common way to do this is to promise them a bonus (e-book, case study, etc) for signing up, but only send it to them once their confirmation is complete, or only giving them access on the page they are redirected to after confirming.

You can also be more creative here. Give the first line of a joke or riddle on the "Almost there" page, and only give the punchline or answer on the page they're redirected to after clicking that "Confirm" button in the email!

7. Send a reminder if you can.

If you have access to the list of people who haven't confirmed your subscription, a personal reminder to those who didn't complete is incredibly effective. If sent from you personally, it has a much higher rate of being received than the automated email sent by your ESP. You probably won't be able to send them the link they need to use to confirm, so just ask them to find the previous email (again, by telling them exactly what to look for) and complete the subscription.

Once your list growth is too large this is obviously no longer feasible, but when you're still small this is often possible to do manually. Unfortunately very few ESPs will allow you to do this directly.

More Tips for the Technically Oriented

Everyone should be able to implement some or all of the above strategies with relative ease. If you have the programming chops and the time budget, here are a few other strategies you can implement to increase confirmation rates:

1. Provide "Sniper Links" to Find Confirmation Email

The large majority of people these days are using a webmail service, with more than 75% falling into the big three: Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook. By inspecting your lead's email address, you can provide them with a link that will open their email service in a new tab and include a search query to find your exact email.

You can even go so far as to look at MX records for custom domains to see if they are hosted by GSuite and provide links for them as well.

2. Remind Leads What Address They Used

If possible, include the email address that the users entered into the form on the "Almost There" page you send them to. This allows them to recognize if they've made a error entering their email, so they can go back and try again.

3. Update With the Status of Their Confirmation

Most ESPs provide an API you can query to see the status of a particular email, either via webhooks or polling, You can use this to see if an email address bounced, or if the confirmation completed. Use AJAX calls to close the "open loop" by updating the page when their confirmation is complete, or if you learn that the confirmation email bounced.

4. Let Leads Subscribe by Inbound Mail

If you're of a certain age, you may have once belonged to a ListServ, where you were added to the list by sending an email to an address with the subject line "Subscribe". This went out of style but is a quick way to let people sign up for your mailing list without the need for a confirmation step, inspecting the SPF and DKIM checks on the incoming email can be enough to be satisfied that your lead does in fact own the email they're subscribing from. You can then use the API of your ESP to add them to the list as an already confirmed member. Many mail providers will then automatically add you to the user's contact list because they've sent you an email, which will help with deliverability.

Find a Service That Does the Work For You

If all these seems overwhelming, or the more technical options sound cool but are beyond your skill or available time, you're in luck, because I'm in the process of launching a SaaS that does these things for you.

Subscribe Sense is a quick addition to your marketing stack that will track your unconfirmed leads and implement the above suggestions to help make sure you're getting as many confirmed subscribers as possible. Sign up for our waitlist and you can see many of the above strategies in action.

Good luck!