How to Maintain Your Opt-in eMail List
The feeling you get when you receive notification of your first subscriber can be very exhilarating. And it can motivate you to develop even more new and unique methods of gaining additional subscribers. But before you get too excited you have to quickly make a decision on how you intend to maintain the integrity of your list. To ensure that it only contains real email addresses from real people, and to protect yourself against Spam complaints.
Unfortunately people will use fake email addresses to subscribe to your list just to grab your free offer. This will falsely inflate the size of your list and impact on the sales conversion rate of the offers you send out to your list. There's nothing worse thinking that you have a list of 5,000 genuine subscribers, when in fact 1,000 of these have never even read your offer because they've never received your emails.
Even worse, if you sell solo ads in your ezine your advertisers won't be very happy with their conversion rate as they will not be reaching as many subscribers as you stated and your credibility will suffer. Another problem you may face when you begin building your list is you may receive an unwarranted spam complaint. Don't be offended by these actions.
It's a universal problem that plagues all online business owners. As long as you have implemented the correct procedures to ensure that you only receive genuine email addresses and are able to document the subscription details of your subscribers you will be protected from any spam complaints. But the question is, how can you do this? How can you maintain the integrity of your opt-in list to ensure you only receive real email addresses and protect yourself from Spam complaints?
This is not as difficult as you may first think. Basically there are two things you must do:
1. Use Double Opt-in Subscription. Double opt-in is a process that your subscribers must follow before they are accepted into your list. When they first request to be subscribed they provide their relevant contact details in a web form or script located on your website. When they submit this request an automated response then fires back an authorization email to the email address that they provided. This not only ensures that this is a working email, but it also ensures that they must click on a link contained within the email to confirm that they agree to receive information from you.
This also ensures that person who filled out the subscription form is also the person who owns the email. This prevents practical jokers from signing up all their friends to your newsletter without their permission, or worse, some unscrupulous competitor from signing up people at random in the hope that you'll be accused of spam.
Until they complete this two-part process they will not be placed in your list. The term "double" opt-in. You need to opt-in subscription method won't stop spam complaints. I'm afraid it doesn't matter what you do or how you do it, there is always a possibility of receiving a spam complaint from someone who has genuinely forgotten that they have subscribed to your list. But if you use the above measures to build your list and you've only sent your emails to those people who have specifically requested it, you're virtually guaranteed to be protected against any complaints.
2. Blocking certain email domain names. As mentioned previously it is important to manage your list to ensure that it only contains working emails so that as many subscribers as possible have the opportunity to read your follow-up emails and backend offers. Unfortunately not all information submitted by your visitors when they subscribe to your list will be correct. Some people will accidentally type in the incorrect email address while others will intentionally give you the wrong information.
If you have already started to build your email list you may already be receiving "undeliverable" messages from your autoresponder program. These are caused from "dead" or "bounced" emails resulting from bad email addresses. The reason your subscribers provide incorrect information is not important. You just have to be aware that this does happen. Now, if you are using the double opt-in method for your subscriptions then this won't be a problem. Unless they provided the correct email address when they subscribed they will never receive the confirmation email and therefore they will never be included in your list.
You will also find that others may use free email account, such as .AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail etc, to subscribe to your list. Some of these subscribers have no intention of reading your follow-up emails. Once they receive your free offer they then cancel their email account and never get to see any of your follow-ups.
There are even domains that are notorious for automatically blocking bulk emails sent to their server. They assume you are spamming their clients so they just block them without your subscriber's knowledge and they never get the chance to check them out. Worse still someone from these same domains may even accuse you of spam and try to shut you down.
If your autoresponder service allows you to restrict the use of the domain names of your subscribers email addresses, then you will have no problems controlling the quality of your list. You will be able to simply restrict the use of these emails during the subscription process. However most autoresponder services don't have this feature. So what can you do to maintain the integrity and quality of your list?
Fortunately there is a simple solution. A Double Opt-In Manager. Double Opt-In Manager is a unique web based program that allows you to control who, when and how people subscribe to your list. From the time your subscribers enter their contact details into your web based form their details are permanently recorded on your own server as proof that they personally opted in to your list.
Details recorded include their name, email, ip address, phone, home address, date and time. This information is saved on your own website so that you can access this information any time you want. Even if your autoresponder already offers this service it is recommended that you have a back up so that you have immediate and unrestricted access to your own records.
The advantage of this is that if your autoresponder service goes out of business or you change services, you will still have the subscription details of all your subscribers so you can defend yourself against any false accusations. Double Opt-In Managers also lets you control exactly who subscribes to your list. You can blacklist any email domain so that you chose what email addresses you will allow to subscribe to your list so that you have full control over the integrity and quality of your list.
Unfortunately people will use fake email addresses to subscribe to your list just to grab your free offer. This will falsely inflate the size of your list and impact on the sales conversion rate of the offers you send out to your list. There's nothing worse thinking that you have a list of 5,000 genuine subscribers, when in fact 1,000 of these have never even read your offer because they've never received your emails.
Even worse, if you sell solo ads in your ezine your advertisers won't be very happy with their conversion rate as they will not be reaching as many subscribers as you stated and your credibility will suffer. Another problem you may face when you begin building your list is you may receive an unwarranted spam complaint. Don't be offended by these actions.
It's a universal problem that plagues all online business owners. As long as you have implemented the correct procedures to ensure that you only receive genuine email addresses and are able to document the subscription details of your subscribers you will be protected from any spam complaints. But the question is, how can you do this? How can you maintain the integrity of your opt-in list to ensure you only receive real email addresses and protect yourself from Spam complaints?
This is not as difficult as you may first think. Basically there are two things you must do:
1. Use Double Opt-in Subscription. Double opt-in is a process that your subscribers must follow before they are accepted into your list. When they first request to be subscribed they provide their relevant contact details in a web form or script located on your website. When they submit this request an automated response then fires back an authorization email to the email address that they provided. This not only ensures that this is a working email, but it also ensures that they must click on a link contained within the email to confirm that they agree to receive information from you.
This also ensures that person who filled out the subscription form is also the person who owns the email. This prevents practical jokers from signing up all their friends to your newsletter without their permission, or worse, some unscrupulous competitor from signing up people at random in the hope that you'll be accused of spam.
Until they complete this two-part process they will not be placed in your list. The term "double" opt-in. You need to opt-in subscription method won't stop spam complaints. I'm afraid it doesn't matter what you do or how you do it, there is always a possibility of receiving a spam complaint from someone who has genuinely forgotten that they have subscribed to your list. But if you use the above measures to build your list and you've only sent your emails to those people who have specifically requested it, you're virtually guaranteed to be protected against any complaints.
2. Blocking certain email domain names. As mentioned previously it is important to manage your list to ensure that it only contains working emails so that as many subscribers as possible have the opportunity to read your follow-up emails and backend offers. Unfortunately not all information submitted by your visitors when they subscribe to your list will be correct. Some people will accidentally type in the incorrect email address while others will intentionally give you the wrong information.
If you have already started to build your email list you may already be receiving "undeliverable" messages from your autoresponder program. These are caused from "dead" or "bounced" emails resulting from bad email addresses. The reason your subscribers provide incorrect information is not important. You just have to be aware that this does happen. Now, if you are using the double opt-in method for your subscriptions then this won't be a problem. Unless they provided the correct email address when they subscribed they will never receive the confirmation email and therefore they will never be included in your list.
You will also find that others may use free email account, such as .AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail etc, to subscribe to your list. Some of these subscribers have no intention of reading your follow-up emails. Once they receive your free offer they then cancel their email account and never get to see any of your follow-ups.
There are even domains that are notorious for automatically blocking bulk emails sent to their server. They assume you are spamming their clients so they just block them without your subscriber's knowledge and they never get the chance to check them out. Worse still someone from these same domains may even accuse you of spam and try to shut you down.
If your autoresponder service allows you to restrict the use of the domain names of your subscribers email addresses, then you will have no problems controlling the quality of your list. You will be able to simply restrict the use of these emails during the subscription process. However most autoresponder services don't have this feature. So what can you do to maintain the integrity and quality of your list?
Fortunately there is a simple solution. A Double Opt-In Manager. Double Opt-In Manager is a unique web based program that allows you to control who, when and how people subscribe to your list. From the time your subscribers enter their contact details into your web based form their details are permanently recorded on your own server as proof that they personally opted in to your list.
Details recorded include their name, email, ip address, phone, home address, date and time. This information is saved on your own website so that you can access this information any time you want. Even if your autoresponder already offers this service it is recommended that you have a back up so that you have immediate and unrestricted access to your own records.
The advantage of this is that if your autoresponder service goes out of business or you change services, you will still have the subscription details of all your subscribers so you can defend yourself against any false accusations. Double Opt-In Managers also lets you control exactly who subscribes to your list. You can blacklist any email domain so that you chose what email addresses you will allow to subscribe to your list so that you have full control over the integrity and quality of your list.
posted by S. Ann Johnson at 7:49 AM
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