Guest post by Anna Maste.

Email marketing to your own list remains one of the most effective ways to build relationships with potential customers over time. And a double opt-in list is the best way to ensure you aren’t wasting time or money sending emails to people who aren’t actually interested in what you’re sharing.

But the big downside of double opt-in lists is the dreaded “unconfirmed subscriber.”

What is an Unconfirmed Subscriber?

An unconfirmed subscriber is a lead who has filled in the form to sign up for your mailing list, but hasn’t clicked on the confirmation link in the email that was then sent to them.

This confirmation step is the defining feature of a double opt-in mailing list—it’s what prevents people from being able to be added without their explicit consent, and what prevents your messages from getting marked as spam by sending to those who didn’t really want your emails.

But typically, quite a few genuine leads never get through the confirmation stage. This can be a very big leak in your funnel!

How Many Unconfirmed Subscribers Do You Have?

Depending on your email marketing provider, you may or may not have direct access to a list of your unconfirmed subscribers. For example, ConvertKit makes this list directly available, but MailChimp and many others don’t expose the list of unconfirmed subscribers directly. You may, however, be able to access this list using API calls or exporting all emails sent from your account and doing some spreadsheet filtering.

You can see in the above screenshot from a ConvertKit customer with a popular mailing list that 2,833 leads never confirmed their email address, whereas 7,633 made it onto the list. That means approximately 27% of their leads never made it through the confirmation step.

That may seem abysmal, but this is actually a pretty good ratio for a double opt-in list. Rates of unconfirmed subscribers can vary greatly between different providers and different lists, depending on a lot of factors (which we’ll go through below).

To give you an idea of the size of this problem, in late 2017, Mailchimp changed their default setting for new lists from double opt-in to single opt-in. They stated that this change was because they were seeing unconfirmed subscribers reach rates of 61%, despite the fact that “the overwhelming majority of those who don’t complete the double opt-in process are legitimate subscribers”.

While Mailchimp’s solution was to throw the double opt-in list baby out with the bathwater, many email marketing experts argue that double opt-in lists are more important than ever, especially as email open tracking is no longer reliable as a way to prune your list.

Why Do So Many Leads Not Confirm Their Subscription?

There are four main reasons why a lead doesn’t confirm their subscription.

1. The signup is a spambot or similar fake signup.

These are the signups that you don’t want. Any unconfirmed subscribers that fall into this category are your double opt-in list doing its job. You can enable things like Captchas and HoneyPot fields on your list to reduce these signups, but it’s unlikely you’ll be able to remove them completely. Still, even without those techniques, if your average long-term rate of unconfirmed subscribers is higher than about 15%, your leads are likely failing to confirm for other reasons on this list.

2. The subscriber didn’t realize they had to confirm.

This is common if you haven’t taken care to personalize your opt-in funnel. Some email marketing providers support embedded forms that simply show a default message to the tune of “Thanks for signing up!” after the lead submits their email address. This, obviously, results in your prospect not even bothering to look for the confirmation email.

The best way to avoid this is to ensure that your success message explicitly states that they need to find the email and confirm. Including text like, “Almost there! Now find our email in your inbox and confirm your subscription” is a great start to reducing subscribers who don’t confirm for this reason.

Ideally, you should redirect to a dedicated page after the form submission that gives these instructions. This helps assure your message about the next step in the process doesn’t get lost amid the noise of all your other great content.

3. The email address had an error in it.

While you don’t want to send emails to an address that doesn’t correspond to your user, if they’ve made a typo while submitting the form, it’s quite likely they do actually want to hear from you. But if they aren’t aware that they’ve made an error in their submission, they may get frustrated and give up rather than trying again after waiting for your confirmation email that never arrives.

If possible, include the email address they’ve subscribed with in the message that is shown after their form is submitted, e.g., “One more step! We’ve sent a confirmation email to [email protected], please click the link to confirm your subscription to our list.” Hopefully they’ll notice the error before they abandon the process completely.

4. There was too much friction in the confirmation process.

By definition, a double opt-in with a confirmation step is going to add friction to the signup process. You can however make some changes to reduce that friction and increase the odds of the signup being completed successfully.

How to Reduce Friction During the Confirmation Process

1. Tell subscribers exactly what to look for in their inbox.

All email service providers allow users to search their inboxes, so make sure you tell them exactly what to search for. For example, make sure your confirmation message or page includes something like:

Look for an email with the subject line “[Action Required] Confirm Your Subscription” from [email protected]

2. Make sure you’re sending from a verified domain.

Having to search for your email in their spam folder is a huge source of confirmation friction, so doing whatever you can to minimize that is important.

Most email marketing providers suggest verifying your domain as optional, but it’s really essential that you set up your domain with both DKIM and either SPF or Return-Path records in your DNS settings to ensure your emails aren’t marked as spam. Without them, a bad actor could theoretically have sent the email from their own servers and put your name and domain in the “from” field. These settings are the only official way to tell your recipients’ mail servers that your mail provider is allowed to send emails on your behalf, and thus confirm your identity as the actual sender.

And while having these settings isn’t enough by itself to keep you out of the spam folder, they are essential to building your own reputation as a sender, rather than relying on the reputation of your provider, which may have many less legitimate senders using their service.

3. Provide “sniper links” to take users directly to your confirmation email.

A sniper link refers to a link that opens a user’s webmail program directly in their browser with a search query that will pull up your confirmation email. Growth.Design, a product design education company, coined the term after doing a case study on Trello’s onboarding, where they noticed them using the technique. They then saw an increase of 7% in their confirmation rate by implementing these links on their own list.

Above, you can see the clear call to action on a dedicated confirmation page, with the button linking directly to the user’s Gmail account with a search query to pull up all emails from the sending domain.

If you can’t easily determine the mail service of your user on your confirmation page, you can hard-code sniper links for the most common mail providers (e.g. Google and Yahoo), or you can use a service that implements this for you along with other tactics to reduce unconfirmed subscribers.

Other Techniques to Increase Confirmation Rates

Other great ways to increase the number of subscribers who complete the confirmation step include:

1. Offer an appealing incentive.

Have a PDF guide or case study that is downloadable only after clicking on the confirmation link. This will not only motivate people to sign-up, but also create an “open loop” that gives them significant motivation to complete the process.

2. Send unconfirmed subscribers a reminder if possible.

Most marketing email providers don’t support this directly, but you may be able to do it manually by downloading the list of unconfirmed subscribers, or you can use Brennan Dunn’s technique that simulates a double opt-in list with reminders by using a single opt-in list and automations to tag subscribers only after they complete the confirmation step.

3. Show on-page reminder banners to leads who haven’t confirmed.

This is a more technically challenging solution, but using first-party cookies and webhooks from your email marketing provider, you can include a banner at the top or bottom of each page on your site after a lead signs up, reminding them to confirm, and hide it once they complete that step. Bonus marks for using a sniper link in the banner too!

The double opt-in list is here to stay, and for good reason: it helps keep out unwanted signups. But that doesn’t mean it has to stop a large percentage of valid leads from confirming their subscription too.

Understanding why you have unconfirmed subscribers and implementing some of the techniques outlined here will be guaranteed to reduce the number of subscribers who don’t confirm, and accelerate the growth of your mailing list with quality leads so you can build a relationship and eventually convert them to customers!

Anna Maste is the Founder of Subscribe Sense, a MarTech SaaS that helps reduce the number of unconfirmed subscribers in your double opt-in mailing list. She’s a serial entrepreneur, having built, grown and sold a B2C company in the RV space that relied heavily on email marketing to drive revenue. You can find her building in public on Twitter @skulegirl.

The post Unconfirmed Subscribers: What They Are and What To Do About Them appeared first on B2B Marketing Blog | Webbiquity.