Social Media Marketing

List Building is becoming every more competitive – but what if 20% or even more of the people who sign up to your list are not actually getting on to it all because of failing to verify their email address.

Alarmist!?!?!

No.

This is a typical  problem and the scale is bigger than you might have imagined for websites using a “confirmed opt-in” scheme.

So, you’ve gone through all the hard work of getting someone to signup in the first place, what next?

After the initial Opt-in

Let’s start with the #1 thing you should NOT do:

Use a default “Thank You” page from your autoresponder company.

It’s easy to do as you’re concentrating on driving new visitors and maximising your back-end as well but you need to pay attention to the middle of your “list building funnel” given the huge proportion of people who will go astray after the initial signup.

The main problem is people are signing up in blissful ignorance of having to confirm their optin (yes you may have told them but that does not mean they were listening or receptive to your message at the time). There are other problems as we shall see below.

A secondary benefit of this attrition (there is an upside) is the fact some people simply signup with throwaway email addresses just to see if they can download any freebies straight away. This type of person probably isn’t the type of person you are looking to have as a customer anyway so they are saving you some time by not verifying in the first place.

Ok, so what can you do about this whole problem.

It boils down to communication, here’s a sample script you might want to employ and try on your “Thank You for signing up page”:

Sample Thank You Script

“Thanks for signing up – you’re almost there!

It’s strange to think as many as 20% of people who sign up with a website fail to complete the signup process.

Perhaps you think by entering your email address it’s job done?

Well, not in this day and age, there always has to be an extra hoop to jump through. This is because of spammers.

You see, right now your email address is in our email system but we cannot send you out the content you have signed up for until you have confirmed your email address. This proves it was actually you who requested the information in the first place rather than someone else using your email address trying to flood your inbox with unwanted emails.

We’ve all seen those Viagra emails for example.

This is why ethical businesses use a system called confirmed optin. Simply put, you should have an email right now (or in a couple of minutes if the Internet is slow) in your inbox asking you to confirm your subscription.

This is a bit of a pain but it is for your protection. I don’t know about you but I don’t want 10 million emails in my inbox just because someone got jiggy with my email address!

When you do receive the email, all you have to do is click on the link to confirm your request to join this website’s email list. Make sure you add our email address to your list of trusted email sources, otherwise our emails may get trapped in your bulk email folder.

In fact, it’s very possible the confirmation email just sent to you has ended up in there so please take a look if you don’t see it in your inbox.

Why does this happen you might ask – again, it’s back to the spammers. Email hosts are fighting a war against billions of spam emails every day and they do their best to filter the junk from legitimate email.

Unfortunately, the spammers are getting smarter and slip through the net more often but the other unfortunate thing is more and more legitimate emails are being falsely tagged as spam. This situation is called a false positive and is happening all the time.

You have probably heard people say to you “But I sent you the email last week” and you replied “I never received it”. The truth is you probably did, it might well be sitting in your inbox right now.

So, please return to your email inbox right now and click on the link in the verification email.

Thanks again for signing up.”

The above script was written with video and/or audio delivery. You will probably want to tweak it to your own needs and website as well (putting in a personal message is a good idea – as well as expanding on whitelisting).

Bottom Line

Focusing on this one area of your sign-up process can significantly boost your email marketing results. Always test, test, tes

Here are some interesting articles you should have a look at in the context of the above:

• 5 Ways To Increase Email Deliverability
• How to build a Huge Opt-In Email List and Increase Your Profit
• 28 Ways to build permission based email lists

All the best,

Tom