Double optins is the term used for activating/using an email verification system when someone registers their email address on your blog for your newsletter or any digital product that you might be giving in for free. There are various pros and cons of using Double Optins vs Single Optin and there are varied opinions of people around the globe.
What is Double Optin To Be Exact?
Suppose you offer a free eBook to your readers that you feel would be valuable to them. You ask for the readers email address first and in exchange you offer them the free download. This way, you're able to get in touch with the subscriber for the years to come and continue to provide more value to the subscriber.
Here, once the subscriber enters their email address, in the case of double optin, the subscriber gets redirected to a new page where they are asked to confirm their email address using a link that is sent to them on the email through which they subscribed. (This page is called confirmation page)
Next up, the subscriber would click the confirmation link in their email that we sent and this would redirect them to a 'thank you' page which we can utilize in all sort of ways that I'll discuss in the future posts.
Double optins help you to make sure that the subscribers that download your eBook and become part of your email list are real fans and people who wish to be part of what you do.
Very often what happens is that people would generate random email address online (many tools out there) and would use them to subscribe and download you eBook in case you don't have double optins system set up.
This brings trash email address to your email list, for which you pay on monthly basis. This is what you won't want in worst case.
Note that at BloggingeHow, I personally experience both, the double optins and the single optin (where there is no confirmation gateway in between) and found out the single optin to work for me better. I'd love to talk about it in my up coming posts InshaAllah.
Now lets see how we can activate and manage double optins in Aweber account.
How To Activate Double Optins In Aweber?
Navigate to your Aweber's Dashboard >> List Options >> Confirmed Optins.
First of here in 'Confirmed Optins' options, you have to set your confirmation message that would be sent to the subscriber.
You can customize this message as I showed in the last post in Aweber series. You can set up a customized subject line that would make it clear to the subscriber that this would be the confirmation email.
Example: First Name, Please Confirm Your Email OR BlogggingeHow, Email Confirmation etc.
There are multiple options that we can choose from as shown in the image above. Once you select the subject line, move on and edit out the email body and make it more personalized. You don't need to change the entire body, though I would recommend to add some branding by mentioning the name of your blog or company.
For example you can enter in the body:
Thank you Name, for subscribing and showing interest to download my eBook. I hope the eBook helps you out in many ways. There is only 1 step left for you to follow so that I can send the download link of the eBook right in your inbox.
Kindly confirm the email address by clicking the link below.
Thank you :)
Regards
Your Name.
This body is more personalize and looks like it's sent by a human and not an automated bot. You can work out your own email body as you wish. Think out side the box :)
Next up, simply enable the button (as shown in the image above) to activate double optin. Now each time, when a subscribe subscribes through the email web forms on your blog (you can create your own aweber email webforms, I'll talk about that in upcoming post in the series).
Hope this procedure was easy to follow. Double Optins would definitely save you a lot of money by ignoring spam emails.
Try Out Experimentation Too
Never stay back from trying new ideas and experimentation. I would suggest you to enable double optin for a month or two and see how many people confirm their email address. What often happens is that when people see that there is another step to go, they often won't confirm their emails and this results in loosing a potential subscriber/fan.
Thus in some niche, it's advisable to use double optins while in some, it's better to have single optin, which is what I do with BloggingeHow.
I'll InshaAllah discus this in detail in my upcoming posts.
Make sure you go through them and then decide between what strategy is good for your niche.
Till next time,
Take care.
Allah Hafiz. :)
