You're building your mailing list using the Double Opt-in process, but users aren't confirming their subscription to the newsletter. Find out what you can do in this situation!
But what can you do when a user subscribes to your newsletter, but doesn't confirm their consent?
We noticed some of our clients were facing this problem, so we decided to run some tests to see how it could be remedied.
#spoileralert – we found that one simple strategy managed to increase subscription confirmations by up to 20%.
Keep reading to know all about it!
Study overview
For this study, we selected two online stores, both operating in the cosmetics industry and both having problems with low confirmation rates in their Newsletter Subscription scenario. Here's a brief overview of their database size and subscription process:
| CLIENT A | CLIENT B |
Database size | 280,000 | 24,000 |
Sending newsletters regularly (apart from automated messages) | ✔ | ✔ |
Newsletter subscription process | Subscription forms in several places of the website + welcome pop up with subscription form offering a 5% discount code for subscription | Subscription forms in several places of the website + welcome Pop up with subscription form only on the blog page, no discount coupons |
Now let's take a look at their results from the Newsletter Subscription scenario:
| CLIENT A | CLIENT B |
Confirmation email subject line | Confirm your subscription to the newsletter | ☘ Confirm your subscription! |
Open Rate | 50.1% | 60% |
Click-through Rate (CTR) | 27.5% | 42.5% |
Click To Open Rate (CTOR) | 54.6% | 70% |
As you can see, roughly half of all users that subscribed to the newsletter didn't even open the confirmation email. Maybe they ignored it, maybe it went straight to the spam folder... there are many possible explanations. What matters is that the users need not only to open these emails, but also click on the confirmation button, meaning that the number of lost subscriptions is even higher!
Let's analyze Client A's results with the hypothetical number of 100 new subscribers over a given period. How many clients will actually confirm their subscription?
100 confirmation emails are sent
50 users open the confirmation email (50.1% OR)
From these 50, roughly 27 users click on the confirmation button (54.6% CTOR)
In other words, after all the effort involved in attracting those 100 users and convincing them to subscribe to the newsletter, around 73 were just slipping away.
That's bad! So, how to fix this?
We decided to test a simple strategy: resending only the confirmation message to those users who didn't confirm after the first one.
Study method and results
In order to resend the confirmation message only to those users who had subscribed to the newsletter but had not confirmed their subscription, we had to identify these customers, assign them with a specific tag, and then send the confirmation emails only to the users with that tag.
We did this for both clients, over a period of two months.
We used a more technically complicated approach involving some changes to the website's code, which we won't get into in detail here. What matters are the results we saw from this confirmation email resend campaign:
| CLIENT A | CLIENT B |
Total number of resend campaigns | 8 | 12 |
Avg. Open Rate | 36.0% | 24.7% |
Avg. Click-through Rate (CTR) | 9.2% | 9.9% |
Avg. Click To Open Rate (CTOR) | 26.4% | 40.0% |
Additional subscriptions | 16.9% | 20.8% |
In other words, these clients got around 17–20% more subscribers by just asking users one more time if they wanted to confirm a subscription. Not bad!
Not only that, but these emails even generated additional revenue, even though they weren't sales-oriented and didn't include product recommendations.
| CLIENT A | CLIENT B |
Confirmation email resend campaigns as % of all campaigns | < 1% | 2.5% |
Revenue generated by confirmation email resend campaigns as % of total store revenue | 4.6% | 3.5% |
Amazing! That's certainly a strategy worth trying out, right? So let's see how you can implement it right now.
How to resend the confirmation message
We will follow the same principle as we did in our study, but in a simplified way. To begin, log into your edrone Workspace and follow these steps:
Step 1: Copy your confirmation email
Go to Automations > Ready Flows > NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIPTION. Select the Confirmation message > Edit project and click Copy:
Step 2: Create a NEWSLETTER HUB with the confirmation email
Now go to Campaigns > NEWSLETTERS and create a new campaign. In the DESIGN SECTION, click Paste. You will now have the option of sending exactly the same confirmation message or making some changes to the subject line or content.
The most important thing is to make sure the confirmation button is there!
Step 3: Select the right audience
Once you determine how your message will be, all that's left to do is send it to the right audience. To do that, in the AUDIENCE section, select any tags that might be involved in your subscription process (e.g. FromPopUp, FromWebLayer, Footer etc).
Here's how your segmentation should look like:
Audience type = TAGGED
Subscription status = SUBSCRIPTION STATUS UNKNOWN
Tags = ANY (select all tags that are involved in your subscription process).
Check out this article for instructions on how to select an audience group with a tag in the HUB Newsletter.
That's it! Now just send the message and check the results later on.
Make sure to do this regularly, e.g. every month or so, and you will surely grow your list even more.
Need more help?
If you have any further questions about how to grow your subscriber's list, please do not hesitate to contact us at hello@edrone.me