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
understand one very important fact. Implementing a double
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.
About
The Author
Abe Cherian is the founder of Multiple Stream Media, an advertising network company that helps online businesses find new prospects and clients, who are anxious to grow their business fast, and without spending a fortune in marketing and advertising. www.msmedianetwork.com
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