Difficult to join my mailing list?
Scroll to the bottom of the page, enter your email address and hit the “JOIN MY MAILING LIST” button.
It does not end there. You will have to head over to your email to confirm subscription to my mailing list.
Upon confirmation, you will be added to my mailing list.
Why is there an extra step to confirm the subscription via email?
For the purpose of understanding the context, you will need to have some knowledge on email marketing. The standard email marketing campaign sends out email to users who gave consent to receiving emails, while a cold email marketing campaign sends out email to users who did not consent to receiving emails. If you opt into a mailing list, the emails will land in your inbox while cold emails generally land in your spams.
Normally, you are only required to enter your email and hit the “submit” button to join a mailing list. The reason why you are required to confirm subscription to my mailing list is because I want to confirm your interest to join the mailing list and spare you the emails that are of no value to you due to an impulsive act. This process is known as Double Opt-In and it reduces the likelihood of spam emails opting into the mailing list as well.
While implementing a double opt-in carries the risk of losing subscribers as one may find it troublesome to go through several steps to join in the mailing list, I get to filter out users who are that much more interested in my content. I invest time and effort into writing my content, hence I only want my content to reach users who truly appreciates it and can benefit from my content. For a blog post like this one, I can spend several days writing to complete it; granted I am not working on this full time.
It is not that much of a hassle to join the mailing list.
I am delighted if you agree with the statement above. For many however, it is indeed a chore to have to head over to their email to confirm their subscription to the mailing list and I can understand that. I find it troublesome to have to enter my email address and still confirm my subscription via email as well. The only good thing I get out of confirming my subscription, is that I am doubly sure that I want to be in this mailing list.
It boils down to the users’ desire and interest at the end of the day. It is never a hassle or trouble to get something you really want. But what benefits can joining a mailing list bring?
Why do people opt in for mailing lists?
People rarely opt in to receive emails for no reason, let’s get that straight. So what are some reasons for people to opt in for a mailing list?
- Promotions – Special offers or gifts such as exclusive discount coupons and freebies are tangible incentives that are perfect for getting users to subscribe to a mailing list.
- Gated Content – Similar to promotions, these are exclusive content that are not available on the website (publicly) and access is only granted through emails.
- Genuine Interest in Topic – Users may genuinely be interested in a certain topic which a website has displayed thought leadership for and are keen to see future content regarding the same topic.
For those reasons, people are unlikely to provide a fake email address as the incentives are sent to their email. I have submitted fake email addresses nonetheless to access gated content as some websites does not require double opt-in, so the content are accessible after I provide an email address. For websites like this one, a fake email address will get you nothing due to the implementation of the double opt-in feature.
Why do people not opt in for mailing lists?
There are 1001 reasons to avoid subscribing to a mailing list and here are some of them.
- Negative Experience – Prior experience with receiving spammy emails and malware from subscribing to mailing list from other websites.
- Data Privacy – Email information may be sold to third party.
- Big Turn Off – Imagine a popup on every page of the website asking you to sign up for their mailing list, which is pretty annoying.
- Gated Content? – Why should I have to join a mailing list just to access more information?
- Email Overload – You are already dealing with loads of email, better to not sign up for more.
It is common to find ourselves subscribed to undesirable mailing lists and receiving irrelevant emails in our inbox. We’d end up having to filter through many emails to filter out the ones that are truly important to us, such as emails from government services, etc.
You can opt out of a mailing list you are in!
But fret not, for there will be an option to unsubscribe from the mailing list in every email that is part of an email marketing campaign.
My emails are no exception as well. I strive to be as law-abiding as possible, so I did my homework and design my email marketing campaigns to be compliant with Singapore’s Law. The rules dictates that every email from marketing campaigns must provide an option for users to unsubscribe; naturally the unsubscribe button will usually be small and hard to find as companies wants to maintain communication with you to raise brand awareness or make a purchase.
Next time you receive an unsolicited email with no option to unsubscribe, feel free to report that email.
Start unsubscribing from those useless mailing list!
I hope this post was able to give you a new perspective on email marketing and ultimately helps you to manage your emails better.
If you liked my content, perhaps you could overlook the hassle and join my mailing list 😉