Quality matters when it comes to listbuilding and at RocketResponder we strongly believe this to be true.
We don’t believe in the rather outdated concept that says you just pile as many people onto your list as you possibly can in the hope that if you send them enough marketing emails that some will eventually bite.
Not only is it not very clever marketing, but neither is it very effective and you will just end up unnecessarily annoying a lot of people for no good reason.
To everyone who enters the world of listbuilding there is a question which always must be answered…should I go for single or double opt in when it comes to getting subscribers.
Single opt in is where someone enters an email address and as soon as that happens the email address is automatically added to your list.
Double opt in is where someone enters an email address and it is only added to your list when the owner of that address clicks a link in an email to confirm that they actually want to be on your list.
The first, without doubt, will allow you to build your list faster than the second which is slower, but which, arguably, will give you a much higher quality list.
Think of it like this. It is so easy to get hold of someone’s email address and sign that person up to a list – with single opt in the owner of that email address is on your list whether or not they wanted to be on it in the first place.
With single opt in, you as a list owner, have no way of knowing whether anyone at all on your list actually wanted to be on it.
Even if someone did sign up for your list with a single opt in process, it is difficult to determine how interested they are in what you are promoting. The person who really wants to hear from you cannot be differentiated from the person who signed up to your list by mistake.
With double opt in you are asking people to actually take some positive action to say “Yes I really do want to be on this list and receive email communication from the person who owns it.”
I can guarantee that with double opt in you will regularly get people who sign up for the list but then never get around to clicking on the email to confirm their interest.
This can be really frustrating but it need not be. Look at is this way – if the person cannot even be bothered to confirm their interest then they probably have little or on interest in anything you have to say or any goods or services you might want them to buy.
At RocketResponder our message is simple – there is nothing to fear from double opt-in and by getting people to take one extra step to join your list means you are building a higher quality list.
The higher quality should translate into more engagement and higher conversions and that, after all, is what listbuilding is all about.
When it comes to building a list, then the size of that list is obviously going to be important, however size is not everything and that is what a lot of new listbuilders fail to understand.