A Brief History
Email Double Opt-in has been around since recipients started complaining about why they receive emails to which they never subscribed.
The next thing, Email Service Providers (ESPs), such as Google, Yahoo, and the rest, had to do something about it.
So, they started implementing various logical filters and indexes to rank senders and eventually blacklist.
Additionally, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) had to also take action since the number of spammers had grown to millions. They practically choked the internet.
Even though today both ESPs and ISPs are fairly good in spam detection and filtering, the numbers are still high.
Average Daily Sp*m Volume
The latest analysis from Cisco Talos Intelligence, at the time of writing this article, has measured about 282 Billion Spam Emails send every day!
To simplify things, from a consumer perspective there are only three things.
The email box, the email itself, and the email sender.
However, behind the scenes, there is a war going on to make sure your emails land in your recipient’s email box!
This fact in general makes things a lot more complicated for the legit email senders.
Salesforce Marketing Research
Additionally, based on Salesforce’s latest research “Seventh State of Marketing“, conducted in June 2021, by surveying over 8200 marketing leaders worldwide, only 37% of the companies feel completely satisfied with their Consent Management setup.
Do the simple math, and you’ll find that over 5000 companies are not on top of their Consent Management.
Some more silly math. Most likely, many of these companies have from 100-500K contacts to which they actively send weekly emails.
A modest estimate of 5-10B emails per month without proper Consent Management in place!
Even though these numbers are just funny estimates, they are not far from the truth.
In order words, all this is outrageous!
I guess, there is still a lot of work to be done!
Why this Matters
Putting all this together, the responsibility for an email marketeer or campaign manager becomes a serious business.
This takes us to the main question.
Why is this so important for you dear marketer!
Email, Revenue, Brand
Impact on Email Deliverability
Unlike before, most of the ESPs today use Artificial Intelligence to validate, rank, and filter emails and email senders.
This sender rank is very fast in sliding down, and extremely difficult in climbing up.
A good place to get a partial overview of your sender score is senderscore.org.
In general, this means, sending large volumes of irrelevant emails to people that didn’t subscribe to, or consent, will result in ranking down. In the worst-case become even blacklisted.
To check your blacklist status you can try mxtoolbox.com
Anyways, once that happens, I doubt anyone can help you! – the journey to recovery is painfully long.
Impact on Revenue
For most of the companies that still use email communication as the main channel, it means, fewer emails received.
This will ultimately result in less revenue generated.
Less revenue means less marketing budget in the future, and to be more dramatic, it all goes downhill.
Impact on Company Image
Besides the loss in revenue, sending emails without consent usually creates angry customers.
With the current power of the internet, they end up complaining wherever they can.
Most likely where they will be heard the most, so, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, sites like TrustPilot, and more.
As you can imagine this will cost the brand and company image a lot!
Conclusion
Please implement Email Double Opt-in, no matter if your local law requires it or not.
It will be the first step to show that you respect your subscriber’s consent and their interest in your Brand.
Few things you can do right now:
- Whether you use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Eloqua, or similar, consider creating the right Data Model to support your consent management processes.
- Additionally, you should build a custom Contact Preferences Center, easy to use and available for both Mobile and Desktop.
- Last but not the least, you need to make sure your emails contain clearly visible email unsubscribe links.
Typically you will have to add the Unsubscribe and Manage Preferences links as clear as possible.
Finally, if you can’t implement this yourself, work with your Salesforce Partner, or a local agency.
I am pretty sure they have done this many times.
This post was created by advension.com. For more information about what we do and how we can help your company, please see our services, or just get in touch.
