What Is Double Opt-In and Why You Need It
With Double Opt-In, your users will receive a Confirmation Email asking them to click a link and confirm that they wish to receive emails from you. Enabling Double Opt-in can improve your email deliverability, increase engagement with your users, and lead to better overall email marketing. Prefinery recommends enabling Double Opt-in for your project.
What is Double Opt-In?
Double opt-in is when users submit your Signup Form and then get an email with a link they have to click to confirm that they really want to get emails from you.
This is called a confirmation email, and when Double Opt-in is enabled, users must confirm, or they won’t get future emails from you.
Note: A confirmation email cannot be resent in any way, not even via the API, otherwise it would defeat the purpose of double opt-in if resending was an option. If the user doesn't want to confirm and be added to the list, they most certainly don't want to be constantly reminded nor pushed into doing so. If your opt-in emails are not being sent in the first place, there are different ways on how to resolve that.
What are the advantages of using Double Opt-in?
1. Acquire more qualified and engaged users
Because users have to confirm, you know that the people on your list really wanted to sign up. This typically makes them more responsive to your emails, and more likely to open and click. Plus, confirmed users are less likely to report your emails as spam, and too many spam reports can negatively affect your sender reputation.
2. Improve your email deliverability ranking
Hard bounces (emails that bounce because the address is not valid) affect your sender reputation and deliverability.
Hard bounces can happen when a user submits their email address with a typo. Other times, your Signup Form may be submitted by fake users, spammers, hackers or bots. Sometimes time happens because a valid email address includes a typo. If your list is flooded with bad email addresses, your overall deliverability will decline and it will be more difficult for real Users who want to receive your emails to do so.
3. Avoid potential issues with data protection laws, such as the GDPR
Many data protection laws, including the GDPR, require that you be able to show proof of consent for each user. While Double Opt-in is not required by the GDPR, it can be helpful for showing proof that the user verified their email address and gave permission to be contacted. In fact, in Germany, Double Opt-in is the norm to prove legal compliance.
When should you use Single Opt-In?
Rarely, if ever.
Single Opt-in has huge deliverability issues, and that’s bad for business. With Single Opt-in there’s a much higher risk of being reported as spam. According to Litmus, 50% of consumers marked an email as spam because of a confusing or painful unsubscribe process.
With Single Opt-in, mistyped or fake email addresses can end up on your list. That can result in an increase in hard bounces, which negatively impacts your sender reputation even more.
How do I enable Double Opt-in?
- Click on the Settings menu in the sidebar navigation of your project dashboard.
- Choose the General menu option.
- Tick the Enable Double Opt-in option.
- Scroll down and Save your project settings.
Redirect user to your website on confirmation
Instead of the default thank-you page that users see when confirming opt-in, you can redirect them to your own custom confirmation page following our guide here: How to Redirect User to Your Custom Email Opt-in Confirmation Page