ClickDimensions places great emphasis on using permission-based marketing practices for email marketing. One standard practice that marketers like to employ to ensure they are building great, permission-based marketing lists, is the double opt-in. This method lets your website visitors sign up for your mailings, but doesn’t add them to your marketing list unless they then also confirm that they’ve signed up. Double opt-ins ensure that the email addresses entered in your sign-up form are not only valid, but are being entered by their legitimate owner. The person signing up will get an email telling them that you have received a request to add them to your mailing list, and providing a link for them to confirm their intent:
Goals
- Learn how to set up a double opt-in process using ClickDimensions forms and emails
The Confirmation Form
Note that we're going to work our way backwards from the final confirmation where we add the person to our marketing list. First, create a simple form that only has an email address field (mapped to the Lead and Contact email address fields, of course). I have also added an HTML component so I can put a logo and some text in the page:
Set the Action for this form to add the responding individual to your marketing list:
The Confirmation Email
Next, create an Email Template that includes a link to the above form. This template will be sent to the person signing up. Notice that I included the email address in the template, using Freemarker to pull the address from the Lead or Contact (in case they are already in my CRM). Showing the email address in the body of the email is a nice way to let the recipient visually understand what you're asking them to confirm.
The Sign-Up Form
Now we can create our sign-up form. If you already have a sign-up form, you can simply add the Action to the form using our Form Builder: My sign-up form looks like this in the Form Builder:
The real trick here is to have an auto-responder action for your sign-up form that sends the confirmation email:
The Final Result: Double Opt-In
Now that you have this all in place, when someone fills in your sign-up form…
They’ll soon get an email asking them to confirm…
And the link will take them to a page where they can confirm their sign-up:
