Unverified Leads: To Mail Or Not To Mail

 

I was recently reading an article on Aweber’s blog regarding unverified leads, and to be honest it was probably the first time I’ve given the topic any real thought.

Aweber is the mailing list manager that I use to manage unlimited newsletters, mailing lists, autoresponders and customer follow-up sequences. Unverified Leads are those people who sign up for your list or opt-in to receive emails from you, but never confirm their subscription – leaving them unverified in your database of subscribers.

The question that has come up is whether you should email those subscribers in an effort to get them to confirm their subscriptions… or not?

Of course, this piqued my interest so I logged into my own Aweber account to get an idea what percentage never verify their subscription. Aweber offers a lot of interesting statistics about your mailing lists, so this was quite enlightening.

There were over 2,000 unverified leads on one of my lists. But further inspection showed that the majority of those were unverified because they were “undeliverable”. Only 617 of them were people who received the confirmation message and simply did not verify their subscription.

Did they change their mind? Did the note get filtered out? Did they simply forget or overlook it? There is no way to know…

Aweber says to let it go, just leave it be and move on. Their advice is to focus on those subscribers who are active and fully engaged in what you are offering – period.

Of course, if you have a high rate of unconfirmed subscribers then it is time to look into your campaign and consider ways that you might improve the confirmation rate. Perhaps you are giving a freebie to subscribers on the confirmation page, leaving them no reason to opt-in to your list if the freebie was what they were after. You can move that freebie to the follow-up message instead, and improve your results dramatically.

But even after every tweak you can think of, you’ll still be left with a certain percentage that never verify. Do you “let it go”? Do you email them a reminder? The Warriors came up with some good tips recently when this same topic came up in the Warrior Forum:

Emailing your unverified leads – Good or Bad?

Still on the fence myself, I decided to do some more investigating in my own Aweber account…

Aweber allows you to do “Ad Tracking”, which means that I can easily see where my subscribers are coming from, and even sort my database by these categories. So of the 617 people who did not verify their request for my emails, for whatever reason, I began to take note of any significant similarities.

Now I can really see some definitive stats. For example, I see that 20% of the people who signed up during a JV Giveaway Event did not confirm. 20% is a pretty high rate.

So not only can I analyze which of my campaigns are most successful, but I can also micro-target specific groups of unverified subscribers – should I decide to send out a second email.

The Warriors suggest that if you are going to email these non-subscribers at all, that you should tread carefully and send a very personalized message. Using your Ad Tracking stats, you can go so far as to include the details of where they signed up and why. For example:

Hi John,

I noticed that you requested the XYZ e-course from the ABC Giveaway event. Since you didnt confirm your request, I cant deliver the course. I just wanted to check in to make sure you received that confirmation email, and see if everything came through okay. If you changed your mind, no worries! But if you still want the XYZ e-course you can click on the link below:

*link*

Best,
Lynn Terry

If you are going to do it at all, my advice is that you get as personalized in that follow-up message as possible to avoid any confusion or complaints.

Your thoughts?

Tags: aweber, mailing list manager, newsletter, subscribers, double opt-in

Category: Email Marketing