Email opt-in is the process of consenting to receive messages or content via your email. When you visit a website and sign up or subscribe to a newsletter it means you have granted permission for that company to send you email messages that you subscribed for. It might be event updates, promotional posts, blog post updates, and weekly newsletters, etc. You can also unsubscribe or opt-out of receiving such updates.
Example of opt in; John visits Website Z and signs up for Website Z’s weekly newsletter. He has opted into Website Z’s weekly newsletter email list.
Importance of opt-in in Email Marketing
Some of the reasons why opt-in is important in email marketing include:
- Compliance: In some countries, it is illegal to send promotional emails to people without their consent. That is without them opting into your email list.
- Avoid being marked as spam: There is a likelihood that your emails will be marked as spam thus affecting your sending score if you send emails to people who have not opted into your email list. Most people hate random promotional emails.
- Increase Open and Click-through rate: People are likely to open and click your email links if they subscribed to receive such messages.
Types of Email opt-in
There are two major types of email opt-in. Single opt-in and Double opt In.
Single opt-in: This involves allowing people to subscribe to your email list without them necessarily having to confirm their emails. The disadvantage of single opt-in is that some people will sign up to your newsletter with invalid email addresses which will affect your bounce rate. However, if you validate your email list you will be good to go.
Double Opt in: In double opt-in, subscribers must confirm their email. The disadvantage of this method is that your email list will grow at a slow rate since most people do not confirm their email addresses after subscribing to an email list. The advantage of double opt-in is that you will have high email deliverability and an extremely low bounce rate.
