Today I want to discuss with you the Double Opt-in and Single Opt-In. It’s always a controversial topic that people are passionate about.

Single Opt-in basically means that someone comes to your opt-in page. They fill in their email address and once they hit the submit button, they are your subscriber. Double Opt-in means that someone fills in their email address and hits the submit button. Typically they’ll be directed to a thank-you page and from there they need to go back to their email and click a link confirming that they want to receive further emails from you.

The controversial part is that people are very passionate that the Single Opt-in is the way to go, and other people say Double Opt-in helps to build a better list and that’s the way to go. Since there is no definite answer and it’s kind of what fits for you, so here I just want to share my story.

I started to build my list with Double Opt-in. People weren’t completing the Opt-in process, which caused me a lot of frustration that I’m losing leads.

Soon I decided to quit Double Opt-in and went with Single Opt-in. And what I found is the list was growing faster. People were opting in and there was no confirmation process. But I noticed that the quality of my list decreased. The interaction was not good, and the feedback was not good. When I sent out emails, I just wasn’t getting the feedback like I did on my first trial with Double Opt-in. Though I wasn’t losing new subscribers because there was no Double Opt-in process, I didn’t feel like I was getting the same level of interaction and relationship building.

So I decided to give it another try and go back to Double Opt-in, but this time I tweak the conversion process. What I mean by that is from the opt-in page, thank-you page and the instruction page for clicking on the confirmation link. I tweak the whole process and what I found was that my opt-in conversion rate just sky-rocketed. And the non opt-in is dramatically less. It’s just pretty powerful.

What I learn from that is to test, tweak the opt-in page and take action. That’s my story. Hope it is helpful for you to choose Double Opt-in or Single Opt-in.