Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

I was on the phone today with a friend who has a membership site. We occasionally get on the phone and discuss strategies and techniques that are working, along with what’s not working for our sites. I could talk for hours about that stuff and find that just talking about what we are doing brings me new “a-ha” moments and I try to steal as many of his good ideas as I can.

One of the topics that came up was the percentage of our email subscribers that sign up for the email list but never confirm. It’s the curse of the double opt-in. A visitor comes to your site, puts in their email address and then never clicks on the confirmation link in the email that follows. There are a variety of things you can do to make sure that number is as low as possible. I’ll show you what we do in a moment.

It had been a while since I checked that percentage so I thought I’d share it with you for several of our sites. Below are graphics of two of our email lists. One from our membership site Trader Interviews and another from one of our niche sites where we sell e-Books and other online content:

As you can see, in the last 30 days, 17.40% of the subscribers are “unverified”, meaning they never confirmed their email sign up by clicking on the confirmation email link. 5.70% have unsubscribed. Both numbers are surprising to me. The former because I thought that number was actually lower and the later because I thought it was much higher. (See my post, “High Fives For Unsubscribes” for my opinion of unsubscribes.)

I’ve done all kinds of searches to see if those numbers are in line with other services in the industry but have come up short. All I can do at this point is try to lower those numbers and use our own history as the benchmark. Please leave a comment if you know where I might find this information. I’ve found that most site owners don’t share the information, which is understandable. I’m not comfortable showing my actual numbers yet, which is why they are covered – maybe I will be down the road.

For the niche content site that isn’t a membership site but has individual information products for sale, here’s how it looks:

Eerily similar on the “unverified” number, even though the two sites are in two completely different niches. But perhaps not so surprising considering we do the exact same things to try to get them on the list and confirmed.

However, the unsubscribe rate is much lower on this one. My sense is that the “attention span” of this industry is longer than the first one, but that’s just a hunch. I’ll need to dive into that number a bit more to see what may be going on.

Much has been written and debated about the double opt-in vs. single opt-in method. Industry best practices say double-opt in is the more ethical way to run your list. No one is added to your list who has not expressly given permission to be added. I’ve run both types of lists and I can tell you that while double opt-in lists will grow more slowly, the quality is much higher and conversion rates on sales to those lists are much better. Remember, I’m not in this to build huge lists. I want lists of action takers and buyers. If they can be huge too, well, awesome. But in my experience, the larger the list, the less responsive simply because a larger list is less targeted.

More niche = more passion = more action takers.

What we do to increase the opt-in as much as possible is be as clear as possible about what they do next. Tell your potential subscriber EXACTLY what they need to do next every step of the way.

In our case, if they subscribe using a form on a regular page, they get this graphic immediately after they hit submit:

If they enter their email in the lightbox, they see this:

It looks a bit like an error message and requires them to click “OK” to make it go away. I was a little concerned about it at first but our “unverified” percentage went down when we implemented it because the subscriber is told exactly what they need to do to get the carrot we offered for their email address.

Double opt-in is more work – no question. But do a few things to make sure the subscriber knows exactly what to expect, and you’ll grow an action-taking list that performs.

Now we need to figure out how to get that “unverified” number down to 10%. That’s my goal for next month. How low can we get it to go? We’ll see.

email marketing, taking action double opt-in vs single opt-in email marketing