Why Double Opt-in is Better for Your Business
The History of the Spam Problem
During the earliest days of email marketing in the mid 1990s, companies could purchase a list of email addresses and some inexpensive email broadcasting software for roughly $250. After sending a blast to 25,000 email addresses, a few thousand dollars in new sales could be generated in a 24-hour period as a direct result of the email campaign. A person could then repeat that same process continually and see the same amount of money pour in over-and-over again. In those earliest days of email marketing, spam was not an issue. Most people deleted the few pieces of unwanted email from their inbox and life on the Internet was happy for all involved, even without spam filters or spam complaints. Spam, at least when connected to unsolicited commercial email, was not even a household word yet.
Yet, as more and more people discovered how exceptionally profitable email marketing had become, spam proliferated to the point where many dreaded opening their inboxes. As a result, reasonable companies began to move away from purchasing databases and towards legitimate opt-in email marketing. Nevertheless, the spam problem continued to spiral out of control. A large anti-spam industry developed to combat this problem, offering various means to block, albeit imperfectly, unwanted email.
Today, according to government and analyst estimates, 70 percent of email messages sent daily are spam. ISPs, companies, and individual computer users have access to a virtual fortress of software that blocks a huge portion of unwanted email. However, even legitimate opt-in email is blocked during the imperfect process of protecting inboxes from spam.
Read excerpts from this double opt-in email study online: