Why Double Opt-in is Better for Your Business
Spam Traps
A spam trap is an email addresses that is placed within a database to poison it with a contact that is virtually guaranteed to cause a spam complaint. If you have too many spam traps within your email database you will be black listed.
Spam traps can be added to your database in many ways. A few of them are covered below:
- Automated Spam Traps: Hardcore anti-spammers consider anything that is not double opt-in or closed-loop opt-in spam. Industry insiders have discovered that there are servers, most likely setup by these "hardcore" people/organizations, which search the Internet and sign up for mailing lists via any single opt-in form they can find. When an organization sends out an email campaign to their database they are also emailing the spam traps that have been seeded into their list. The spam traps will automatically take the message when it arrives and report it as spam to ISPs, black lists, and other anti-spam organizations.
- Malicious & Manual Spam Traps: There are also people that maliciously enter spam-trap email addresses into opt-in databases. Sometimes these people are disgruntled employees or unethical competitors; the results of their spam complaints are equally as devastating to your database.
- Accidental Entry Spam Traps: With a single opt-in form, people can mistakenly add someone else's email address by accidentally mistyping their own. The natural result is that someone will receive an email from you that they do not want. Another type of "accidental entry spam trap" is when someone signs a friend, relative, or acquaintance up for a mailing list that he/she did not want to be signed up for.
Had the list owner user used a double opt-in system in all of the above examples, they would have either completely eliminated or greatly reduced the possibility of the spam complaint occurring as a result of a spam trap.
In the unlikely event that you would ever receive a spam complaint from a double opt-in email, you would have much better leverage working with an ISP to resolve an issue based on the fact that your subscribers confirmed their subscription.
Remember that your goal is to make sure that everyone within your email marketing database wants to receive your email communications. By achieving that goal, your email will be successfully delivered to your subscribers' inboxes instead of being automatically trashed or sent to the bulk folder. Using double opt-in email communications pretty much ensures that any responsibly run email campaign will not cause enough issues to warrant a black listing.
Read excerpts from this double opt-in email study online: