| Transactional Email Problems |
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Written by Dirk Lutzweiler November 28, 2006 Email Confirmations Being Ignored?Our site requires a new registrant to confirm their registration by clicking on a link in a welcome message that they receive after submission. A large percentage of new registrants go through the trouble of filling out our form, but do not confirm their registration. Why do you suppose this is? What can we do to encourage new registrants to get to this next step and become an active member? |
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| Dirk, One thing that may help considerably is to add some prominent text just above your Submit button on your registration page, indicating that the applicant will receive a confirmation email, and that they MUST click a link within that email to confirm their registration. Otherwise, they will not be registered on your site. This could also be noted on the redirection page, after the Submit button is clicked. For your newsletter, another helpful hint would be to provide a link to your customized Whitelist Instructions. I provide a free tool to generate Whitelisting Instructions for any site or email publication. It generates instructions for many of the major email filtering solutions on how to whitelist an email publication, and can be easily customized to fit your site design. It's been used by thousands of site and email publishers for years now. The link to this free tool is located here: http://www.cleanmymailbox.com/whitelist.html Best of success, Dirk. Joe Halbrook |
Shel Horowitz
said:
| "Spam has taken a large bite out of email already. Where are we headed?" Oh, boy, has it ever! Thank you, Adam, for giving me a much-needed chance to vent. Email is collapsing, pure and simple--and it's gotten much, much worse in the last two or three weeks. I took my email off charter.net and am feeding it directly through my webhost (BlueHost.com), starting in mid-November--this was to solve problems with undelivered mail in both directions. But... 1. I've gotten hundreds more spams per day in my spamfilter, many of whose subject lines start with a first name followed by "wrote:" (nothing after the colon. I don't know if this style was just invented or if something in the switch opened up my spamfilter to stuff that had been going straight tot he trash before. But it's like 600 spams a day. 2. More of my outbound email is blocked, including absolutely everything I try to send to comcast.net. These are not even transactional emails but often notes to friends. 3. Certain legitimate messages I try to rescue from my spamfilter are being rejected with a 550 error by the server (yet all the trash gets through, it seems) 4. And then there's the simple matter of inbox overload. I find that usually 50 or 100 more messages make it into my inbox each day (that is, get past the spamfilter) than I'm able to read and still get any work done. I am seriously considering setting up a specified address for newsletters and closing my other eboxes, replacing them with a helpticket system. I have serious reservations about doing this, but I can't maintain the status quo. These days, the only way I believe that an email was read is if I get either a response or a return receipt. This was the best technology ever invented for communication--and for marketing--and the bastards have absolutely killed it. Vent over--for now. |
Mike Collins
said:
| This is an issue I have struggled with firsthand, and I've come to realize that your niche can make a huge difference in your conversion rate for confirmation messages. About 97% of subscribers confirm their subscription to my marketing newsletter, but my niche-related newsletters do not fare so well. One such newsletter (with a decidedly less web-savvy audience) has only a 59% success rate for confirmations. I very recently customized my Subscription Thank You page (I had been using Aweber's default page out of laziness) to include explicit instructions on how to confirm the subscription and to make it feel more like a part of my site. Early indications are that the conversion rate has increased, but it's too early to tell how much. Best of Luck, Mike Collins |
John Smart
said:
| Having just finished the code for a double-opt in list, this is a problem I am very aware of. When companies like Earthlink do all they do in the interest of spam prevention, getting EarthLinkers involved is almost impossible. Not much better for any of the big boys – AOL, MSN, hotmail – gmail is a good bet – so far. I am looking at a new approach, but it is not so automated. This is the flow chart for it: Sign up for mailing list with your name and e-Mail address. Confirmation page contains a code snippet like this: <.a rel="nofollow" href="mailto:me@ home.com?subject=sign up&body=http://www.domain.com/confirm.php?uid=897398jkhkjh23uiy78d6">Click here to send the mail to confirm you want to opt in.<./a> Person signing up sends the mail, letting their network know that they are communicating with you Moderator gets the mail, clicks the link, Mail is sent back, confirming subscription, testing it all worked. Mail that is sent back has an opt out link in it, to avoid system abuse. It is possible to abuse this system, and the moderator (or someone else) will need to click the links to activate the code so it isn’t as automated as I would like. But when the 1st mail goes from recipient to the moderator and that opens the door for many of the spam filters. Hope that helps, John Smart |
Renee Kennedy
said:
| In order to confirm email addresses, we're offering a download that is valuable to our target market. We offer the download through a direct mail campaign, then we ask them to come to a web page to fill out some information - name, email, address, etc. We also remind them that they must add our email address to their address book in order to get the download. Then we send them the email with the download and they are subscribed to our list at the same time. At any point, they may unsubscribe. We also qualify that by giving us their email we may send them information in the future. People will actually call in if they cannot get that download, it's usually because our email to them has been filtered. Renee Kennedy |
Adrian McElligott
said:
| What percentage of the emails that you send end up in black holes and junk folders? What does this cost you in lost business? While all the major providers of spam filter technology claim fantastic accuracy, I would be interested to know what LEDs think. Are BrightMail and the like doing a good job under the circumstances, or should they be doing more to reduce their false positive rate? Is there anything that they can do? Would people use a spamfilter companion program that retrieved legitimate message from their junk folder, if one was available, or do they just want everyone else to use it. We are thinking of producing one that uses CaseKeys and Spamborders technologies to identify legitimate messages that have been incorrectly designated to the junk folder, and we would first like to know if there is a perceived need for such a program. For those that are interested, there is info on these technologies here: http://www.geobytes.com/casekey.htm Kind Regards Adrian McElligott |
Steven Rothberg
said:
| You’re seeing “conversion rates for confirmation messages are as low as 50% in some cases” are feel that’s very serious? I’ve got news for you, that’s a pretty good percentage for double opt-in. About a year ago, we ran a double opt-in campaign for one of the largest employers of college students and recent graduates in the country. Because the organization is part of the U.S. federal government, they required candidates to provide some additional information that corporate recruiters could never ask at the application stage. Leaving aside the issue of those “do as we say, not as we do” double standards that so many governmental units seem to love, the process was pretty straight forward. The job seekers found the job posting on our site just as they would any other job posting. When they clicked on the apply link, they were taken to another page on our site that was basically a form. They were asked for their basic contact information, date of birth, social security number, etc. (we auto-filled whatever information we had from their previous interactions with our site) and they clicked submit. They were told on that same page that they would receive an email that would ask them to confirm their interest in the position. The emails were sent immediately and contained a reminder about the position to which they had just applied and instructed them to click on a link in the email in order to confirm their interest. The email also indicated that their information could only be sent to the employer if the candidate clicked on the link to confirm their interest. Only about 10 percent did so. I wasn’t surprised that a high percentage of candidates balked at providing their date of birth and social security number on-line at a site that they may have only just discovered, but the 90 percent who did not confirm their interest had already gotten past that hurdle. They had followed the entire process, provided all of the information required, and just had to click on a link to make all of that work worthwhile, yet 90 percent did not. I suspect that a large portion of that 90 percent did not respond to the emails because the emails were filtered out by their ISPs or anti-spam software or because they simply did not read the instructions. My point isn’t to bemoan the recruitment advertising campaign that we ran. My point is that double opt-in is an extremely high standard and I believe one that is unrealistic for us to expect of typical users. Steven Rothberg |
Joe Halbrook
said:
| "Are BrightMail and the like doing a good job under the circumstances, or should they be doing more to reduce their false positive rate? Is there anything that they can do?" Adrian brings up extremely relevant questions here. The answers, unfortunately, are not as cut and dry as we all want them to be. Are the major solutions "doing a good job under the circumstances?" That's a question that results in individual answers, because no one mailbox content is identical to another. What might work well for you may not work well for me. With existing technologies, false positives are never going to be reduced to zero. Why? Because no technology can perfectly emulate the human process that you and I use to define "unwanted email." So, if a solution provider claims a zero false positive rate, I'd have to question that statement; there's no such solution in existence that can guarantee 100% accuracy, to my knowledge. Thus, this question becomes refined to: How do present technologies provide easy false positive identification and retrieval? In the case of my solution, an email report (generated multiple times per day) is delivered to the recipient's mailbox. The report consists of a brief summary of each filtered message - accompanied by three clickable links per filtered message: 1-Read the Message 2-Restore the Message to Mailbox 3-Whitelist the Sender, then Restore to Mailbox. (Using the latter link, future email from the Sender will never be filtered again, as the Sender's email address is appended to the whitelist.) At the end of the report, there's a link to delete all remaining filtered email items. The report is not bulky, and can easily be used on a Treo, if need be. Thus, all filtered email (including any false positives) can be managed right from the mailbox itself. The reports can be generated on-demand, or they can be configured to generate multiple times a day. Most filtering solutions provide some sort of quarantine for questionable email, and a mechanism for reviewing and retrieving email items from the quarantine. I'd be interested in following how Geobytes progresses in developing a companion program to accomplish this. I do think there is a need, depending on the filtering solution being used. Joe Halbrook |
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