Single Opt-In vs. Double Opt-in | What Is The Right Way To Grow Your Email List?

Hey, Miles here, milesbecker.com.
This video is all about single opt in versus double opt in.
Specifically, you're going to learn what the right approach is for you in growing your
email list and ultimately growing your business online.
Because the truth is that it's not a one size fits all type scenario.
And in fact my wife and I operate differently.
I run a double opt in list while she runs a single opt in list and there are specific
reasons for that and that's what you're gonna learn here.
So you know what the right ultimate approach is for you.
Before we jump into which one, let's tok about what this is K. so growing your email
list, the user needs to give you their email in exchange for your lead magnet.
Then the question is, do they automatikally go on your list and go into your followup
sequence in that moment or that single opt in?
Or do you require an extra confirmation step where they actually have to go to their email,
they open up a confirmation email, they click a link and you're getting a double opt in
confirmation.
So that's the difference.
Okay.
Now you are clearly going to grow your list more slowly with a double opt in, but that's
not necessarily a problem and there's a lot of marketers who rally behind the idea of
small lists of hyper-targeted people are way more valuable than large lists of non-relevant
individuals.
This is why I could use a tool and go scrape millions of email addresses from websites
and that list would be worth nothing to me because there's no relationship.
These people don't know me.
My deliverability would be terrible and I would go right to the spam box.
Whereas when my list was only 3,500 subscribers, very small list in my space, I actually won
an affiliate competition.
I did over $30,000 in revenue in one week with three emails in one video and I out kind
of sold people who have lists of a hundred and 120,000 and greater.
And the reason is because it's more about the relationship you have with the subscribers
on your list than it is the size of your list.
The size of the list is absolutely a vanity metric.
With that said, the other reason, the other key reason why I'm running a double opt in
list is the niche that I'm in.
So in the world of digital marketing and entrepreneurship, it's very common for me to be toking about
cashflow, income, profits, making money, return on investment, and all of those phrases are
really, really close to spam traps.
Okay.
Those are the types of phrases that when flagged by G mail, my emails will go over into the
promotions tab.
And if enough people click report as spam, I'm going to really ruin my deliverability.
And the fact that the niche that I'm operating within has a lot of people all pushing webinars
and over-hype get rich quick things.
My emails may be perceived as overly promotional and people might be more willing hit the report
as spam on my content than someone who is potentially in the cooking space.
So the other niches where this becomes a problem is anything that has to do with finances,
personal finance, making money, whether it's investing, whether it's Forex, whether it's
making money, online, digital marketing, et cetera.
So that was one of the big considerations.
And also my list was brand new.
When you're just getting started, a lot of times certain, um, mailing tools, auto responders
will not actually let you run double opt in until you've proven that you're a trustworthy
sender because they're fearful.
You're just going to go upload a list of random people and start spamming them essentially,
right?
Sending emails that are unsolicited as if you didn't get that kind of, um, the confirmation
that you could actually email them.
So a lot of them, if you're brand new, they're just going to prevent you flat out from going
to a double a single opt in list and they're going to force you to go with a double opt
in list until you prove yourself as a reliable sender who doesn't have huge amounts of spam
complaints.
So I really want to position the single opt in as a great option for people who are new
to email marketing.
It's a great option for anyone who toks about anything in the world of earning income, of
growing a business, of, of profits, of return on investments, et cetera.
Because what's going to happen is you're going to make sure that you're focusing your message
on those individuals who are most interested in what you have.
And really, truly great marketing is more sometimes about making sure the wrong people
don't get your message as it is about getting, making sure that the right people do indeed
get your message.
I love the idea that I learned from Dan Kennedy about putting, um, obstacle courses in front
of people.
So I get asked by friends and family, Hey miles, can you help me get an idea?
I wanna run through, run by you.
And a lot of times people are hoping that I run with their ideas and I always put obstacle
courses in front of people and I make them go do this.
And then that, and then this and then that.
And if they get all of those things done, then come back and tok to me and I happily
will lay out those next steps.
What happens?
People who aren't serious don't make it through the obstacle courses.
And when you have someone who has just given you their email address in exchange for that
free thing, if they're not willing to go to their email and confirm and then go download
your thing, did they really, really want it?
And if they didn't really, really want it or did they really trust you and if they didn't
really trust you, do you actually want them on your list anyways?
The answer for me is simple.
It's a no, I don't.
I want a smaller list.
It's less expensive to maintain, but most importantly, I'm going to get the best deliverability.
I'm shooting to have that list of just those core people who want to hear every message
that I have.
I make it really easy for people to unsubscribe from my list as well because again, it's about
getting the right people.
Now with that said, on the other side of the paradigm, my wife is not in the make money
or the marketing space at all.
She's in a niche, in the world of spirituality and ultimately in this space and a lot of
other spaces, whether it's fitness, whether it's um, kind of the world of spirituality.
It could be cooking, it could be a hobby based, whether it's golf or bowling or golf or whatever
it is, repeated golf obviously.
Um, when you're in those kind of language patterns, it's very rare that the words you
use in emails are going to get you into the, the spam filters and into the promotion filters
because you just, the jargon of the niche isn't such that it's kind of controversial
in the eyes of Google, right?
So you're not saying profits, you're not saying return on investments or cashflow or grow
your business in those types of emails.
So the ability for you to get your emails delivered, right?
The deliverability potential of those niches is often greater.
Excuse me.
So that's the first thing.
Second thing is we are running a lot of paid traffic and I want to make sure that the paid
traffic we are sending our content and our are our messages to number one.
I want to make sure that they see my onetime offer and you can definitely show people your
onetime offer it whether you're doing a double opt in or a single opt in, but on my double
opt in list when they go to that second page, I'm just putting a message that says great,
I've received your request.
Now you have to go confirm your email if you actually want to get the free course.
That's my process.
So I am reminding them visibly that the next step is to go confirm their email cause I
do want the right people onto my list, which means I'm missing an opportunity to display
a onetime offer where I'm giving them a special chance to purchase something.
But since we're buying traffic on my wife's brand, we want to make sure we're displaying
that one time offer and I want to make sure as many people as possible are seeing our
followup sequence.
This followup sequence has been refined over the course of 10 plus years now and it has
a very high conversion rate, is very profitable for us to make sure more people do see this.
But here's what I have going on.
Even though we're running single opt in, I have multiple automations running in the background.
I didn't set this stuff up.
I hired Dave from integrate pro.com who he runs all of my deep integration stuff.
Um, he costs thousands of dollars per month because he's an absolute pro at marketing
automation.
So you're thinking about reaching out to him, make sure you're earning five, 10, 15 grand
a month and you have the ability to afford someone of that kind of caliber.
But what we do is we are monitoring, if they opt in and they go all seven days, it's either
seven or 10 days and they don't open and they don't click.
This is a warning flag, right?
They just opted in for something and now they've disappeared.
So we run a save the subscriber sequence that has some very proven high open rate email,
subject lines and high click through rate body copy, and if they don't open and take
action on those, I scrubbed them from my list.
And then at any point in the cycle with the Regal, I believe it's set to 45 days.
It's either 45 or 60 days.
If they go 45 days or 60 days without opening an email than we remove them from our list
after sending them through that last save the subscriber sequence, it's the same save
the subscriber sequence.
It's three emails that come out three days in a row and they have very, very entiking
and curiosity inducing emails because here's what happens.
Sometimes people change email addresses.
Did you ever have an AOL address that you don't use anymore or do you have a Yahoo address
that you don't use anymore?
Maybe now you're a Gmail or a Google mail type person.
Maybe you're on proton mail because you care about security and you have these other email
addresses that you don't actually open anymore.
Well, here's what's going on.
Those mail providers are monitoring this and when they see emailers like me sending an
email to a dead email box, how does Yahoo know that email box is dead?
Yahoo can tell that person has not opened their email box for five years and if I'm
still emailing that every single day, it kills my deliverability for every other email I'm
sending to an app.
Yahoo address.
Same with AOL, same with Google because the truth is people move on.
These are called spam traps or honeypots, I believe is actually what they're called.
If honey traps, I think they're called honeypots, is what they're called.
If you want to look into this more, but the idea is that all of these email box companies
are monitoring who is blatantly sending email after email after email to people who aren't
even opening their inboxes and then they look at that sender, they look at the IP address
it comes from, and they're dinging these individuals for the deliverability across all of those
Yahoo or Gmail people.
So you want to scrub your list, especially true if you're actually running a single opt
in list.
In fact, I think you need to have a very early scrub date and then obviously you need to
have an ongoing scrubbing system in place to make sure that every 60 days or 90 days
or 45 days or whatever it is for your business, if they're not opening, if they're not engaged,
if they're not there anymore, you need to get them off the list so your messages have
a higher likelihood of reaching the people who are indeed opening your emails.
And really I just put that big filter up at the very front.
That's what a double opt in list does, is I add the obstacle course in the beginning
to number one, make sure I'm only speaking with people who are willing to take some sort
of action because if you're not willing to go a double subscriber, confirm your subscription,
what are the odds you're actually gonna follow through and build a real business online.
They're pretty slim and I just don't have any time or desire to tok with people who
aren't willing to do the work.
Right?
But then again, those people who do take those actions and they do show up and they do open
their emails.
Those are my kinds of people and those are the individuals who I do want to tok with.
When you're running a larger brand that has maybe a broader focus or a broader appeal
to a larger segment and you're paying for traffic and you want to maximize that ROI
and you're not sending a lot of emails that have the potential, having those words in
there that can get you caught up in the spam filters and in those kinds of promotions tab
filters, then it can be a decent time to run a single opt in list.
I've had one marketer friend, um, who says, ah, if you want to make money online, you
run a single opt in list.
And that's just the way it is because the more email subscribers, the more messages,
the more offers in the more money that you make.
But within that world, it can go against you because if you're not cleaning your list,
if you're getting a bad reputation as an emailer, it will affect you across your entire list,
not just that individual, so you're just getting started.
Double opt in is absolutely great.
If you're a seasoned pro and you have marketing automation help or you are a marketing automation
Ninja on your own, you can do that single opt in, but my wife and I grew her list of
the first hundred thousand or so, running it as a double opt in.
It wasn't until we really reinvested in some of this stuff and sort of scale our cold traffic
through paid ads that we decided to go with a single opt in for her, and I'm happy as
a Lark with small lists because I really do believe and I subscribe to the philosophy
that I just want to tok to my true 1000 fans.
Okay?
That's my goal, my whole business model, 115 20,000 subscribers here.
I've got about 12,000 people on my email list and I've got about 500 members inside of my
inner circle right now.
And that's really what I'm filtering out is of all the people on YouTube, then my subscribers,
then my email subscribers and who wants to join my inner circle so I can help them build
a real business.
Because the truth is 99.8% of people on YouTube are never going to build $1 million business
online.
I'm just filtering out to those ones who are, and if you're not willing to double confirm
and double opt in and confirm your email address, the odds of you actually taken all the actions
pretty slim.
And when you take that approach, you can move forward and realize it's a helpful filter
to make sure you're only toking with those ambitious people that doers the ones in your
niche who are willing to do what it takes.
They're not going to confirm their email what they really buy your product, probably not.
Right.
So that's the philosophy.
I hope this has helped you understand.
If you have questions for me, get at me in the comments below.
If you want to see my opt in my process, go to miles becker.com for slash free dash course.
There'll be an image of a book that shows up here on the end screen, and you can just
click on that and that will take you into my opt in so you can get my emails and get
my free course.
And on that note, I'll catch you on the next video.
Thanks for your time.
See you soon.