Campaign tutorial: Double opt-in

A commercial email sender is only allowed to send email to addresses that have given their explicit permission to receive this mail: This is known as an opt-in. This also means you are not allowed to buy a list of email addresses or scrape them from the web yourself. When someone signs up for your newsletter or emails about promotions this is known as a single opt-in.

However, the best thing for your reputation is to always use a double opt-in. A double opt-in confirms that a user really wants to receive your email by confirming their subscription, usually in the form of clicking a confirmation link sent to them by email.

Creating a double opt-in with follow-ups

First you need to prepare your database: We recommend making a newsletter selection first. You also need a newsletter field in your database, where we will be using the possible values "no", "single opt-in" and "double opt-in". We also recommend making a landing page on your webpage to show the user that the registration for your newsletter was successful.

Now we can create the follow-up:

  • Go to the database you want to create the double opt-in for and open the follow-up manager.
  • Make a new follow-up with the trigger "Profile created"
  • Use a "Check destination" box first: Check if the your newsletter field is set to single opt-in.
  • Add a match link to a new "Send email" box. Select the template you will use to confirm the subscription.
  • Click the box and create an event handler for a link click. This will make sure that we can handle clicks from the confirmation mail.
  • Add a "Link check" box to check if the click was actually on the confirmation link. You can skip this step if the confirmation link is the only link in your email.
  • Add a link to a new "Update destination" box where you set the value of your newsletter field to "double opt-in".

More information

Now you can start emailing your new newsletter subscribers! The articles below can give you some ideas on how to group your customers in selections and personalize emails just for them.