You and I will perish but looks like this debate will never end. New rules will come in, new regulations will be enacted and probably they may introduce triple opt-in’s but it looks like email as a marketing tool is here to stay.

Across all my experiments so far I have seen double opt-ins to work better over and over again. When I say better I mean in terms of Conversion, Spam reporting, Rate of opt-outs, Latency and responsiveness. I have tested this in every way possible.

There is a big difference between list latency and list responsiveness and this is controlled not by any technology but by the type of communication and relationship you build over time.

While many marketers talk about list responsiveness, not many are aware of list latency. I think I was one of the first in the industry to talk about it ( bragging a little bit here). I will blog about this on another day.

The time and effort that goes into building a double opt-in list is pretty steep and often times very frustrating. Here are some numbers from my personal blog Srini Saripalli

For every 10,000 visitors who visit my blog for the first time approximately 2000 people opt-in. Out of these 2000 visitors only 800 people click the confirmation link sent to their email.

I could argue that becuase this is a light box the numbers are little skewed, but again when I compare that with a non-intrusive opt-in box similar to what you see in the header of this page the numbers not much different.

So the bottom line is you have no control on who will opt-in, who will stay and who will leave. Relevancy is the key.