Opt-In Best Practices

Do You Have Explicit Opt-In?

Explicit opt-in means a customer or subscriber told you directly that they want to hear from your company or brand via email.

These examples are acceptable forms of explicit consent:

• Contacts who submitted a form on your website to receive emails for sales and promotions
• Contacts who filled out a paper or electronic sign-up sheet specifically for your email newsletter

Marketing Cloud Engagement customers agree to only send emails to subscribers who have directly subscribed in compliance with the Anti-Spam policy included in their contract.

Examples of Opt-In That Don’t Qualify

• Contacts purchased, rented, borrowed, or otherwise obtained from a third-party list don’t qualify as explicit opt-in. Some lists advertise themselves as having obtained opt-in consent, but the opt-in isn’t specific to your company. Contacts obtained through purchased or rented sources are highly likely to bounce, unsubscribe, mark emails as spam, and cause blocklistings.
• Membership or organization lists are considered third-party lists, regardless of any expectations set at the time the list was collected.
• Personal business contacts from a previous company haven’t yet given explicit opt-in. Contacts who gave you consent for your previous company don't transfer over to your new company.
• Contacts who submit a form on another brand's website don’t meet the opt-in requirements.
• Contacts from lead providers or data enrichment tools don’t qualify as explicit opt-in. You can use data enrichment tools to build out a contact profile. However, that information can’t be used to source contact email addresses for emails sent from the marketing email tool.
• A past relationship with friends, families, and past colleagues doesn’t mean they consent to bulk communication from your new brand. Ensure that they’ve provided one of the acceptable methods of consent before sending them a marketing email.
• Contacts who approached your booth and provided their information through a badge scan, gave you their business card, or converted on a form or sign-up sheet meet the opt-in requirements. However, a contact's info obtained from a list of attendees provided by the event or trade show organizer doesn’t count as opt-in consent. The contact provided their email address to the organizer, not your brand.
• Employers can provide a list of their employees' work-based email addresses for employer-provided benefits, such as health insurance. To decrease the risk to your email health, consider contacting employees in a one-to-one email to gain opt-in consent, and enable double opt-in to confirm their consent.
• Though opt-in is transferable in a brand merger or acquisition, not all contacts expect to hear from your new brand. To protect your email health, notify customers of the brand acquisition and allow them to reconfirm their opt-in status for the new brand.
• Direct any contacts you meet in person to an electronic or paper conversion. Verbal consent isn’t verifiable and doesn’t meet requirements for sending marketing emails.
• If you email an address that's associated with a company, department, or group, it's often forwarded to multiple people instead of a specific individual. As a result, you can’t gain verifiable consent from a role-based email address.

Best Practice Tips for Sign-Up Forms

Most opt-ins for commercial mailings are driven from your website sign-up form or shopping cart purchase process.

Use a transparent and customer-driven opt-in process. Prechecking the opt-in box isn’t recommended. This process can cause complaints from subscribers and potentially register false addresses in your database.

To minimize complaints, set expectations at sign-up for how often you engage customers. You can even allow customers to set a communication frequency preference to help drive additional sign-ups.

Use CAPTCHA to prevent bot sign-ups. Bad actors can exploit forms and use your subscriber list to harm your company’s reputation.

Consider including a hidden text field in your form. Bots scan forms and complete all available fields, but your customers don’t see hidden fields. Then you can suppress subscribers that show hidden field values.

Consider using double opt-in at time of sign-up. A double opt-in campaign requires your subscribers to confirm their email address by clicking a link in an email they receive after subscribing. Double opt-in ensures that the subscribers on your list want to be there and minimizes the number of invalid email addresses on your list. This method also helps keep spam complaints to a minimum. Looking for more guidance around re-engagement or reconfirmation email campaigns? Check out this post from our partners at Inbox Monster on the subject.

Summary

To help prevent your company from becoming an unwilling spamming accomplice, follow all of the opt-in guidance. More importantly, these precautions help you protect your sending reputation. Here are some tips on including elements in your sign-up page that drive conversion:

• A headline that grabs attention
• A subheader that explains the benefits of sign-up
• Tease a solution to a problem
• Social proof or a testimonial of the added value
• A simple form to collect email addresses. Use CAPTCHA at a minimum and consider a hidden text field that catches bot sign-ups.