Clean Data Recommendations

Configure Confirmed Opt-In

The gold standard for messaging consent is a type of explicit consent called confirmed opt-in or double opt-in. After someone submits your form, they receive a confirmation email that verifies the email address and asks the recipient to click a link indicating that they want to share their information with you.

Using a confirmed opt-in process prevents fraudulent signups and reduces the chances of invalid email addresses entering your database. It also gives recipients a chance to confirm their interest in your brand, which can lead to higher engagement, and lower negative engagement, in the future.

Capture Data with Signup Forms

Create transparent, honest signup forms. Make sure that the signup checkbox is unchecked by default and that it only controls consent for marketing messages. Never combine a consent agreement with another action, such as a purchase or whitepaper request.

Instead, use a consent-specific checkbox. It helps to manage the person’s expectations: describe what’s typically included in your messages and how often you send them. You can even link to an example.

• Marketing Cloud Next: Create and Manage a Form
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: Capture Leads with Forms and Form Handlers
• Marketing Cloud Engagement: Create a SmartCapture Form in CloudPages

Protect Signup Forms from Bots

Bots crawl webpages and submit invalid data to signup forms. Bot-provided email addresses are often invalid, and can quickly lead to negative deliverability and reputation results.

To prevent these invalid signups, add CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, or another verification tool on your forms.

• Marketing Cloud Next: Protect Forms with reCAPTCHA
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: Bot Protection and Forms
• Marketing Cloud Engagement: CloudPages Security Best Practices

Ask Recipients to Allowlist You

In addition to authentication tools, you can always ask your recipients to add your sending email address to their contact list or address book. By allowlisting your email address in this way, they tell their mailbox provider to send your messages to their inbox.

Include this recommendatinos in the footer of every message, or include the request periodically in one of your email body components.

Review Data Regularly

Monitor your engagement metrics at least monthly, or even weekly to quickly identify potential issues in your data or content. Look at your positive and negative outcomes for trends. For example, falling open rates and rising email bounces can suggest a stale data issue. Or, low clicks and high unsubscribes might mean that the content no longer feels relevant.

See Monitoring, Reporting, and Optimization.

Remove Hard Bounces Quickly

When a receiving email server rejects a message because the address is invalid for any reason, we call it a hard email bounce. Keeping email addresses in your data that hard bounce can negatively affect your reputation, and fast.

See Hard Bounce Management.

Ask for Preference Updates

It’s common for someone to sign up for an email list because they’re planning an event or trip, or they’re looking for the perfect item. But after they finish that task, they may not want to hear from you as often or about the same things.

Create a preferences form, share it periodically, and remind recipients that they can update it at any time. When you know more about what someone needs over time, you can send them more relevant content, and increase your chances of high engagement.

See Preference Management and Segmentation.