Email-Based Subscription Strategy ... Ends Now



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Email-Based Subscription Strategy ... Ends Now
By Christopher Knight

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If you allow people to subscribe to your email newsletter via email, then today's Ezine-Tips will be addressing you directly. The consequences of the lesson in this tip can dramatically help you to keep your ezine and business from being blacklisted.

First, let me tell you a short and true story:

On Monday, I was reviewing my email subscription data from the previous 24 hours of time and I noticed that I had 2,614 new subscribers who were in "confirmation" mode.

This means that they had requested to be subscribed to one of my newsletters but had not yet confirmed their subscription.

When I drilled even further into the data, over 99% of the 2,614 new subscribers who were in confirmation mode bounced the confirmation message. This means that they never asked to be subscribed in the first place and most likely the origination of the email requests came from spammers or email viruses.

Mind you, this was only a 24 hour period. For the month of November, my email newsletters generated over 52,000 confirmation emails to people who never requested them and of the 1% that actually got delivered; it is most likely that the greater majority never asked to subscribe to my ezines.

This ends today as I have shut down my email join addresses for this list and dozens of others... and will be transitioning 100% of my email newsletters, marketing emails and transactional-based emails to never allow email-based subscriptions again.

Bottom line: Email-based subscriptions as a method has ended.

What is an email-based subscription?

It's an email address that a person can use to subscribe to an email newsletter via email rather than using a web form to fill out. For example: to join Ezine-Tips, you could have sent an email to: join-ezine-tips@ezine-tips.com [but not any more]

What has caused my email "join" addresses to be abused?

For the past 5+ years, the join email address for this newsletter and my other newsletters has been circulating around the Internet. All of them have been harvested by spammers who use text extractors to crawl the web to build a spam email database to spew too. It could have also been picked up by people who have joined my lists in the past and had their computers exploited by an email virus that pillaged their address box.

Why is it bad to allow email-based subscriptions to your Ezine?

So that you don't send hundred, thousands or tens of thousands of false confirmation emails to people who didn't request to join your Ezine or worse: If you are running single opt-in without a confirmation email, you could be signing up people who never wanted to be on your ezine.

Technically, you could also be accused of being a spammer because you are sending emails to people who never requested them even if they and you are unaware as to which email virus or spammers sent the spoofed subscription request.

You can get banned and blocked for sending confirmation emails and actual email newsletter emails to people who didn't request it.

What to do about it today:

Immediately shut down the email alias/address that is used to subscribe people to your email newsletter.
Only give out the web address of your subscription page (you do have one dedicated to your newsletter, right?).

Conclusion: Email-based subscriptions as a strategy is now over

If you are relatively new to ezines, you may be reading today's Ezine-Tips a bit cross-eyed because no one probably ever told you that you could give out an email address and have people subscribe directly to your newsletter without visiting your website. That strategy has been awesome for the past 10+ years it was possible to do so, but the strategy has now become a liability and must be discontinued if you hope to stay off the anti-spam blacklists.

This Ezine-Tip was submitted By Christopher Knight -- Email List Marketing Expert, author and entrepreneur. Get your weekly dose of Email newsletter publishing, marketing, promotion, management, email-etiquette, email usability and deliverability tips by joining the free Ezine-Tips newsletter: http://www.emailuniverse.com/subscribe/.

Ezine-Tips for December 08, 2004

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Email-Based Subscription Strategy ... Ends NowBy Christopher Knight

Email-Based Subscription Strategy ... Ends Now
By Christopher Knight