Creating double opt-in email campaigns are important for any marketer trying to stay on the right side of GDPR compliance. This video will walk you through the steps necessary to create a double opt-in campaign. The platform shown is HeadStart Marketing Platform, a fork of Mautic, which is an open-source marketing automation platform.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to a fairly in-depth video about how to create a GDPR-friendly double opt-in email campaign. Now, if you are already here, you probably know what double opt-in means, but just to level set, it means that a new subscriber to your email agrees two times to receive your content.
The first is usually via a form on a website and the second time is by clicking the confirmation link in the first email that is sent out after filling out the form.
Not only does this help prevent your subscriber list from being filled with bots, but it also helps ensure compliance with GDPR standards where the email recipient must actively agree to receive your content.
Now, as with almost everything in marketing automation, there are a dozen ways to do things and I am going to show you how I currently do this in a production environment.
Today, inside of our marketing automation platform we are going to create a form and embed that form on a website. Then we are going to create three segments, sometimes known as ‘Contact Lists’ to hold our contacts at different stages in their short journey to Double Opt-In Status:
One for when they first fill out the form
One for when the system validates the email address
And one for when the contact clicks the CONFIRMATION link.
We are going to create an email with the confirmation link, and
Finally, we are going to create a campaign, or workflow, that automates this process for us.
Let’s get started!
First, I’m going to log into HeadStart Marketing Platform which is a fork of Mautic – which is an open-source marketing automation platform. You may hear me use the names “HeadStart” and “Mautic” interchangeably – just know that they are the same thing for our purposes. And just to be clear, this lesson is applicable to any marketing automation platform so don’t let that stop you from learning!
The areas we need to focus on to make this double opt-in work are Segments (other platforms might call them Contact Lists or somesuch), Forms, Emails, and Campaigns.
Let’s start by creating the segments we are going to need:
- Click segments
- You can see that I already have our segments built out to save time, but let’s create a new one just to see how:
- Click new
- Name your segment
- And if you had a reason too, you could add a filter and any prospects that match those filters would be added to the segment.
- In our case, we don’t need filters because we are using these segments essentially as empty buckets that we fill or empty with an automated campaign, which we will see shortly.
Ok, segments are ready. Let’s move on to forms. Since this isn’t a lesson on forms, I will just provide an overview.
- Click on Forms
- Click New
- In this case, choose Stand Alone because that gives us the option of adding form fillers into a segment.
- At this point, you would build out the form fields such as first name, last name, email address, etc., and match them to fields in the system.
- After you’ve done that choose a Submit Action, which in this case is “Modify Contacts Segments’. So, when a new visitor fills out a form, they will be automatically added to this segment.
Now that we’ve got our form, let’s embed it in a website. Most marketing automation platforms provide javascript embeds that you simply drop into the area of your website that you want the form to render. Grab this code and drop it into the page. Your end result will look something like this page.
Ok, we are almost done making assets, we just need our email. And again, this isn’t a video on how to make emails, so I will just show you the email we are going to use.
Here is our welcome and confirmation email
In this case, I only need the button to link to a specific page on my website that is unique to this confirmation sequence.
OK – let’s bring all of this together and automate the experience using a campaign. Other platforms may call this a workflow or automation, or a journey of some sort, but they are essentially the same concepts where we create a series of automated actions inside of a canvas that can then operate on its own.
I’m going to walk you step by step through this campaign as this is the real magic.
First, click ‘New’ to create a new campaign.
Give it a name, and a description if you like.
Then choose Allow contacts to restart a campaign. This just means that the contact can be re-added to the campaign if necessary (maybe they changed an email address).
Categorize it if you want to stay organized.
Click “Launch Builder” to open up the canvas.
The first thing we have to do is choose a source of contacts that the campaign can act on. In this case, we will use the UNvalidated Segment – remember, these are visitors who filled out the form on the website. So, anyone who filled out the form will be added to the campaign that we are making.
Next, you take an initial action – in Mautic, that can be one of three things:
- A decision that the contact has made, such as to open an email, click a link, visit a page, etc.
- An Action that mautic would take such as SEND an email, Change a Segment, etc.
- Or a Condition, which is essentially the state of a contact field, such as ‘they are a military veteran’.
OK – I’m going to switch over to the already-built campaign so that I can walk you through the steps without boring you completely.
So, I’m clicking into this campaign which is already live and we can see that it is made up of a variety of decisions, actions, and conditions.
Let’s start at the top! Remember, we have the source of the campaign as our UNvalidated email address.
Next, we are going to ask the system to check publicly available MX records to see if the email address is even valid. This will help to prevent emails from being sent to bad email addresses and bouncing. If you get too many bounced emails, then your sender reputation and the deliverability of your emails will be affected, so we want to stop this where we can.
If the email is NOT valid then right out of the gate we are going to use an Action to delete the contact.
f the email IS valid, then we are going to add the contact into the VALIDATED segment that we created earlier and we are going to remove them from the UNVALIDATED segment.
The next step after we validate the email address is to send them the confirmation email.
After which we will look for a “Decision” action from the contact to see if they visited the confirmation page by clicking on the email.
If they did click the button and come to the Confirmation page then we move them to the Double Opt-In Confirmed segment and remove them from the VALIDATED email segment and that’s it! That journey is over.
Now, what happens if they DON’T click the Confirm button right away?
Well, we create a negative branch. We wait one day and then resend the same Confirmation email and again we wait to see if the Confirmation button is clicked and the Confirmation page visited.
Only this time, we give the contact seven days to click the button.
If they click it within those seven days then it’s the same outcome: we add the contact to the Double Opt-In segment, remove them from the Validated segment and the journey is over.
If they do NOT click the Confirm button within 7 days we simply delete the contact.
Now, if you wanted to, you could, after the seven days, send them the confirmation email one last time, and then wait one day before deleting them, but at this point, these decisions are up to you!
And there we have it. How to create a Double-Opt-In Subscription campaign in HeadStart Marketing Platform or pretty much any other marketing automation platform. I hope you learned something that can be put to use and if you have any comments please leave them below. Thank you!