Ep. 244-🤔DOUBLE OPT-IN: YES or NO⁉️Bar Crawls? Stranger Things?🛸Ask Us ANYTHING

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40We are back for Ask Us Anything from the Do This, Not That podcast. This is our short episode where all week long we get in work questions and we get in really ridiculous questions and we try to tackle one of each. And if you want to submit a question, you just go to jschwedlson.com and there's a button that says podcast. Another one that says Ask Us Anything. Please send us questions because we love it. All right, we got a question in. Let's do the work one first. we got a question from rachel from savannah georgia i've been there then the the tagline for savannah is i believe it's america's most haunted city which is totally ridiculous i don't even know how people watch these shows about ghosts the whole thing is come on you got you probably have a rat in your attic and that's what you hear and maybe you need to go to the eye doctor and you're seeing fuzzy things walking around get out of here with this haunted nonsense anyway Anyway, Savannah, what, not Savannah, your name is Rachel.

1:35I'm so confused. What is your question, Rachel? Jay, we are starting a new newsletter. Should we make it double opt-in? You know, as this year gets rolling, everybody's doing new stuff, new newsletters, new whatever. So it's a great question. Should you make your newsletter or any list that people are signing up for from your site, business or consumer, should you make it double opt-in? Well, first off, let me give you the answer, and then I'm going to tell you what it is. The answer is 100 % no. You should not make your list, your email list, double opt-in, I don't think ever. And I'll give you the exact reasons why and the data behind it.

2:12But first off, what does double opt-in even mean? You all know what double opt-in is. You go ahead and you sign up for an email newsletter, right? You put in your email address to subscribe. And then what happens? You get a confirmation email. And in that confirmation email, it says, hey, click on this link or this button because we want to confirm. And if you don't click on the link or button, then you don't get subscribed to that list. You don't get added to that list if you don't click on that confirmation button. It's considered double opt-in because you're not just saying, hey, I want to get on your list.

2:46You have to then say, I really want to get on your list by clicking that. So you have to do two things, essentially get on the list. But the reason that you don't want to do a double opt-in, first is the obvious reasons. You're going to lose a ton of people. A lot of people are not going to do that secondary step. According to Litmus, which is a big email platform, up to 40 % of people who submit their information do not actually do the follow-up confirmation link. 40 % you'll lose. And according to MailChimp, the giant email sending platform, they found that a staggering 61 % of people never complete the double opt-in sign-up process.

3:23Do you want to lose 61 % of people signing up for a list? Come on, that's ridiculous. Now, what other reasons don't you want to double opt-in? Number one, the confirmation email itself can get caught up in a spam filter. So you're not even giving the person the opportunity to confirm that they want to opt-in. That's ridiculous. They can't even get on the list even if they want to do it the right way. So that's a fail. Okay, what if people are signing up for your list for a time-sensitive offer? They want to take advantage of an offer right now. But first, they need to confirm to get on your list.

3:55This is ridiculous. And it's a confusing user experience. You know, in marketing, we're very close to it. We understand that lists can have a double opt-in mechanism. But the problem is we're too close to it. and the overwhelming majority of people, believe it or not, do not expect the user experience to be that they sign up for something and then they have to confirm it, right? So that's why you're losing up to 61 % of the people. And also, if you have an audience that's global, a lot of regions around the world, they don't do this at all. For example, in Latin America and Asia, they don't do this at all.

4:27So they're not, I mean, the numbers are going to be even worse. And the last you want to do is confuse people. You want to be a good experience out of the gate and some of the biggest and best list and markers on the planet. I'll give you a great example. Social Media Examiner, and by the way, you should get on their list. I love it in terms of a great marketing list. You go into socialmediaexaminer.com, they don't do this. They don't do a double opt-in, and they try to do every best practice humanly possible. So when you look at some of the leaders in the different categories and they're not doing it, there's a reason why.

4:56You can't afford to lose 61 % of your audience. All right, before we get into the ridiculous portion of this podcast, I got to let you know that this podcast is presented by Marigold. Marigold is awesome. They're the exclusive sponsor of this thing. They're my email sending platform. Okay. That's who I press the button with. Whether you're a business marketer, consumer marketer, I send out billions of emails every single year. They have a new guide. It is a guide about loyalty marketing. You want to download this thing. You know, if you don't have loyalty marketing set up in your regular cadence and what you're doing, it's not that hard.

5:29It's not this big expensive thing. You don't need to have a special app. If you go to jschwedelson.com slash Marigold, you can download the free guide to getting started with loyalty marketing from Marigold. And I'm telling you it's worth it. And if you're looking for a new email sending platform, you want to use what I'm using because I love this platform. I've been using it for years. You go to meetmarigold.com. It is the best email sending platform on earth. That's meetmarigold.com. All right, let's get into the ridiculous question we got a question from jesse from baltimore maryland jay i have three this or that questions for you oh no here we go these are always going sideways let's see what we got okay for new year's eve would you rather participate in a new year's eve bar crawl or be at a game night at a home.

6:27First of all, I like games in general. I like playing games. Why not? And bar crawls, I have to tell you, I did a bar crawl a few years back because I do a guy strip every year with my buddies from college. And I had not been on one since college. And I got to tell you, I am not cut out for this because what happens is my friends are a bunch of idiots that we go away with every year. The first bar, you're fine. You have a drink, a beer, whatever. but then like by the third or fourth bar forget it everybody is toast and my friends are acting like the biggest idiots alive i'm like i gotta get out of here these guys are out of their minds and so i think my days of bar crawls are over but game night i'm all in let's go all right next question jay um would you rather live in a reality show like squid game or supernatural world like Stranger Things.

7:18Well, Squid Game is bad because I'm going to die. So I'm going to go with no on Squid Game right out of the gate. Stranger Things is my vibe because that's like in the 80s. And other than probably having to get a bowl cut haircut, which is horrendous, I actually, you know what? I could rock a bowl cut now that I think about it. But yeah, I'd hang out on Stranger Things and I think I'd be the smartest person in the entire town because every time I saw something weird, I'd be like, hey, did you all just see that? that's really weird because every time you watch stranger things like how come nobody's saying x y and z that's always my vibe all right the last one jay would you rather star in a reality show about your life or be the subject or of a viral documentary well first of all that's simple okay i'd rather have a reality show about my life because if it's a viral documentary i did something really bad they don't make these documentaries about people that are crushing it's usually something that's done something really, really bad.

8:14You want to know a fun fact? I tried out for a reality show once. Yes, this is true. When I was in college, the real world was a reality show going on. And the real world was like all these people that were living in a house together and all this stuff. Well, they came to the University of Florida, MTV did, and they were looking for a cast to do real world spring break. And so they had a casting call and I went. You got to go with a group of friends. So I went with my group of friends and we met with the producers. This is true. We sat down and they were like, what would you guys do if you were in the Caribbean on spring break?

8:52And we started rattling off what would go on if we were picked. I think we freaked them out because at the end, the producers were like, what did you like? They were looking at us like we were out of our minds. And I think it's the best thing that could have happened that they didn't pick us because I mean, I don't need that documented. That can't end well. And I probably would have thought I was like a C-level celebrity. And then I would have tried to get on other reality shows because that's what these reality people do. They keep going on more and more and more shows. And then you wind up as a wrestler in the WWE and your life is a disaster.

9:24So I'm glad that didn't happen. So I would pick reality show though. Not that I don't know what we just talked about. As usual. Anyway, thanks for being here. Check out certifiedguru.com. It's our free email certification program. You want to get on that wait list. We're building the wait list now. If you're not on it, you can't get in. We open up later in January. It is awesome. It's an email certification program, 100 % free. Thanks for being here and leave this thing a review. Come on, why not? Later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers.

10:04and hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.