A common issue some people have with Mautic is how to create a double opt in email list. Some time ago, Mautic published a post on how to do this, but I’m going to show you a slightly different way.
What is double opt in?
Double opt in is the recommended method for building email lists. With a single opt-in, there are potential issues that any good email marketer wants to avoid, such as mistyped email addresses or people subscribing others without their permission.
With double opt in, after a user has submitted their email address, they are sent an email that contains a link they need to click to be subscribed. This helps ensure that the email address is actually theirs, and gives you explicit permission to send them marketing emails.
How to set up double opt in in Mautic
Although Mautic doesn’t have double opt-in as a function (yet), It’s relatively simple to set up. And I’ll show you one way right here.
To effectively set up double opt in, we’re going to need to create a few things:
- a form to capture the email address
- two segments to separate who has and who hasn’t confirmed
- a landing page to track confirmations, and
- a campaign to tie it all together
First, let’s create the segments. We need one for contacts who haven’t yet confirmed:
and one for those who have:
Next, we’ll create the form we’re going to use to collect the email addresses. Unlike the Mautic post referenced above, I’ve used a standalone form, not a campaign form. The reason for this is that I want to send the email asking them to confirm their email address straight away, instead of waiting for the campaign to trigger.
Note that the only field here is the email address, and there’s a reason for that. Statistically, people are less inclined to fill out forms that ask for too much information, and all we really need to send them a newsletter is their email address.
Now, we’ll add actions to the email form. What we’re going to do is add them to the Pending segment, and send the email asking them to confirm their email address.
Next, we need to create the landing page we’re going to use to track whether the contact has confirmed their email address. Note that this doesn’t need to be complicated, in fact the first one we used at Accent looked like this:
The next step is to create the campaign. It’s a very simple campaign that looks like this:
We take the Pending segment and check to see if they’ve confirmed their email address by visiting the landing page. If they have, they get removed from the Pending segment and added to the Confirmed segment.
And that’s all there is to it.
I did it that way, but the confirmation email is only delivered after the campaign has been updated and is not being delivered immediately.
On the other hand, if the form has an action to send the confirmation email it will already be sent immediately after the lead fills it, however as the email is delivered immediately it already clicks the link (low active in my case) before the campaign run, but I could not get the campaign to recognize that it downloaded the email asset that was sent by the form, only recognizes if the person downloads the asset after it has entered the campaign, have any suggestions of what to do?