Email sign-up confirmation page examples and best practices

Do you know your email con­fir­ma­tion rate? If you are seri­ous about your email mar­ket­ing, you prob­a­bly should check it. How many sub­scribers are you losing to a boring, typ­i­cal ESP double opt-in con­fir­ma­tion? With a bit of tweak­ing, your con­fir­ma­tion rate can be improved. Below are a few good exam­ples of email sign-up con­fir­ma­tion pages I’ve stum­bled upon lately. I turned them into 7 action­able, easy-to-implement tips.

1. Introduce yourself

When some­body sub­scribes to your newslet­ter, they indi­cate that they want to know more about you and your busi­ness, they want to read your stuff and maybe even con­nect personally.

The con­fir­ma­tion page is a good place to intro­duce your­self and tell a bit more about your newsletter.

You prob­a­bly haven’t had much space or time yet to talk about your business. This is the right place to start. A great exam­ple of an email confirmation page is Ramit Sethi’s at iwillteachyoutoberich.com.

Info-marketers are a great source of best prac­tices that ecom­merce stores can use. The newslet­ter is often their most prof­itable sales chan­nel, so they know what to do with it. I rec­om­mend sub­scrib­ing to them every time you find one, even if you gen­er­ally don’t like this salesy rich-dad-poor-dad stuff.

Be cre­ative and make your newslet­ter even more desir­able with smart copy and social proof. Ramit uses this “cute­ness” tactic to make you feel sorry for not let­ting him into your inbox.

Ramit Sethi from iwillteachyoutoberich.com shows his sad face, asking you to confirm

2. Add your photo

People are so human! Show them a real photo of the newslet­ter’s author. This is your second step towards bring­ing your per­son­al­ity into the newslet­ter, which is a great way to build rap­port with your followers. Here’s a photo of our store’s newslet­ter author, Tanya. Isn’t she cute?

3. Show what they lose if they don’t confirm

We are afraid of losing. So much so that some­times we lose even more because of this fear. Read Wikipedia’s arti­cle on loss aversion for the sci­en­tific proof, and then make your read­ers afraid of miss­ing your emails. Tell them what useful case stud­ies, white papers and great sto­ries you have up your sleeve. Available only after they subscribe.

4. Give precise instructions

Like Shopify does

5. Show a screenshot of the confirmation email

Like blogtyrant.com does

Show exactly what the con­fir­ma­tion email looks like in their inbox and where to click.

6. Add a link to Gmail search results

What’s more, Ramit has cre­ated a direct link for Gmail users that searches their inbox for his con­fir­ma­tion email:

You can see it if you visit through this link with an email address in it. It’s a good trick to make sure they actu­ally find your email if you were unlucky enough to land in a spam folder.

7. Consider adding urgency

This one is from the info-marketing arse­nal too. But what can I do?

You can use copy or a real timer to add urgency to your con­fir­ma­tion page. We are all lazy, and your sub­scribers even more so. Entice them to act ASAP.

Those were 7 easy steps to power up your email con­fir­ma­tion page. Don’t be lazy, make it fun and per­sonal, and you’ll get better results from your email marketing.