Community Forum

Blank Email Status and Double Opt in

Contacts Email
#1

Our Newsletter emailing list has a lot of contacts with “blank” email status. We have paid to have the list cleaned before but this message seems to pop up once every few months or so saying that we have too many contacts with a blank email status. We have primarily been getting people to sign up using the website form and have not been importing or manually entering a large number of contacts so I’m not sure why we keep getting this message, is there a way to fix this issue without having to clean the list every few months?

Additionally, I want to get as many of these contacts as possible to double opt in. It seems there’s supposed to be a system email that would go out after they sign up by the website that asks them to confirm their email address but I’m not sure how to set that up, and I’m not sure how to get contacts who have signed up for the mailing list a while ago to double opt in. Any help would be appreciated!

#2

Have you read this document yet?

https://documentation.vin65.com/Contacts/Email-Documents/Email-Statuses

#3

Yes I saw that. It says “a contact will be blank if the contact was imported, the contact was manually added through the admin panel, or if the contact was pushed into winedirect through a 3rd party vendor”. We haven’t been doing any of these things which is why I was confused that we keep having so many contacts with the blank status.

In regards to double opt in, it says that contacts will receive a system verification email with a double opt in link. Is this something that goes out automatically or do I need to set this up? And is there a way to send this out to contacts who may have joined the newsletter a while ago to try to get them to double opt in?

#4

Hi @Info1 - There is a System Email (when a specific action takes place (new club sign up, new order is placed, etc), an email document that directly relates to that action will be automatically sent out) that exists for double-opt in verification. In this circumstance, this email allows customers to double opt into receiving marketing emails (mass emails). The send for this email is triggered when a customer fills out a form containing an opt in checkbox. You can review the documentation on that here.

To have someone take a look at and clarify the set up of your system emails, I recommend reaching out to support@winedirect.com, and one of our team members can help!

#5

@kari.scott that was a very helpful link thank you! That answers some of my questions but also raises more.

I’ve set up the opt in checkbox on our newsletter form so people can trigger the “email verification” system email, and I see now where I can send that email to a list in order to get people who signed up a while ago to double opt in.

It looks like the reason we had so many newsletter contacts with blank email status is because our “contact us” form was tied to the newsletter contact type. So people were sending us questions and getting put into our newsletter list without meaning to. I added the opt in checkbox to the “contact us” form so people have the option to opt in to the newsletter list, but it seems like as long as that form is tied to the newsletter contact list it will add the customers info to the newsletter contact list, even if they don’t check the opt in box. However, not tying the form to the newsletter list means that a customer won’t be added to the newsletter list even if they check the opt in checkbox. I don’t want people to be added to the newsletter list without realizing that they’re signing up for our newsletter, but I want to have the option to sign up there. How can I do that? And how do I add the opt in checkbox to our store’s checkout page?

#6

Hi @info1 - glad I could help!

If this form is associated with the Contact Type ‘Newsletter’, then every person that submits their information on this form will have the Newsletter Contact Type. You can remove that from this form to avoid incorrectly labelling submissions. To collect Newsletter subscriber information, I would recommend pointing them, instead, directly to a newsletter sign up form, to avoid any confusion. Some further reading may prompt a preferred solution, I would recommend checking out this link: Form Builder

To add the ’ Opt In’ checkbox on your store’s checkout page, access your Website Settings > Contacts > tick off ‘Show Subscribe Checkbox On Checkout’. Please feel free to email us for help, as we always advise that changes in this section should not be taken lightly and can cause great adverse issues on your website and/or POS.