Everyone is overwhelmed with spam these days. If you use email to communicate with your prospects and clients (and you definitely should be!) the last thing you want is to get flagged as a spammer. One of the best ways to prevent this from happening is to use a double opt-in sign-up.
Double opt-in simply means that after someone signs up for your list — whether you’ve captured their email address in a notebook and enter it into your email marketing application or they complete a signup form on your website — they are sent an email message that asks them to confirm their subscription request. This is most often done by clicking on a link or by replying to the confirmation message itself. This prevents someone from arbitrarily adding email addresses that are either invalid or belong to someone other than the person completing the form.
The confirmation message also serves another purpose: it lets people know the name of the list, who it will be coming from, and usually contains instructions on how to add your address to their whitelist so that it won’t inadvertently end up in their spam folder.
As a courtesy, make sure all emails you send to your list include unsubscribe instructions. Should someone decide that they no longer want to be on your list, give them an easy way to opt-out. Otherwise, they just might start marking your emails as spam.
