Agile Business Navigator

If you've been sending a newsletter, you're probably familiar with opt-in and opt-out approaches. You're likely familiar with the heavy hitting approaches that Newsletter Service Providers insist on to protect people that subcribe to your newsletter.

If not – here's how it works. You've got an establish list of 2,000 email readers. But you know that only 1/2 of them actually receive and read your newsletter. You can't guarantee the readership because you don't have a system in place to validate each email delivery and when the email is opened.

You decide that the best action would be to use a service that provides those capabilities. List in hand, off you go to find the best service. Once your service is established, you import your list.

Now for the bad news. Even though you've diligently gathered your list with opt-in methods – you provided a form for your subscribers to enter their info and you sent them a validation email in case someone nasty signed them up – most reputable service providers are going to require that each of your existing subscribers be re-subscribed. As you import them, they'll get an email asking them to confirm their subscription.

But you know how that works! Susie isn't at that email anymore, Joe can't get HTML emails, Betty has you in her junk mail, and John just skips over your email like he does everytime. So your list of 2,000 quickly dwindles to 1,000 and you think – aak! No one loves me anymore.

One suggestion is to make an official campaign out of the request. Send out a notification in your newsletter that you'll be changing providers and what they should expect in email as you do.

Offer a free download when they verify their email. Include a tell-a-friend option so you'll add more users.

Put notification of the change on your webite in case people miss it.

Check your old list for the folks that didn't respond and send them another request before you take them off the list.

Any other ideas out there?