Maintaining a quality email list is vital to the success of your marketing campaigns. Confirming that a lead is opted in to receive your content is ideal, since a lead signs up on your page and then confirms their interest in your company by responding to an email. This does not end once you import contacts. You will need to constantly maintain lists of contacts who have opted in and ensure that those who have not—or even those who have unsubscribed—are not part of your email sends. This article will detail how to create processes for maintaining confirmed opt-in statuses.
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Creating Custom Opt-In Content
To create a custom opt-in process, you will first need to create an opt-in email. Using opt-in processes validates the email address a lead has provided, in addition to verifying that they would in fact like to receive further communications. This process is useful in requesting that a lead join a mailing list.
To create custom opt-in content, do the following:
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Creating Manual Lists
You should always be reviewing your lists of leads to ensure that you are remaining compliant with SharpSpring's email sending standards. Manually reviewing your leads lets you keep those who have not opted in or unsubscribed from receiving unwanted emails.
Manual lists are important to the overall opt-in process. They house those leads that do not satisfy the opt-in status and let you confirm lead statuses as a whole.
Ideally, you should review this list on a regular basis. That way, you can account for the leads that are on the list. You cannot send emails to these leads without risking your sending reputation or otherwise being non-compliant with best sending practices.
Creating Rules-Based Lists
Rules-based lists will dynamically remove a member when the lead no longer meets any lead action rules. These lists can be configured to remove those leads who have not opted in to receive your emails.
To create a rules-based list that focuses on leads who have opted in to receive your content, do the following:
Creating Action Groups
Once you have created your lists, you can create the heart of your opt-in automation: a branching action group. When created and activated, this action group will send unsubscribed leads to your manual list, and those leads who have opted in to your rules-based list.
Adding the First Branch: Email Action and Time Delay
Once you have created the action group, it will be empty. You will need to add the automation branches and filtering logic. As this action group will be doing two separate things at once, it will need two distinct automation branches. The initial part of the first automation branch will be based on leads responding within a set amount of time to your created opt-in email. To create the first branch of the action group, do the following:
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Note: Consider setting the time delay to be something close a week. This will give your leads an appropriate length of time to see your email and respond to it. If a lead does not respond to an email within a week, they are not likely to at all.
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Completing the First Branch: Unsubscription Status and Manual Lists
At this point, the first branch will be open-ended with a time delay. That time delay, as the name implies, delays an action by a specific amount of time.
This branch will utilize this time delay to add to your manual list those contacts who have not read your email or otherwise not opted in to receive your content within a set period of time.
To complete this branch, do the following:
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Adding the Second Branch: Gated Email Trigger
To complete this action group, you will need to add a second branch. This branch will send all leads that have opted in to your rules-based list. This branch is separated from the first branch by a gated trigger. Gated triggers only activate if the trigger's condition is satisfied by the contact already being part of the parent workflow. To add this branch, do the following:
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Important: If you select exactly in the Comparison drop-down menu, the action group will not function as intended. This is because if a lead has satisfied the action group's logic once before, this counts as exactly once. This means the lead will not go through the trigger and will be automatically unsubscribed.
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Completing the Second Branch: Opt-In Status and Lists
The gated trigger will need an action. This action will keep those contacts who have opted in to receive your content from your manual list, and add them to your rules-based list.
To complete the branch and add the action, do the following:
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Creating Workflows
Adding Triggers and Action Groups
Once you have created the workflow, you can begin customizing it to request that leads opt in to receiving your content. This is done by:
- Adding an initial trigger that starts the automation when a lead does a specific thing
- Inserting your created action group that sends opt-in emails and manages your opt-in list
To add a trigger and action group to the created workflow, do the following:
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Note: If your action group is inactive, it will not be able to be selected.
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Regarding Multiple Initial Triggers and Different Workflows
The fills out the form trigger represents the most common way people can request your content. This is because users have to interact with this form and purposefully fill it out in order to request your content. This does not mean that you cannot use other triggers to create opt-in workflows or otherwise filter leads into specific lists.
You can use any relevant trigger to start this workflow, such as when users visit a specific landing page or when they view a certain email. You could, in turn, use any combination of those triggers in the same workflow to start the action group. SharpSpring recommends using the action group in different workflows, however. This is because you can see which leads were filtered by the individual workflows.