FAQ: Should you use double opt-in to validate leads?

We have a crowdfunding course called The Crowdfunding Essentials, and often get a bunch of really great questions from people who take the course and who want to know more. In these very short FAQs we'll answer some. Hopefully, these answers prove useful to you too. Check out the video below if you'd rather watch than read the answer to this question.

Read the previous question here.

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Is it a good idea to apply double opt-in to validate leads when you're in the lead generation phase?

What are double opt-ins? Well, say you have a landing page where you collect emails, where people can leave their email address and click subscribe. What you can do then in your email marketing software like Klaviyo, for example, is to either choose to add them straight to your mailing list and have them receive your email marketing.

Alternatively, you can have them first do a double opt in, meaning that Klaviyo will send them a quick email asking: "are you sure you wanna subscribe to this? Please click here to confirm".

We typically don't enable this because you see a high drop off, but it's a great way to warm up your domain. And, also, it's a great way to see if your audience is truly engaged.

So, you might want do it to warm your domain or you might want to do it if you want to double check the quality of those leads. This, again, is very nuanced. I'll tell you two strategies that I typically do.

If we do on Facebook lead collection, meaning that people do not go to a landing page, but they sign up directly within the Facebook ad, this typically gives really cheap cost per lead, but the quality of those leads may vary. In that case, we go for a double opt in, meaning they see the Facebook ad or the Instagram ad within the Instagram or Facebook environment. They leave the environment and automatically get that synced into the Klaviyo back-end, and then Klaviyo sends an opt-in email to confirm they really want to be on that list.

That's a great strategy. The other way that you can do it is, for example, have them redirected to a landing page, already testing whether they're kind of high intent. The next email you send them is not a double opt-in, but it's an email where we ask them to undertake another call-to-action. Maybe we ask them to down pay a dollar in the reservation funnel, or we ask them to join a Facebook group.

We have these metrics when doing lead collection, which decides which actions to take or to ask of our subscribers since this is really what lead generation and lead validation is all about.