Do paper opt-ins count?
Thursday, January 4th, 2007Everyone has seen the paper opt-in (newsletter) forms at their local Peet’s Coffee & Tea or have been asked at Williams-Sonoma for their email address. This seems like one of the most legitimate ways of capturing opt-in information. Online anyone can forge an email address to get access to an account or see if they get to an instant coupon page, but what is the value of that offline?
However, when I recently asked the one of the “administrators” over at FIVETEN blacklist if paper opt-ins or those opt-ins that are captured via a contract. Their response back was, it does not count. You have to have electronic closed-loop confirmations with random tokens from both steps of the process.
So the rogue blacklists that are out there are trying to tell marketers how to do business and it should only be in an electronic manner, because you cannot email your paper copies to them (unless you scan and attach to email), but it is still not accepted by them.
When did paper become the least trustworthy form of consent? Now only 5% of marketers use a closed-loop opt-in. We know that using a double-opt-in process improves overall response rate, an important factor, but many businesses are built off of “a numbers game” and single opt in is best in those cases.
Retail businesses rely on paper opt-ins or those captured by a salesperson. Let’s show these type of blacklists that because that is the way they like it, does not mean it is the right way.
Let me know your thoughts on this if you have run up against this.
