The 5 Best SEO Companies of 2020

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Anywhere you find a cube of sugar in the open, you’ll find ants. 

Today, the SEO service providers’ industry, valued over $65 billion, is like a cube of sugar. It’s why you’ll find countless SEO companies scrambling for a piece of that sugary cake. 

And where does that leave you, a business owner eager to reach Google’s top pages, generate qualified traffic, and drive sales?

Insanity!

With all this confusion, I sense you came here pondering: 

• How do I filter vetted SEO companies?
• How can I find a top SEO company that doesn’t need ads to rank its website organically?

You’ll find the answer to those questions here. 

And that’s not all. 

You’ll also see the SEO companies that go beyond vanity metrics and deliver real business results.

The 5 Top SEO Companies in The World

1. Neil Patel Digital (best for SEO content marketing)
2. Voice SEO (best for Voice search) 
3. ReachLocal (best for local SEO) 
4. FATJOE (best for backlinks’ acquisition)
5. OuterBox (best for eCommerce SEO) 

In the past, you could hire any Tom and Harry to stuff keywords into a page or website you wanted to rank, and it’ll make its way to Google’s 1st page.

Not anymore. 

In short, the constant evolution of SEO has reached a tipping point where ranking alone doesn’t guarantee business results—qualified traffic, leads, and sales. 

To get the most out of any SEO investment today, you need a holistic strategy. 

And a holistic SEO strategy must blend your website code, information architecture (IA), and content marketing with context to not only make your business discoverable online but valuable to customers.

Take this guide you’re reading, for example. If it wasn’t valuable to you, would you still be reading?

You’re experiencing excellent SEO execution at play here. 

Done well, it drives relevant website visits. But most importantly, it uses high-quality content to engage and convert visitors into leads and customers.  

I’m confident the best SEO companies we reviewed below will do no different. Hire any of them, and you’ll attract and convert visitors into leads and customers.

#1 Neil Patel Digital – Best For SEO Content Marketing 

Yeah, we’re tooting our own horn, and it’s not because charity begins at home. 

We’ve earned our place on this list. 

First things first, Neil Patel Digital was founded by hardcore marketers who walk the talk, and not some random wannabe. If you type “SEO strategies” into Google from anywhere in the world, you’ll find well-crafted content by our Co-founder, Neil Patel, on the 3rd and 4th organic positions: 

And that’s but the tip of the iceberg. 

We generate millions of organic search traffic—about 3.5 million to be precise, to my blog. No ads, only through SEO-optimized content marketing:

As you can see from the snapshot above, through these efforts, our Co-Founder has accumulated more than 1.7 million organic keywords with over 3 million websites across the globe linking back to his content pieces. 

To build a rock-solid SEO content marketing company you can rely on, I also partnered with other marketing veterans to form Neil Patel Digital:

Together, the executive team here in Neil Patel Digital has garnered over five decades of hands-on experience. And this excludes other top-level, in-house marketing managers. 

In short, SEO-optimized content marketing is one of the prime reasons customers, from startups to enterprise brands, trust Neil Patel Digital to deliver top-notch search engine optimization strategies: 

If you’re just starting with search engine optimization or seek better results, it’s best to start with content marketing. 

Content is the bedrock that drives all other online marketing campaigns. 

It’s how you got here; it’s how your customers will find you, too. 

And not only is SEO-optimized content marketing Neil Patel Digital’s core offering, but we’ve also developed battle-tested programs we can bet our life on: 

Since you’re still here, get your free consultation with Neil Patel Digital here. 

#2 Voice SEO – Best For Voice SEO

No, this company didn’t name themselves Voice SEO for the fun of it. They’re the #1 ranked voice SEO company by TopSEOs. 

And that’s for a reason. 

Voice SEO took it upon themselves to study the trends surrounding how people use spoken commands—instead of typing words to query the search engines. From there, they discovered the ever-increasing use of voice search and positioned themselves as the go-to company for voice SEO.

If you own any of Siri, Google Echo, or Alexa devices, or you know someone who does, that should give an idea of the growing importance to optimize your website for voice. 

But, if you don’t, I’ll quickly let you in on it. 

Over 31% of smartphone users across the world use voice technology at least once weekly. Another research projected 50% of all online searches in 2020 to be voice-based. And by 2022, over 55% of households are expected to have voice search-enabled devices. 

These stats all point to one direction: The time to optimize your website for voice search is now. 

And that’s where Voice SEO, as the name suggests, comes in. 

This company started as a small team of SEO experts focused on putting their SEO skills to good use, helping businesses like them to grow. 

Through this intense passion for excellence, Voice SEO followed the highest standards in the industry, particularly in voice search engine optimization. 

Although there are no client testimonials to their name, they have garnered accreditations, which shows they know their onions to deserve a place on this list: 

#3 ReachLocal – Best For Local SEO 

ReachLocal is the go-to company for strategic local SEO executions. And their experience, results, and high-value partnerships speak for itself.

Founded in 2004, their expertise in the local SEO niche has generated over 201 million local leads for about 19,000 clients worldwide. 

With offices in five continents, they’re a Google Premier Partner, and Bing Ads Certified specialists, and others. ReachLocal proudly partners with Google, Yelp, Yahoo!, Bing, and Facebook to help businesses optimize their local search engine optimization strategies and drive in-store customers. 

Local SEO Companies, a domain that vets and ranks top local SEO practitioners, ranked ReachLocal as the best for local SEO strategies. 

And not only that, across several review sites, this company’s experience and attention to detail have seen them receive 4.5/5-star ratings from happy customers: 

#4 FatJoe – Best For Backlink Acquisition 

Search engines interpret the relative importance of your web pages and websites as a whole, using the number of backlinks pointing to them. 

In order words, the more backlinks you acquire, the more the search engines see your site as authoritative. 

And the more it’ll rank your site over those of your competitors for competitive keywords. 

When it comes to acquiring backlinks for SEO, FATJOE comes highly recommended by us. They’ll help you generate high-value backlinks, and you can rest assured because even other SEO agencies turn to them for the same. 

FATJOE has grown to become one of the world’s largest outsourced link building agencies, serving over 5,000 clients worldwide.

When you sign up for FATJOE’s SEO link building services, you get premium access to every tool you need: A dashboard to manage and track your orders, and their Blogger Outreach product to find and reach relevant websites to build links from. 

About 97% of customers who use FATJOE rates them a 4.5/5, and even though they’re more positioned for agencies—because they do link building a lot.

#5 OuterBox – Best for eCommerce SEO 

OuterBox, an SEO and performance marketing company focused on eCommerce brands, is our pick for eCommerce SEO. 

If you own an eCommerce website and seek a talented group of dedicated people to power your business through the search engines, you should look OuterBox’s way. 

Founded in 2004, this company earned the list of Inc. 500 fastest growing companies in the US, having served hundreds of customers across several eCommerce sectors. 

Their clientele speaks for itself: NewAir, AtlasOil, JetDock, UCFS, and others. 

And it doesn’t matter which eCommerce platform you’ve built your business with. Be it WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Drupal, or others; you can rely on OuterBox for effective eCommerce search engine optimization: 

5 Characteristics That Make a Great SEO Company

You’ll find hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO companies out there.

So, let’s say you wanted to go out of our vetted list to find one for yourself. What are the characteristics that make a great SEO company you should be looking out for? 

They are as follows. 

1. Experience and Process for Implementing SEO

When it comes to SEO these days, anyone with a laptop, access to the internet, and a WordPress-installed blog can boast of being an SEO company. 

What you won’t see behind those claims, however, is the experience and process they take to deliver results. 

You should always lookout for this. 

Scroll their website, do a simple Google search and see if they show up on the search engine’s organic positions. If they don’t, it means they have little to no experience nor implemented what they claim to deliver. 

Can you give what you don’t have?

Likewise, a fundamental characteristic of a great SEO company is that they have experience implementing SEO for themselves first. 

And they have a process, showing you how they go about getting results: 

2. An Impressive Portfolio

The idea of showing off portfolios has become a characteristic of great SEO companies today. And the reason for this is simple. 

They’re proud of the businesses they’ve helped increase rankings on Google and driven traffic to get leads and sales. 

But, this idea to show off their portfolio does you more good. 

Scroll through it, and you’ll see the kind of clients they’ve worked with or frequently work with. From here, decide if you want to be in that mix and get similar results. 

For example, at Neil Patel Digital, here are some clients in our work portfolio:

3. Thought Leadership 

SEO is always evolving. 

Today it’s Google’s RankBrain. Before you know it, it’s Panda. And just when you thought that one would stay, Hummingbird hits you right in the face. 

And those are major updates. In one year alone, Google makes upwards of 3,200 updates to its search engine algorithms. 

How can you—one focused on managing your business, keep tabs with all these changes?

You need thought-leadership, and that’s a characteristic of great SEO companies. 

Look out if they’re keeping up with SEO best practices as they evolve, and sharing tips to help businesses adjust for maximum impact: 

4. Real Life Testimonials

Who wouldn’t toot his own horn?

Definitely not search engine optimization companies. Developing winning SEO strategies, managing its implementation, and guiding teams on its execution to generate results is hard. 

When an SEO company does all this hard work and gets those fantastic results, their customers reward them with testimonials, having got value for their money. 

Thus, sharing real-life testimonials is a characteristic you’ll find with most great SEO organizations: 

5. A Complete Team of Leaders, Managers, and Executors

Just as no man is an island, turning SEO ideas into higher rankings, website visitors, leads, and sales needs a diverse team of specialists. 

When an SEO company makes too many promises without showing you the team to make it happen, hold tight. Why? 

Because that’s a red flag they’ll charge you a premium and outsource your job for pennies on the dollar overseas or Fiverr for $5. 

From strategic leaders to managers and different teams of specialists to execute your strategy, great SEO companies are proud to show off their amazing team members: 

What to Expect from a Great SEO Company

So far, I’ve listed our recommended SEO companies and highlighted the characteristics that make a great search engine optimization company, suppose you decide to find one yourself. 

Either way, after making a choice, what should you expect from a great SEO company?

1. Discovery session 

Your decision to work with an SEO company may come from the need to rank your site higher, generate more traffic, drive sales, or all three. 

But, no business case and needs are exactly the same. The SEO strategies that worked for another company won’t work automatically for yours. 

Great SEO companies, from experience working with different organizations, know this. Thus, they’re not quick to send proposals. Instead, to help you, they allow you to share your unique needs and business case in a discovery session: 

2. Research and Recommendations

After sharing your needs and business case with an SEO company, they take what you tell them and use their expertise to conduct in-depth research. 

They do this to get the right context needed to bring themselves on the same page with you, your target audience, and industry. 

After they’ve performed this research, expect a great SEO company to share their recommendations of what you need to do to get maximum results. This, they can do over another discovery call or via email. 

3. Contract with Deliverables

If your discovery session and follow-up conversations with an SEO company looks like a good fit for the exchange of mutual value, you’ll receive a contract for your business. 

However, a great SEO company won’t only send you any contract. In it, expect to see a detailed list of what they’ll deliver, how they plan to deliver it, and when you should start expecting results. 

4. Onboarding, Project Scoping, and Management

To help you, an SEO company would need access to some of your assets. 

Depending on your work scope, this could include your in-house staff, website or blog access, your analytics login codes, etc. 

So, to forge a smooth partnership with your company, expect your team to go through a detailed onboarding process from a great SEO company. 

From this onboarding process, they’ll also scope your project, timelines, and establish an understanding of how they’ll manage your project. 

Conclusion: Give SEO Time

SEO takes time before its results start to manifest. 

You should start expecting results from SEO in about 100 days. 

Any company that promises you overnight successes doesn’t know SEO well enough or what they’re doing. 

In short, great SEO companies don’t make wild promises; they show you what’s possible and how they’ll work hard to achieve it. 

If you give them time, you’ll start seeing results—qualified traffic, leads, and sales. 

And once things pick up, it’s like a flywheel, always getting better as long as you continue to work with a great SEO company.

The post The 5 Best SEO Companies of 2020 appeared first on Neil Patel.

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9 Ways to Improve Organic Reach and Beat the YouTube Algorithm

As the most-viewed site globally, YouTube is a must-visit destination for marketers and content creators looking to increase audience reach.

While it is possible to optimize YouTube SEO to score top results, without an understanding of the YouTube algorithm, SEO alone won’t manifest videos on a potential viewer’s suggested video list.

YouTube’s product chief underlined the reality of the impact of suggested-to-watch videos in an interview, noting 70% of a user’s time spent on the platform was dictated by the company’s suggested video algorithm.  

70%. That number is huge.

To truly execute a successful YouTube marketing strategy, improve organic reach, and take advantage of that massive percentage, you need in-depth familiarity with the unique YouTube algorithm. Here are nine ways to increase your organic reach on YouTube.

The YouTube Algorithm’s Evolution

What began as a venture capital-funded technology startup in 2006 is now our go-to spot for all things video.

Although YouTube itself has undergone significant changes over the past fifteen years, its algorithm has, by far, been its most dynamic feature.

Before 2012, YouTube charted video success by the number of views alone, regardless of the length of viewing. This singular YouTube algorithm led to a profusion of clickbait videos that relied upon misrepresentative headlines and thumbnails to earn views, with most audience members jumping ship immediately.

Later the same year, YouTube began measuring success through view duration, a metric that rewarded longer-viewed videos with increased search promotion.

Today, we still see the roots of the platform’s infancy in the current YouTube algorithm, which draws heavily on view duration as a component of a video’s ranking.

How Does the YouTube Algorithm Work?

While YouTube’s stated mission is to give everyone a voice and a window to explore the world, one of YouTube’s lower-ranking goals is to engage viewers for extended amounts of time, maximizing the number of advertisement interactions.

Why does this secondary goal matter? Because YouTube suggests videos that satisfy this goal of increased exposure to advertiser content.

YouTube uses an algorithm based on three main qualifiers: relevance, engagement, and quality.

To benchmark relevance, YouTube explores the pairing of title, description, tags, and content with an individualized search query.

Engagement aggregates the number of responses from users, including watch time, engagement, and frequency.

Quality rating is determined by a channel’s ability to demonstrate trustable authority.

In addition to these three qualifiers, YouTube’s algorithm also draws on a user’s historical views and a video-specific assigned score, one that weighs both novelty and frequency of channel uploads, among other attributes.

This combination of statistics allows YouTube to recommend videos that speak directly to a viewer’s interests, continuing a narratively static viewing material chain.

These videos will appear in six different locations on the YouTube platform:

1. Search results
2.  Recommended Streams (as shown in the screenshot on the right side in the below screenshot)
3. Notifications
4. Channel Subscriptions
5. Trending Streams
6. YouTube Home Page

Much like any search algorithm, YouTube’s ranking system is in constant flux, evolving and adapting in an ongoing attempt to better define and satisfy user engagement.

How do I Improve my Organic Reach on YouTube?

Armed with a concrete understanding of how the YouTube algorithm works, it’s time to break down how you can harness your newfound knowledge to increase your organic reach.

1. Keywords and Metadata

YouTube made it explicitly clear in their algorithm explanation that content-relevant keywords, descriptions, captions, and tags all matter when you’re optimizing videos for search. Make sure you do your keyword researching using a tool like Ubersuggest to make sure you’re mentioning terms users are looking for.

By writing compelling, keyword-rich titles and descriptions, you increase your chances of attracting audience members’ attention and increasing your video’s search visibility.

Check out this post if you need to brush up on SEO basics. 

2. Optimized Description

The quote “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” is true of YouTube just as much as life.

Ensure audience engagement by crafting attention-getting copy that not only attracts your potential audience but also harnesses your keywords’ power.

YouTube slants toward the verbose, advocating long descriptions, so don’t be afraid to go the extra wordy mile with them.

Although your prospective viewer will only interact with the first few lines of the description unless they select the “show more” option, those few short lines are valuable real estate when it comes to attracting your audience.

3. Video Transcription

Closed captions not only help those with accessibility needs, but allows users to watch videos in silence.

To make the most of closed captions, upload self-created subtitles. By uploading these yourself, you ensure that, when these captions are indexed for search, they are more accurate than automatically-generated ones, in many cases.

4. Whole-Video Views

Because YouTube ranks videos by engagement, longer watch times mean more opportunities to earn the coveted suggested video inclusion.

If you’re struggling with viewer attrition rates, you’re going to want to tighten focus on your videos’ first few seconds and ensure you:

• match the description with the first few seconds of video content, and
• snag a viewer with an impossible-to-ignore hook.  

Don’t forget to study your audience retention graphs and pay attention to what those metrics are telling you.

These quick fixes help you further engage your audience, extending watch time, and earning your video a higher score via the YouTube algorithm.

5. Conversational Conclusions

Rather than simply ending your video, use various tactics to influence your audience’s next view.

By directing viewers to another video on your channel, you increase interaction and likelihood that they’ll return to interact with future content, both of which satisfy the YouTube algorithm’s engagement portion.

To direct your audience, use watermarks, end screens, and cards, all of which can be clicked and linked to your next video, ensuring continued viewing of your channel and content.   

6. Subscriptions

When viewers subscribe to your channel, you automatically increase your organic reach. To increase your number of subscribers, consistently create great content, videos viewers are dying to see.

While consistently creating great content may be easier said than done, it’s essential to building your channel. Create a channel trailer, reach out to influencers, and engage with all comments left on your videos.

If you’re looking for additional strategies to increase your subscribers, check out our YouTube Marketing Guide.

7. Serial Viewers

By crafting videos that continue a conversation, viewers are helpless to resist watching the next in the series.

To keep viewers on your channel, you can create playlists of videos with similar content: these are collections that will attract and sustain viewership.

8. Cross-Promote Content

Social channels are free advertising for your YouTube channel. Promote your videos on all your social accounts, website, and in your email marketing—anywhere you have an audience.

An example of a recent YouTube video shared on this blog.

 You can also publish a blog post with the video and a summary or transcription.

9. Actionable Analytics

These numbers don’t just exist to make you feel good; they tell you what’s working well and when, and to identify who is watching what and when.

Conversely, these numbers also tell you what isn’t working, which is inarguably the more influential insight. By identifying what isn’t working, you can try new strategies and content, attempting to delight your audience and improve your reach through different approaches.

By digging deep into YouTube analytics, you can unearth realities about your videos and your audience, allowing you to tailor your creation process to suit the needs of the audience you’re trying to reach.

Conclusion

With over one billion hours of video watched per day on YouTube, it’s undeniable content creators and marketers need to take advantage of the platform to curate and grow their audiences.

By understanding how YouTube suggests videos, content creators and marketers can make their videos work harder and use its nuances to your benefit.

How you changed how you upload videos to satisfy the YouTube algorithm? 

The post 9 Ways to Improve Organic Reach and Beat the YouTube Algorithm appeared first on Neil Patel.

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How Actionable Insights Can Help You Optimize Your Website

How Actionable Insights Can Help You Optimize Your Website written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Nils De Moor

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Nils De Moor, Co-founder and CTO at Woorank. Nils is an entrepreneur passionate about stuff on the internet out of Brussels, Belgium. He is also a Docker Captain. And describes himself as generally intrigued by advancements in software, cloud infrastructure, and engineering.

Nils is an open-source aficionado. After a brief passage through the academic world where he researched simulation of distributed systems, he decided to try his luck as an entrepreneur and cofounded Woorank as the CTO. By grabbing millions of data points every day, he developed a passion for automating, scaling and distributing services at scale.

Questions I ask Nils De Moor:

• How does someone become a CTO?
• What do you think the impact is of business if their pages don’t load quickly?
• Are there a few culprits that typically slow sites down?
• What role does hosting play?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• How companies can lose millions of dollars based on the difference of milliseconds in page speed
• The customer is Google’s user and how they prioritize user experience
• What part browsers play in performance

More about Nils De Moor:

• For more about Woorank
• Find Woorank on Twitter

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

 

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush.

SEMrush is an all-in-one marketing tool kit that marketing consultants use to boost their digital marketing efforts for their clients. SEMrush helps with SEO, PPC, social media, content marketing and market research. This tool is incredibly valuable to Duct Tape Marketing and the work we do for our clients.

To learn more, go to SEMrush.com.

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B2B Marketing Subject Matter Experts & Industry Influencers: Which Should I Choose?

What does being an influencer really mean in the B2B world? The classic B2C influencer is someone with a big following on social media, someone who makes a living doing makeup tutorials or cosplay or skateboarding tricks. Brands who want to reach their audience can simply provide free products or sponsor a post — it’s inherently transactional. But for B2B, the question is a little trickier. B2B influencers are very rarely celebrities with millions of followers. For example, given enough time and money, you could get Taylor Swift to endorse your hybrid cloud solution. But would her endorsement really persuade your audience? You can’t judge influence in B2B by follower counts alone. There are multiple ways that people can be influential in the B2B space. Which type of influencer your project needs will vary depending on your goals. Let’s take a look at two different types of B2B influencer: The Subject Matter Expert and the Industry Influencer.

Subject Matter Experts Vs. Industry Influencers for B2B Marketing

Which is better for your project: A thousand impressions or a single multi-million-dollar click? There’s no right answer for every situation, of course, and the answer may very well be “both.” But the point is to ask the question when your project is in the planning stages. We can start by defining each of these influencer types, and then we can dig into how to choose the right influencers for your content.

Who Is a Subject Matter Expert?

A subject matter expert (SME) could mean anyone who knows a lot about one particular subject. In influencer marketing, though, it means something slightly different: It’s someone who has that knowledge, and may be influential in business circles, but also has a small social media footprint. SMEs can include practitioners in a particular field, executives of successful businesses in your target industry, or even your own employees. They may not have the reach of an industry influencer, but they do have knowledge that your target audience will find valuable. What’s more, they’re a credible source, because they’re right down in the trenches with your audience. The challenge of working with an SME for creating content is that they may not be used to speaking to an audience. While an industry influencer can whip up a 500-word blog post in their sleep, an SME will take more time and encouragement before they’re ready to contribute. If your goal is to maximize awareness with top-of-funnel content, you wouldn’t go with SMEs exclusively. For content further down the funnel, with a highly-targeted audience, however, the more SME content, the better.

Who Is an Industry Influencer?

Let me say, first, that an industry influencer is no less knowledgeable than an SME. But the work of an industry influencer includes building an audience and actively pursuing thought leadership status. They’re keynote speakers, authors, and podcast hosts. They are more likely to be analysts and consultants than active practitioners. There are several advantages to working with industry influencers, beyond the obvious broader reach: They already know how to quickly create content and package it for their audience. They know the value of self-promotion and can see when it’s mutually beneficial to create content with your brand. And they can have a broader perspective of the industry, gleaned from analyzing trends and/or consulting with multiple businesses. Industry influencers are perfect for top and middle-funnel content. But they are less likely to get into the specifics of day-to-day operations, while an SME would be equipped to give those practical details that make lower-funnel content work.

What Type of Influence Does Your B2B Marketing Need?

Which influencer is right for you? As I said, you might want more SMEs in a lower-funnel piece and more industry influencers in top-of-funnel content. But really, the answer is that a healthy mix of influencers tends to get the best results. Industry influencers bring reach, polish and thought leadership. SMEs bring a practitioner’s experience and credibility. The two can complement each other to make your content irresistible to your audience. For example, our client monday.com created content with SMEs and industry influencers for their remote work campaign. By combining the strengths of different types of influence, the campaign achieved 1,790% of its projected goal for social reach.

Create an Influencer Community

Here’s one more way that B2B influencer marketing is different from B2C. While B2C agreements tend to be one-off and transactional, B2B influence is about building relationships and forming a community. Instead of contracting with an influencer for a single project, it’s important to keep in contact. Make sure your influencers know each other and facilitate conversations. Help them network, teach, and learn from each other. When you take an always-on approach to influencer marketing, you can create a trusted group of go-to experts, folks who are loyal to your brand and ready to collaborate on an ongoing basis. And that’s far more valuable than a Taylor Swift retweet. What’s working, what isn’t, and what’s next for B2B influencer marketing? Find out what your peers had to say in our 2020 State of B2B Influencer Marketing report.

The post B2B Marketing Subject Matter Experts & Industry Influencers: Which Should I Choose? appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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Double Opt-In Best Practices for Email Marketing

Double opt-in (DOI) permission practices are often seen as unnecessary and harmful to list growth. However, when used correctly, they can improve your email program’s results by protecting your sender reputation, which keeps you from having deliverability problems.

I’ll explain the advantages and disadvantages of double opt-in—which is sometimes referred to as confirmed opt-in—as well as where and how to use it effectively. However, let’s first answer the most foundational question of...

How does a double opt-in process work?

When an email address is entered into a signup form to receive emails from your company, or, a signup box is checked or left pre-checked as part of a registration or download form, you would send them a signup confirmation email that asks them to click a link in the email in order to confirm their subscription. If they click the link, their subscription is confirmed, and you send them your welcome email, followed by your promotional emails. If they don’t click the link, you don’t send them any additional emails. 

“Sending one opt-in confirmation request may be enough, especially if you’re getting a high rate of confirmation,” says Daniel Deneweth, Head of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “Others may need to send a ‘reminder’ and then perhaps even a ‘last chance’ confirmation request email to get their rates up. Sending those to non-responders within one or two weeks could be effective, and not too risky.”

This process contrasts with a single opt-in process, where your company accepts all email addresses entered into signup forms and accepts all checked boxes as consent.

There are three chief advantages of double opt-in.

1. It provides ironclad permission.

Double opt-in is the only way to be 100% sure that the person who entered an email address actually owns that email address. Since you can only get permission from the owner of an email address, this is the only ironclad way to get permission. From a compliance perspective, securing a double opt-in is the strongest proof of consent you can collect.

“This is the No. 1 reason to implement a DOI policy,” says Clea Moore, Director of Deliverability Strategy for Email Deliverability Services at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “In addition to compliance issues around the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it helps ensure that you don’t send financial, medical, or other potentially sensitive information to the wrong person. For example, Kelly Molloy, an anti-spam friend and former colleague of mine, regularly receives messages meant for someone else with the same name. Those emails include software keys, concert tickets, medical appointment reminders, and receipts with contact and billing information.”

2. It makes consent crystal clear

People don’t always recognize that they’re signing up for promotional emails. This is especially true when a consumer is checking out online, registering for a webinar, downloading a white paper, or accomplishing some other primary objective. Email consent is collected as a secondary objective. This is most true when email consents are collected via inconspicuous pre-checked boxes, or ,people are auto-opted-in according to details hidden in terms and conditions. This is so user-unfriendly that it’s illegal under CASL and GDPR. 

A double opt-in clarifies and strengthens consents by adding intent and acknowledgement to the opt-in. Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that subscribers that complete this process have considerably higher email engagement than those who complete a single opt-in process.

3. It protects your sender reputation

In addition to yielding subscribers that have higher engagement, double opt-in also helps companies safeguard their email deliverability by protecting them from;

• Typo and other spam traps that inbox providers and email blocklist operators use to identify spammers.

• Malicious signups, where a competitor, detractor, or bad actor purposefully signs up for your promotional emails using email addresses other than their own or spam traps they’ve identified.

In both cases, using a double opt-in process limits the number of emails you’d send to any of these addresses. Since spam traps never click emails, you ensure that a spam trap never gets on your list. Email bots are also unlikely to click. Or, they’ll click every link in every email you send and, you can identify them that way  too. And those who have been maliciously signed up for your emails are much less likely to report your subscription confirmation email as spam than they would a welcome email, or a promotional email that indicates that this is only the first of many emails they’ll receive.

CAPTCHA, email verification services, email validation services, and other tools can also help reduce these risks. It’s not an either-or proposition. Those tools can be used in conjunction with double opt-in, which is the strongest and most certain way to protect your sender reputation.

What are the disadvantages of double opt-in?

While double opt-in is undeniably powerful, there are two main disadvantages:

1. Slower list growth means lower total engagement

Since you can safely send just one opt-in confirmation request email, it’s possible that some real-life would-be subscribers might not see it and therefore never confirm their subscriptions. That means you’ll likely have a few disappointed prospects and customers, plus your list won’t grow quite as fast as it might with a single opt-in process.

“Ultimately, you’re accepting the certainty of lower total engagement in exchange for protection from potential deliverability problems,” says Nick Cantu, Senior Art Director for Creative Services at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “Some are happy to make this trade, but others have difficulties choosing a certain loss over a potential one, even if the potential loss is likely to be much larger over time.”

2. It’s another point of technical failure

A double opt-in process has more moving parts than a single opt-in process. More moving parts mean more points of failure. Your subscription confirmation request email is another line item in your inventory of automated emails that you need to regularly QA test and optimize. A breakdown in this email can harm your list growth, so you need to keep an eye on it.

This happened with the Oracle CX Marketing Consulting newsletter when we redesigned our subscription confirmation request email and didn’t connect it into our flow logic appropriately. It took us weeks to realize that this was the reason that our list growth had plateaued.

“Thankfully,” says Esther Shin, Senior Web Developer for Creative Services at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting, “we were able to track which contacts had clicked through on the double opt-in email during that period and manually added them to our confirmed subscriber list. Not too long had passed, so we didn’t feel we needed to re-confirm them. So, the damage was limited to the engagement that we lost due to these subscribers missing anywhere from one to three newsletters.”

With these advantages and disadvantages in mind, let’s discuss...

Where should I use a double opt-in process?

The debate over email permission often devolves into a false choice of whether to use single opt-in or double opt-in for all subscriber acquisition sources. While it’s perhaps simpler to implement one universal standard, it’s not the most efficient.

Double opt-in is are most appropriate for your subscriber acquisition sources that;

• Involve subscribers who are paying for premium content and you need to make sure you’re sending that paid content to the right recipient

• Have demonstrated in the past that they attract spam traps, email bots, and malicious signups, or generate lots of subscribers who are prone to complaining and rarely convert

• Are far from your fulfillment and customer service operations, such as co-registrations and list rentals, and therefore highly likely to attract low-quality subscribers

• Involve open signup forms that anyone and anything on the internet can easily access, such as the email signup form on your homepage—and especially open forms that aren’t on your website, such as the email signup on your Facebook page

• Involve email address collection processes that are prone to errors in transcriptions, such as paper forms or addresses collected verbally without visual confirmation by the consumer

• Have pre-checked consent boxes that are buried in the fine print or hidden in terms and conditions, especially when the primary purpose of the form completion is not transactional, such as completing a contest entry form.

“It’s especially important to implement DOI where consent is not clearly being given to receive email,” says Moore. “Otherwise, you run the risk of high spam complaint rates and terrible open rates, in addition to the increased risk of mailing spam traps and landing on a blocklist.”

If you have a deliverability expert on staff or have email deliverability consultants watching over your program, you can lean more toward single opt-in. However, if you don’t have such safety nets in place, you’ll likely want to implement more double opt-in. It’s better to be safe than sorry when it comes to deliverability.

How can I maximize double opt-in confirmations?

Probably the most common objection to double opt-in is that “It costs me list growth because not everyone confirms their subscription.” Of course, the primary purpose of a double opt-in process is to screen out risky signups, so you’d expect some addresses to go unconfirmed.

In an ideal world, all those email addresses that aren’t confirmed would be spam traps, email bots, malicious signups, and people who aren’t interested in receiving your emails and are just going to unsubscribe or report your emails as spam. However, we know that there are some truly interested people who never confirm their subscription. You want to minimize that as much as possible.  There are some best practices to help you achieve that.

1. Your signup confirmation page or popup should make it abundantly clear that further action is required.

2. The subject line and preview text of your opt-in confirmation request email should make it clear that action must be taken in the email.

3. The design of your opt-in confirmation request email must focus recipients’ attention on the one action that you want them to take, which is to click the link to confirm their subscription.

4. Upon receiving a click on the opt-in confirmation link, your opt-in confirmation page should clearly acknowledge that they are now subscribed and then drive the relationship forward. Make the new subscriber feel welcome—whether that’s asking them to complete their user profile, presenting them with a welcome offer or discount, giving them educational or instructional information, or something else.

We use these best practices with our clients, and also with the Oracle CX Marketing Consulting newsletter. This twice-monthly newsletter shares advice and insights from our more than 500 digital marketing experts. Let’s walk through how we’ve put these best practices in action with this newsletter.

First, after you complete the form on our signup page or the popup form on our archive page, you’re taken to our signup confirmation page. The primary messaging on this page is just 18 words and communicates to the person that they’re not subscribed yet and that they need to “click the link in the email we just sent” to the email address they provided.

“It’s critical to be clear and concise with confirmation statements,” says Brian Sullivan, Strategy Director of Email Deliverability Services at Oracle CX Marketing Consulting. “With today’s short attention spans, you want to compel that lead to take the next action quickly and avoid them abandoning the process midstream.”

Cantu adds that you should leverage the established language that’s used for double opt-ins. “Consumers are very familiar with confirming not only their email addresses, but their cell phone numbers,” he says. “This is a standard step to engage with many brands, so don’t get clever or try to be original.” 

Second, when they go to their inbox and find the opt-in confirmation request email, they’ll see envelope copy that again reinforces that action is needed. For example, the subject line for our email says, “Activate My Subscription” and the preview text says, “Click the link in this email to complete your subscription.”

Third, when they open our email, they see a huge headline and bright red call-to-action button. The primary text consists of just 11 words, with some secondary text to address people who may have received this email because of a malicious signup or typo in an email address.

“A double opt-in confirmation email should have a singular focus with minimal content,” says Cantu. “It is essential to communicate the action needed and remove all unnecessary elements, including navigation bars, social links, and secondary modules.”

And fourth, when they confirm their opt-in by clicking the link in our email, they’re taken to an opt-in confirmation page with the headline “You’re in!” In addition to telling them to look out for our next issue, this page tries to engage new subscribers by providing some of our best content that’s appeared in past issues of our newsletter.

By putting these double opt-in best practices into action, we’ve seen 96% of signups be confirmed. We freely acknowledge that our target audience of digital marketers is savvier about double opt-in practices than the average consumer, but it speaks to the high level of confirmation that can be achieved by designing an experience that’s singularly focused on getting that opt-in confirmation click.

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Need help with your email deliverability or marketing automation? Oracle CX Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including Email Deliverability Services and Campaign Automation Services teams that can help you improve your deliverability and set up effective triggered email campaigns.

Learn more or reach out to us at CXMconsulting_ww@oracle.com

For more information about email marketing, please visit Oracle CX Marketing.

 

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