So I opened my Gmail account to find this subject line:
“Welcome to Bravissimo, come on in!”
I’m like “Huh?… what’s this? I don’t remember signing up.”
But the Italian-sounding word made me second-guess myself.
You see:
I’d signed up to a few Italian goods stores lately. For a project I’m working on.
Maybe this was related?
So I opened it.
And immediately regretted it.
It was definitely NOT related.
Straight away I’m confronted with images I’d rather unsee.
And the message again:
“Welcome to Bravissimo”.
Followed by:
“We are the leaders in bras and bra-sized swimwear, made for D cups and up.”
🤦‍♂️
Yep.
Felt like I’d been Rickrolled.
They got me.
Or someone did?!
I… hand on heart…did NOT sign up to this site.
So the two most likely options:
1) Bravissimo bought a list and just signed up people without asking.
2) Someone else signed up with my email address.
I think number 2 is probably it.
This looks like a legit company. I don’t expect they’d be stupid enough to buy lists and then spam people.
Incidentally, I marked their email as spam for the first time in a long time.
From my perspective it was spam: unsolicited commercial email.
And if this sort of thing is happening to other people… you can bet they’ll be hitting the spam button too.
There’s a lesson in all this…
Especially if you’re running or intending to run an email list.
It highlights the dangers of using the single opt-in approach.
This is the strategy for just about every single ecommerce store I’ve come across.
Single opt-in means you can just enter your email on a website form… and you’ll start getting their welcome sequence and other emails straight away.
If I knew {{Contact.FullName}}’s email address…
Then I could just sign them up for Bravissimo. And they’d start getting the emails.
And that’s what seems to be going on here. Someone has signed me up.
Now the legitimate-looking shop might be an innocent third party here.
Or might not… if they actually did do option 1 and bulk-add a list of emails.
Either way: they have to deal with the fallout.
Namely: spam complaints.
And if someone can add people to their email list without their consent… then there’s likely bots and other junk on their list as well.
So they’ll need a jolly good regular scrub to keep things clean. To try and keep email deliverability up.
I’m not sure who thinks that I could do with “D cups and up” items.
Certainly there’s some fun to be had making slingshots. But apart from that… 🤔
The solution to single opt-in issues like this… is to use double opt-in.
This means people will get a confirmation email to click before they receive any welcome or other emails from the business.
If I had seen that confirmation email come my way… I’d realise that someone is trying to do dumb things with my email address.
I wouldn’t be looking at the business as the culprit. So I wouldn’t hit the spam button.
I’ve seen some websites trying to do half-way solutions. Like using captcha challenges on signup forms. While this might limit bots joining. It doesn’t prevent nefarious humans.
There’s raging debates about whether you should use single opt-in or double opt-in.
You joined my list using a double opt-in process. And it’s not (or shouldn’t be) too hard to complete.
It means I have a clean list of real people.
Single opt-in afficionados cite drops-offs from double-opt ins. Because some people sign up on your website but never complete their confirmation.
And it’s a fair argument that some of those people will in fact buy in the future. So why prevent them being on your list?
But it seems single opt-in is either just the default. And noone thought about changing it.
Or it’s chosen more from a place of fear — not wanting miss out on a single sign up. Even though that may harm your list health and contribute to a bigger loss in sales.
I’d rather do double opt-in any day.
Simply because you keep the trash emails off your list from the get-go.
Deliverability is higher from the start.
And there’s no need to deal with having to clean up 500 email addresses that some random bot decided to dump into your list.
As you can imagine… there’s plenty more to this topic. Maybe that’s for another day.
If you’ve already got your head around this stuff then: bravissimo! (translation: very well done)
But it doesn’t hurt to double-check…
So you can be ready to help your clients should the question of single or double opt-ins come up.
You don’t want to get a miffed person like me who was “gifted” a subscription to their newsletter against their will.
In addition to carefully managing their single or double opt-ins…
There’s another surefire strategy for serving your clients.
Learn about it here:
https://a.chrismilham.com/surefirestrategy
Ready to build your email list? Go here…
EmailForTheWin.com
Chris Milham