One Opt-In process mistake that may cost you 50% in conversions

If you noticed, I am building my mailing list. See this form on the right? By the way, if you have not subscribed yet, that's what you shoudl do.

However, I was also testing. Most people do the opt-in process like on this diagram:

The responsibility for that workflow lies mainly with the mailing list provider services like AWeber (or AutomateYourList, a private label by AWeber, in my case). When you create a subscription form, you can specify a custom Thank You page on your site, but the mailing list provider sends the user to this page after they subscribe, not after they confirm! Custom confirmation Thank You page is a LIST setting, not a form setting! Hence, if you want to try different bonuses or anything else on Thank You pages for the same list, you have to give it right now, when they have not confirmed their subscription yet.

What I found is that about 30 to 50% of people get to the bonuses page and never bother confirming their subscription.

So, it looked like I have to change the subscription process like that:

How to do that technically?

1. Set up the main mailing list
2. Set up secondary list for the specific offer (e.g. free report for subscription) with a single welcome message.
   Make Thank You page with the report a confirmation page for this second list.
   
3. Create an automation rule on the main list to subscribe to it when a lead subscribes to the secondary list.
4. Use the subscription form for the secondary list. Make Thank You page for this subscription form a reminder to confirm to get the bonus.

Once somebody subscribes, he gets to a reminder page to check email and confirm to get the bonus. He gets confirmation mail for the secondary list, confirms, and gets to the page with the free bonus. Automation instantly adds him to the main mailing list. You never mail to the secondary list or you can do that occasionally for the segment testing (you already know a specific thing which makes people on this mailing list buy!)

Essentially, this is one mailing list. Secondary mailing list is just a technological artifact, fake entity to workaround existing technological deficiency. Some day AWeber will get it and implement two Thank You pages for each form - one immediate and another after confirmation. Then doing workflow #2 will be easy. For now, you can use this workaround.

Keep in ming, of course, that conversion per se is not your goal. What you want is the quality of your mailing list. So if the new workflow will result in higher drop off rate later, you may want to revert to workflow #1. Which one will be better depends on your niche and target audience.

Another thing to consider is that getting bonuses and not confirming is clearly dishonest, which may result in higher returns when you get these extra prospect to the actual sales. On another hand, they were actually giving email addresses for a free report, but - after already giving the address - were not making the last step to get very valuable information by email. That sounds stupid, and in some niches such leads may be a real asset for you. So, in the end, I am not ready to declare workflow 1 or workflow 2 an anti-pattern. As usual, you need to test and pick whatever your business and your niches needs to increase your ultimate goal - successful sales.