I started reading about online marketing about two or so years ago.
This year I've decided to try some of it.
One of the golden rules is that you should build an email list. It is going to be your asset. You could build a following on Facebook, Twitter or another platform, but if they close down or ban you from it, you lose everything. Email addresses and the trust that you build on the other hand can't be taken away. Hence, it's an asset.
I'm using Drip as my email marketing software. You get all features for free up to 100 subscribers. Then it's $49/month for 2500 subscribers.
I started with MailChimp because it was advertised as free for up to 2500 subscribers, but as soon as you wanted automation features, it was at least $10/month. And their user interface was not pleasant to work with.
Problem
I put a sign up form on one of my websites (I'm not talking about peteris.rocks) but I noticed that there was a difference between the number of people that
filled out the form
and became subscribers
It looks like many people didn't confirm their email address for some reason. These are non technical folks, so that was certainly possible. It also doesn't help that Gmail tends to put such emails in the Promotions inbox, and so most people may miss it.
The solution obviously is to switch to not using double opt-in forms.
But how do you not lose the subscribers up to this point?
Support told me there was not way to see the email addresses of those who didn't confirm their subscription, as that would violate the privacy of these users.
Solution
In the form settings, under the Post-Signup tab, you can check to Send subscriber data to post-submission page.
It means that you'll see in your web server logs or Google Analytics their email address as a query string parameter:
But I did not have this enabled.
But I still could see the subscriber ID:
Given these IDs, you can see their email address by going to this URL:
https://www.getdrip.com/<your-account-id>/subscribers/<subscriber-id>
Basically, go to your existing subscribers, click on one. Then replace the ID in the URL with the ID you can see in Google Analytics.
Voila! You can see their email, what they did, etc.
You can then
- go to Subscribers -> Imports/Bulk Ops
- create a New Bulk Operation
- choose Enter a list of email addresses
- enter the emails from Google Analytics/server logs
- and import them!
They will then show up under Subscribers.