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Comment by stefan69 | Hacker News Reader

As a marketer, one of the issues I run into is to subscribe someone, who filled a contact form on my website, to an email automation series (usually to nudge them towards taking an extra action while we scramble to get back to them). Problem is, once the user filled up the contact form to make an enquiry, he is unlikely to go to his/her inbox to confirm... a subscription link.

I do think double opt-in is the way forward (as outlaid in the article), but having that single opt-in option for some special cases is necessary from a business point-of-view.

Overall, pretty good compromise by Mailchimp.

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> Problem is, once the user filled up the contact form to make an enquiry, he is unlikely to go to his/her inbox to confirm... a subscription link.

Or, worded another way: the user really doesn't give a damn about your subscription.

If they can't be bothered enough to take a few seconds to open one e-mail message and click on a single link, then whatever you're offering obviously isn't something that they actually want.

As a non-marketer, it seems to me that marketers would want something like double opt-in -- just so that you can ensure that those on your list are people actually interested in $product. Or is it more about the quantity of users on your list and not the quality of those users?

My (somewhat glib) opinion:

Marketers want quantity; salespeople want quality.

It's because that's what each one is paid for -- and so companies end up paying too much for marketers to undercut their salesteams' effectiveness because they misaligned the incentives, pay for marketing they don't need (or even harms them!), and then sit there wondering why it's not translating into sales (or worse, saturates salespeople with duds and costs sales).

I used work in marketing and my (slightly exaggerated) opinion is you should fire everyone on your marketing team, hire more salespeople, a socialmedia person, and maybe a single dedicated person to track overall sales performance.

But what's the point of marketing? You should be selling from that first contact -- and if you have two teams doing the same job with differing incentive structures, no wonder your organization is inefficient and pulling at different goals.

As a non-marketer, you presumably have not had the experience of customers being mad at you because they thought they signed up for something but never got it.

Email marketing has got to be one of the top "HN readers are not like most people" subjects that get discussed here. Most people do not go through life in a defensive crouch about their email inbox. They sign up for things on a whim and then unsubscribe if they don't like it.

Double opt-in works well for some audiences but definitely not for all. And BTW it's been possible to operate Mailchimp as single opt-in via API calls for a while now.

> customers being mad at you because they thought they signed up for something but never got it.

Yea, the customers never got it because 10 other people on your domain reported it as spam and the whole thing gets black flagged on the server and dropped at the SMTP connector.

This entire thread says one thing.

"Marketing emails are dead, Mailchimp is trying to boost their numbers so they can sell before everyone else realizes it"

This doesn't really affect the scenario you mentioned.

Previously users entered their email just once, and had to confirm newsletter subscription via email. They didn't need to fill in a second form or anything, just confirm they wanted to sign up by clicking a link on an email they get.

I don't really understand the use case. Can you clarify?

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