6 Industry Best Practices in Sending Out Subscription Confirmation Emails

Suppose you provide your email address to a brand through their website or social media handle in exchange for subscribing to their newsletter or receiving any other resource. But, you didn’t get an intimation from the brand’s end as to whether they’ve received your subscription request!

Not only will this lead to annoyance, but you’ll also begin to wonder if the brand you’ve signed up with is legit or not.

This is why instantly confirming subscriptions over email is critical for any brand. After all, you must satisfy leads by displaying proactive behavior through email marketing.

Anyway, subscription confirmation emails have an excellent open rate of 65%, along with an average click-through rate as high as 17%. So, why would you miss the opportunity of confirming users of their subscription and letting them click on the CTAs included in your email?

Subscription Confirmation Emails: Definition and Benefits

Subscription confirmation emails are triggered when a customer or prospect performs an action, such as subscribing to your service or product. These emails are typically used to validate your potential customer’s actions via a click of the confirmation button.

Did you know that subscription confirmation emails are also a necessity for GDPR compliance? GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation, and its dossier contains a set of European (EU) laws governing the usage of customer data.

Even though this law protects European citizens from a data breach, several organizations worldwide accept and follow it. Informing your leads that you adhere to GDPR norms lends credibility to your brand.

Additionally, subscription confirmation emails are responsible for engaging contacts and confirming their willingness to subscribe to your other solutions. What we mean is apart from sending an acknowledgment of subscription, you can also use this email to give them a peek into your other offerings.

Alternatively, you can provide them a small discount or a freebie to keep them hooked and nurture them towards conversion.

Subscription confirmation emails also help you build clean contact lists. How? At first, leads leave their email addresses in the subscription form available on your website, blog site, or social media profile.

In the second step, you send a subscription confirmation link or a confirmation CTA to their inbox. Once they click on that link or button, you receive a fully qualified and interesting contact. This is called a double opt-in mechanism, and it fortifies your email list.

Double opt-ins help you verify lead email addresses and weed out ingenuine users right from the get-go.

5 Industry Best Practices for Crafting Subscription Confirmation Emails

A subscription confirmation email falls within the category of transactional marketing emails because you’re entering a two-way communication with the lead through them. And a study by Borrell Associates, Inc. and Merkle reveals that a whopping 64% of customers consider transactional emails to be the most valuable type of brand communication.

So, the narrative should shift from ‘does my business need a subscription confirmation email?’ to ‘how should I create one that is noteworthy?’.

To help you answer the latter, here are 6 industry best practices for crafting a subscription confirmation email:

1. Ensure Branding Consistency

Conform to your brand’s style, color palette, font(s), and content tonality – be it on your website or email. Your subscription confirmation email must carry elements that match your website or blog site. Individuals must visually recognize your brand’s colors and overall style.

Ensuring consistent branding helps win your customer’s trust. It’s what makes you unique! And not just when you’re sending a subscription confirmation email, but also when you send them future emails.

If leads and customers receive visually inconsistent brand communication, they may stop opening your emails, or worse, flag you as a spam sender. Therefore, emphasize on consistent branding right from the start when you send them their subscription confirmation email.

Actionable Tips to Ensure Branding Consistency

Make sure your subscription confirmation email contains your logo and name.
Keep the font type the same as your website in your subscription confirmation emails.
If you use an informal or quirky writing tone in your website, do not take up a formal tone in your subscription confirmation email.
Choose the dominant color from your brand’s color palette. You can use one of the logo colors and offset it with different hues of the same color.

Branding consistency is all about designing elements that conform and harmonize with your brand’s style and theme.

2. Keep It Crisp, Concise, and Conversational

Never ever forget that you only have a few seconds to inform and thank your prospect for subscribing to your newsletter or any other service. Therefore, keep your subscription emails short, sweet, and conversational.

By conversational, we mean, write the way you speak! Doing this adds a human touch, and your lead knows they’re conversing with a person on the other side.

Using a minimalistic approach lends simplicity and efficiency to your subscription confirmation emails.

Actionable Tips to Ensure Crispness and Conciseness

Do not write a lengthy confirmation email. To make this possible, set a word limit. Ideally, finish your email within 3 to 4 sentences and with a singular Call-To-Action or CTA.
Avoid using big words and long sentences. Simple words that clearly convey your message are ideal.
Do not use block letters to write the entire email.
Don’t forget to thank your recipient for their subscription.
At this point, do not sell or market any brand offering to your lead.

3. Use Appropriate Imagery

Brands are often divided between whether they should add imagery in a subscription confirmation email or not. We say, go for it! If used right, it will only add to the efficacy of your email.

However, you must choose the image correctly. It should depict what your brand does, even if you don’t use your actual product’s picture.

Actionable Tips to Ensure Usage of Appropriate Imagery

Use a clean and single image. Avoid collages at all costs.
If possible, use your product or service’s actual image or GIF. However, GIFs may take slightly longer to load. You don’t want that in a subscription confirmation email. So, use a compressed or medium resolution animated GIF.
Do not place your confirmation CTA on the image.
Avoid making your image into a clickable CTA.

4. Place the Right CTA, Just Right

CTA or the Call-to-Action prompts the next step you want your prospect to take after reading your email. In this case, you want them to subscribe to your email list. Only then can you build one, which you can use for lead nurturing in the future.

Therefore, do not distract your reader’s attention by placing too many CTAs in your subscription confirmation email. We know it’s tempting to use this premium email space to push your products and services. But, don’t!

Actionable Tips to Ensure the Right CTAs

Provide only one CTA.
Make your CTA button large and hard to miss.
Don’t write a long CTA. Keep it at a maximum of 4 words.
Try writing the CTA in the first person. For example, instead of typing “Confirm your subscription,” try “Confirm my subscription.” This makes it more impactful.
Use a bright color.
Make sure you keep the CTA above the fold, meaning place it in such a way that readers don’t have to scroll down to find it. This will happen when you keep your subscription confirmation email short.

5. Let Prospects Know What’s in Store for Them

Word your subscription confirmation email is such a way that it also tells users what’s in store for them if they sign up with you. For example, if you’re providing them an incentive right after the successful email verification step, let them know of the same in advance.

Often subscription confirmation emails spring this surprise upon unsuspecting prospects once they’ve verified the subscription. While this is good, it won’t bring in leads who are a good match for your brand but are skeptical about verifying their email address. Bring them into the fold by trying this tactic.

Actionable Tips for Encouraging Leads to Verify

Tell them about any freebie, free trial, or discount they will be entitled to if they sign up with you.
Provide an individual’s name along with their designation at your brand, as opposed to only the brand name at the bottom of the email. The human touch works wonders, believe us.

6. Craft Impactful Subject Lines

No subscription confirmation email is complete without an informative subject line. Keep in mind that for these emails, you don’t require kitschy and quirky subject statements. You simply need one that tells them they need to verify.

Doling out ambiguous subject lines like “Welcome”, “URGENT,” “Where are you,” or “Want to sign up for sure?” are highly misleading and can land your email in the trash folder.

Actionable Tips To Write Impactful Subject Lines

Insert your brand name before starting the subject line. For example, instead of simply writing “Please confirm your subscription,” write “<Company name> Please confirm your subscription.”
You can also write something like this – Please confirm your subscription for <company name> newsletter.

Wrapping Up

So, without ensuring branding consistency, crisply written email subject line and body, replete with the right imagery and CTAs, you cannot get leads to subscribe.

Anyway, a true subscription confirmation sequence is one that operates with a double opt-in. Meaning a lead agrees to subscribe to your newsletter on your website or social media handle. Here you ask them for their email address and use it to send a subscription confirmation email instantly.

Once they verify over email, you have yourself a truly qualified lead with whom you must share quality brand communication that potentially leads to conversions. But, to get them to doubly verify your subscription, you need our 6 tips.

Once you start adhering to these industry best practices or tips for writing subscription confirmation emails, you’ll end up signing more prospects than you’d initially planned on. And, voila! You’ll have an enviable email list that you can leverage for future communication.

wishpond