Reeling in The Almost Subscribed

What’s worse than an unsubscribe notification or a first-time visitor leaving your blog without choosing to subscribe?

Unverifieds!
These are the readers who were interested enough to subscribe to your blog by email but end up lost in a black hole and never receive your posts because they never clicked the opt-in confirmation link in the follow-up email. The most likely reason I’ve observed is that they entered a simple typo when submitting their email address.

How should you handle unverified email addresses?
I consider these lost souls a priority — worthy of a little extra, manual email list management. I’m working my butt off creating new posts for people who want to read them — and I know these guys are the ones who definitely want them and are missing out.

Each month, as part of my Maintenance To Do List, I go through my Feedburner Email Subscriber list, pull out the “unverifieds” and send them all a personal email explaining the situation.

Tip: You can view your Email Subscriber List by Email Address or Date of sign-up by clicking the top of those columns in the table. When you first click on “Manage Your Subscribers” the table displays, by default, the email addresses in alphabetical order.

Click the “Status” column header to see the “unverifieds” grouped together.

I do a sweep of these dangling readers once a month because it’s easier to keep track of who I’ve already tried to contact.

Note any obvious typos and correct them — for example, I see a lot of addresses in the unverifieds that look like:

• soulsista67@gmai.com
• hotnerd@yaoho.com

Here’s the email I usually send to my unverifieds — feel free to adopt it as a template for creating your own, with the necessary personal information changed, obviously:

Subject line: The Reason You’re NOT Receiving Shift Your Spirits
Hey there!
This is Slade from Shift Your Spirits.

I noticed that your email address shows up on my subscriber list multiple times — but the status of your email address is “unverified.”

Unverified means you entered your email address initially, to sign up, but that the confirmation link has never been activated.

You should receive a follow-up email immediately after you sign up asking you to confirm your subscription, by clicking on a link.

I hate to think you’re out there wondering why you’ve never received the new articles you requested!

If you want to try again, rather than hunting through old email folders:

1. Sign Up
Subscribe to Shift Your Spirits by Email

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=540190&loc=en_US

2. Watch for the confirmation email that immediately follows and click the confirm link

Slade
The most recent article you missed is:
[What's Your Spirit Guide's Name?]

For fifteen minutes of your time, each month, I’d estimate that three-fourths of these subscriptions are save-able, with a little prompting.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.