How to Set Up ‘Double Opt-in’ for Email Confirmations

A double opt-in signup process is good business practice. Our Double Opt-in feature lets you automatically send confirmation emails based on contact actions, such as when a contact fills out a signup form on your blog. If a contact clicks on the link in the confirmation email, then you can automatically perform actions on them, such as adding them to a particular email campaign. You can decide which actions trigger the Double Opt-in campaign, and what happens afterwards.

How to Set Up Double Opt-in

The feature is easily configured through campaign workflows. This workflow can be called from different triggers such as form submissions, contacts getting added, etc. The trigger is up to you. You can also run Double Opt-in manually on a particular set of contacts.

The Double Opt-in Workflow

In the double opt-in workflow, a confirmation email is sent to a contact. If that contact clicks on the link provided in the email within a certain amount of time (we generally use 48 hours), then a “Double Opt-in” tag is added to the contact. You can use this to perform any number of actions with Agile, such as adding the contact to an onboarding campaign, sending them your monthly newsletter, or just confirming them as a customer.

This is how the final workflow looks:

Steps to Create a Double Opt-in Workflow

1. Set Up the Workflow

• Login to your Agile dashboard.
• Go to Campaigns and select New > Custom. This opens the Campaign Builder.
• Drag the Send Email Node into your workflow, then click on the  icon on the left side of the node.                                              
• Enter your “Confirm Subscription” email content. This is the email message contacts will receive asking them to confirm their subscription (ie. to “double opt-in”).                                                                                                                                                                                              
• You can pick an HTML template in the HTML tab. Here’s a sample template we created:
• 
• Rename the node to something relevant such as “Send Confirmation Email”.
  
• Drag the Email Clicked Node into the workflow and open its Settings.
  
• Again, rename the node to something relevant, such as “Confirmation Link Clicked”.
• Set the desired Max Time. We have set it to 48 Hours.
• In this generic double opt-in workflow, we have chosen to add a tag to contacts that click the link in the confirmation email within the chosen time frame. We call the tag “Double Opt-in”, but as with all of our marketing automation features, you can use any tag you’d like.
• Name your campaign and save it. Choose a useful name such as “Double Opt-in” or “Double Opt-in from Landing Page B”.

2. Set Up a Trigger (Auto Assignment)

A Double Opt-in Workflow can be automatically triggered based on any defined trigger condition. In this scenario, we will use a form submission as the trigger. If someone fills out the form, they’ll need to confirm their email and subscription by clicking a link in the confirmation email.

• Go to Campaigns > Manage Triggers > Add Trigger and click on the Form tab. Select the Form Submit trigger by clicking Go.
   
• Fill in the required information for your new trigger and select the “Double Opt-in” campaign (the campaign workflow we created in the steps above) as the campaign to run based on this trigger.

Manual Addition

The Double Opt-in workflow can also be assigned manually to one or many contacts using Bulk Actions. Follow these simple steps to trigger the Double Opt-in campaign manually:

• Go to Contacts and select the contacts you’d like to ask to double opt-in.
• Under Bulk Actions select Add to Campaign. Choose the Double Opt-in workflow we created above.
• That’s it! Those contacts will be added to the campaign.

Thanks for helping us make Agile CRM both streamlined and extensible. Your participation in our User Voice forum is especially useful as we continue to add new features and enhancements.