What percent of your email subscribers do not open & click the link in the confirmation email?

Thanks for the tag @teela_na.

It's not at all unusual to have only 50% opt-in rates for double opt-in lists, but 10% is absolutely abysmal. You're almost certainly right and a lot of those confirmation emails are ending up in spam because of your gmail address.

I am working on a product called Subscribe Sense to try an help tackle this problem, and you can sign up for the beta waitlist to see some of the techniques that we use to help increase confirmation rates. But since it's not yet launched, here are my suggestions for now:

• First - change your confirmation page. I signed up, and it currently says "You're on the list". which is not true! Make it very explicitly clear that your users need to go find the opt-in email and click the confirm button before they're on the list. Even better is if you can promise them something in return for confirming, and put it on the page they're redirected to after confirming. That will help a bit too.
• Your instinct to register a domain will almost certainly help, but you may want to go a step further and set it up as a verified sending domain immediately. ConvertKit recommends in their settings to only do this if you're sending more than 50,000 emails a month, but I had a brand new domain with very few emails being sent, and noticed in my testing that things stopped going to spam (at least in Gmail) as soon as I set it up as a verified sending domain. This will involve adding some records to your DNS, so be prepared for that. (There are generally good walk-throughs for all registrars as to how to do this.)
• You don't need to actually pay for a google workspace for the email address - depending on who you register the domain with, you should be able to just create an email address in the domain settings panel and have it forward to your gmail account, and that will be sufficient for getting ConvertKit to send via that address. I have registered my last few domains directly with Google, and they definitely have support for this, which will save you the monthly GSuite fee.

Not that I don't love ConvertKit, but you may want to also consider using Substack instead - they don't send email using your address, but instead create an address on their domain for you and send it from that. (I believe they forward any replies to your chosen address, although I'm not a Substack publisher so not 100% sure.) it means that you don't have a direct brand on the emails you send, but the deliverability is much higher because of it. There are obviously other differences between the two services too that you may want to examine first.

As an aside, I also noticed that the page you linked to above (https://figang.com) seems to have an invalid SSL certificate, so Chrome won't let me access it (I had to use Safari and then agree to "accept the risk".) I'm not sure how Carrd handles that, but you should definitely look into getting it fixed ASAP.

I hope all that helps!

hi @emilepetrone, congrats on the viral post and your decision to write a book! 🔥as far as subscribers not successfully double-opting in, maybe Anna Maste (@Skulegirl) can point you toward what she's working on. I believe she's working on a solution for just this kind of thing.

For me it was 29/249 = 11.6 %

On top of that I also noticed users that did verify, would often drop off. They'd verify the email and then not use the app. This annoyed me so much that I only provide a Google login.

I kept the old email registration page as an unlinked page in case users emailed me asking if they could register without a Google account.