Braze Tutorial: How To Set Up Double Opt-In For Email Subscription
Meme credits to the one and onlee Alison Gootee! The best Email Deliverability Expert and Email Content Creator on the planet.
If you’re done enjoying the meme above, it’s time to take our email opt-in strategy to the next level!
What better way to increase our Email Deliverability than sending to users who have explicitly opted-in to email?
Check out the full video to learn How To Set Up Double Opt-In for Email Subscription in Braze.
🗣️ WATCH FULL YOUTUBE VIDEO HERE 🗣
What’s up everyone, my name is Allan, Founder and Consultant at For Now Marketing, and welcome back to our channel!
Before we get started, if you have any questions, whether you are currently using Braze or considering using Braze, please feel free to reach out! You can find these addresses and more in the Youtube description below.
Today, we are going to talk through How To Set Up Double Opt-In for Email Subscription in Braze.
Let’s get started!
Email Subscription State
Before we get started, let’s briefly talk about the 3 types of Email Subscription State. If you haven’t already, check out this video above also.
In Braze, there are 3 Email Subscription States: unsubscribed, subscribed, and opted_in. Yes, that’s opted, underscore, in, if we’re being precise with the exact Braze values.
When a user first signs up and gets a Braze profile created, their default Email Subscription State will be subscribed. Technically, you’re able to start sending marketing emails to these users right away, until they unsubscribe.
However, a robust email marketing program will set up what’s called a Double Opt-In (DOI) which is when the brand requires their users to provide a second layer of consent, in addition to a general or easy-to-miss Terms & Conditions consent.
These users will be sent an initial welcome email upon account creation, and inside that initial welcome email, they’ll be asked to click a link, an explicit action, to agree to receive further marketing communications.
We know that these users will want to receive email, because they actually, explicitly asked for it!
And we will use the Email Subscription Status opted_in to mark that users have been successfully double opted-in to receiving email.
Lastly, in the words of Alison, “Permission is the strongest signal of positive engagement potential, and deliverability relies on sustained positive engagement.”
So let’s jump into Braze and set up our Double Opt-In!
Build A Welcome Email
First, let’s build a welcome email that a user will receive upon creating an account. I used one of the Braze HTML templates, and made some small changes, so the email now says, “Welcome to For Now Marketing! If you’d like to receive Marketing Emails, click the button below!”
And the URL behind this button doesn’t have to be anything special. For our email, we’ll just set it to our landing page, https://fornowmarketing.com. Special shoutout to Richard Perry who helped me troubleshoot that the HTTPS part is necessary for this to work properly, so make sure your link follows this rule!
This next step is crucial so make sure to follow along. We are now going to click Link Management. On this page, any URLs from your email will automatically populate here, and you have the option of tracking these individual links by giving it an Alias.
So we will name this one DOI-fnm, and make sure to check that checkbox.
This Email Campaign will be launched immediately, and since we are testing, I’ll set the audience to just my test profile, allan@fornowmarketing.com.
Make sure to remove the Control Group, and let’s go ahead and launch this Campaign for now!
Build The DOI Trigger via User Update Step
We now have our Welcome Email, but how can we set up the process so that when a user clicks on that “Sign Me Up” button, their Email Subscription Status becomes opted_in?
That’s what we’ll set up next, using a Canvas User Update Step.
Create a Canvas, we’ll call it DOI Link Alias Click Trigger.
The Entry Schedule will once again be Action-Based, except this time, we’re choosing “Interact With Campaign”, and yup, you guessed it, we’re choosing “Clicked alias in email”. It’s just super cool that this is even an option. Yay for Email Link Aliasing.
Once you choose that, all the Campaigns that have Link Aliases will become available in the dropdown, and then our Link Alias itself will also become available in the dropdown. If you’re already using other Link Aliases, make sure to choose the correct Link Alias!
So now, whenever a user clicks on that specific link from that Welcome Email, this Canvas will trigger.
Once again, we’ll limit the audience to just my email, allan.heo@fornowmarketing.com.
And let’s build our Canvas!
Go ahead and create a User Update step. Open it, and switch to the Advanced JSON Editor. And copy and paste the code below:
{
"attributes": [
{
"email_subscribe": "opted_in"
}
]
}It’s as simple as that. Now, anytime someone clicks on that Link Alias, we’re updating that user’s Email Subscription Status to “opted_in”.
Let’s launch, and see it in action now!
Launch & Test!
Now that we’re all set up and good to go, let’s go ahead and click our CTA in our Welcome Email!
Before I click the button “Sign Me Up”, first let’s confirm that my user profile’s Email Subscription Status is “Subscribed”. Okay it is, and we want that to hopefully change to “Opted In” after I click the button.
Okay, back to the email, and let’s go ahead and click “Sign Me Up”.
Back to our user profile, and look at that, Opted In! So we’ve just successfully set up our Double Opt-In Process in Braze!
Thank You!
That’s it for today!
As always, if you have any questions, please share them in the comments. We’re happy to help! 🙏
If you learned something from this video, please subscribe for more awesome Braze videos in the future!
Thank you for watching, and see you next time!
