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How To Send Reminders to Unconfirmed Subscribers
While you might want to debate how legal or ethical this is, in most cases it's just fine, as long as you're either sending the reminder personally, or you include an unsubscribe link if you're using an automation to send it.
Obviously, you don't want to annoy your lead. One or two reminders, sent a day or two after their initial sign up, is probably the most you want to send.
If you're keen on it though, here's a convenient way to send reminders to your unconfirmed subscribers by performing a Mail Merge with Gmail/Gsuite. (See note below on the limits of this approach.)
1. Download Your List of Unconfirmed Subscribers
Unfortunately, not all marketing email providers make this information available. Here are instructions for a few that make this relatively easy:
This should leave you with a CSV file with all your unconfirmed subscribers emails in it.
2. Make a Mail Merge Google Sheet.
A mail merge tool will take a spreadsheet and a template email, and use each row in the spreadsheet to fill in the blanks in the template and send a personalized email to each person on your list.
There are several different marketplace apps you can install to achieve this, but you can also do this without installing any 3rd party software, as Google has a sample sheet you can copy that has a script for performing the mail merge built in.
You can make a copy of the Google MailMerge Sheet here.
(If you want to see the original Google instructions that link to this sheet, you can find them here.)
3. Replace the Data With Your Downloaded Data
Now, either open your CSV file in another tab and copy and paste it over to the new mail merge sheet you just created, or import it directly into this new sheet via File > Import and choose "Replace Current Spreadsheet".
Take this opportunity to remove any rows that you don't want to send reminders to, e.g. people who signed up a long time ago and might be confused by getting a reminder this late after the initial signup attempt.
Note: Your Gmail account has a limit on the number of recipients you can email each day. Most consumer accounts are limited at 100 recipients per day, and Gsuite/Workspace accounts are limited to 1500 per day. To avoid being flagged as a spammer, you should stay well below these limits. If you want, you could consider using a paid plan with one of the Workspace Marketplace apps to perform your mail merge, spreading the reminder send out over multiple days so as not to put the standing of your account at risk.
4. Set the Email Column Name to "Recipient"
The Google Sheet that you copied assumes that you have a column with a header titled "Recipient", so be sure to change your row title from "email" or whatever it was in your export to "Recipient"
5. Add an Email Sent Column
The Google Sheet will use a script to send the emails to all the rows in the spreadsheet, and can update to let you know which rows it has completed. In order to do this, you must have an empty column titled Email Sent, so add it onto the end.
6. Create a Draft Email as a Template
In your Gmail account, create a draft email to use as the template to send as a reminder to your unconfirmed subscribers. You can use any of the columns from your Google Sheet as placeholders by using the column header in curly braces, e.g. {{first_name}} if that's the header in the column that has your subscriber's first name. The email addresses will be filled by the script, so no need to put that in the template.
Here's a draft template that might be useful, make sure to replace details to match your list:
Hey {{first_name}},
I noticed that you signed up for the Subscribe Sense mailing list recently, but you didn't get a chance to confirm your subscription. Until you do, you're not officially on our list and won't receive any of our emails.
If you're still interested, please search your inbox for an email from "news@subscribesense.com" with the subject line "Important: Confirm Your Subscription", and click the link to make sure you're on our list.
Looking forward to connecting soon!
Anna
7. Send the Emails
Once your template is complete, then back in your Google Spreadsheet, choose Mail Merge > Send Emails from the menu.
You will need to authorize the script to run. (You may need to click the "advanced" link to achieve this.) After giving permission, you'll need to choose Mail Merge > Send Emails from the menu again.
Then you will need to copy and paste the subject line of the template draft email that you wrote in step 6 into the dialog that pops up. Then hit "OK" and the mail send should begin, and you'll see a success message when it is complete.
Any individual rows that couldn't send (bad email address, etc) should be indicated in the Email Sent column that you added in step 5.
That's it! You've now sent reminder emails to the unconfirmed subscribers on your list. Depending on how many subscribers you get, you may want to do this once a week or more frequently for the most recent unconfirmed subscribers.
If doing this manually becomes too much trouble, you can always connect your email marketing list to Subscribe Sense, and have it send out automated reminders (with unsubscribe links) on your behalf. Another advantage of this approach is that these emails can contain personalized links to allow leads to click through directly to confirm their address, rather than asking them to search for the original confirmation email.
Most importantly, remember that reminders are just one tactic in your toolbox for reducing unconfirmed subscribers.
