“Be sure to white list this email address…”

Today a lesson about blindly following the crowd:

You’ve no doubt seen a welcome email before where the sender told you, “Be sure to white list this email address so you don’t miss any of our messages!”

A lot of people do this.

The premise is that getting a percentage of your subscribers to white list you means more emails getting delivered, opened and read—a higher quality, more engaged list, in other words.

But does it actually work?

Recently I tried an A/B test to find out.

Here’s what I did:

For the test group, I added a P.S. to the welcome email, offering some bonus content if the new subscriber would add the sender’s address to their address book, then hit reply and let me know.

Over the next month, 1,078 new subscribers received the white list request, and 1,046 subscribers did not.

4.1% of the test group subscribers replied for the bonus content.

(I was actually pretty surprised how high the participation was. Without an incentive I suspect less than 1% of people actually follow through on a white listing request.)

What impact did this have on subscriber engagement?

According to the tracking in Drip, the group that had white listed me showed 5% LESS engagement (opens and clicks) than the control group.

I have some ideas about this result, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts first.

What is going on here?

Related posts:

  1. White list hogwash Got a number of great theories and replies yesterday about why my “add this address to your white list” experiment failed to increase subscriber engagement. The most common point was one raised by email marketing pro Ian Brodie: Err, at 4.1% of 1,078 new subscribers we’re talking about the behaviour...
  2. Is Double Optin Hurting Your Email List? In response to my email last week that showed how double optin does NOT a better list make, subscriber Ian Brodie replies: Hey Josh – good email 🙂 There’s another reason the engagement stats look higher for double opted in emails, it’s to do with the samples used. If you...
  3. 3 Ways to Address Your Customer’s Deepest Fears and Desires (Without Turning Them Off) Ever see one of those sappy “morality tale” movies? You know—the kind where the acting is horrible and the plot feels contrived and the movie ends with a 10-minute soliloquy where the main character lectures everyone on the moral hazards of [fill in the blank]? Did the movie convince you?...
  4. How often should I email my list? (case study) One of the biggest “controversies” in email marketing is this: How often should I mail my list? The gurus are all over the map on this. On one hand, you have guys like Matt Furey and Ben Settle who take an aggressive approach—emailing every day, sometimes even multiple times per...