Recent­ly, one of our read­ers asked us how to pre­vent newslet­ter signup spam in WordPress? 

Some­times spam bots fill in your newslet­ter signup forms and add dum­my email address­es to your email list. This costs you mon­ey and email ser­vice providers can mark your emails as spam. 

In this arti­cle, we’ll explain how to pre­vent newslet­ter signup spam in Word­Press and keep your email list healthy and spam free. 

What is Newsletter Signup Spam and Why Prevent It?

Newslet­ter signup spam is when a bot fills in a form and joins your email list. 

It hap­pens because some spam­bots sim­ply fill in all the forms they come across. They’re hop­ing to get a mes­sage to you.

While newslet­ter signup spam may be less notice­able than com­ment spam and con­tact form spam, it can still cause problems.

Almost all email mar­ket­ing ser­vices charge you based on the num­ber of sub­scribers you have in your list. This means, you can end up pay­ing for sub­scribers who are just bots, which is a waste of your money.

Plus, if you’re send­ing out emails to bot email address­es that don’t exist, then this can poten­tial­ly dam­age your sender reputation.

There are sev­er­al ways to pre­vent newslet­ter signup spam, and in this arti­cle we will cov­er all the best methods:

• Use dou­ble optin to pre­vent newslet­ter signup spam
• Use reCAPTCHA on your newslet­ter signup form
• Use a smart lead ver­i­fi­ca­tion service
• Check your list for sus­pi­cious email address­es or activity

Use Double Optin to Prevent Newsletter Signup Spam

Dou­ble optin, some­times called con­firmed optin, is use­ful in sev­er­al ways. It means peo­ple have to con­firm they want to receive your emails.

When a user first signs up, they get a spe­cial email with a but­ton or link to click. If they don’t click this, then they will not receive any fur­ther emails. Here’s an exam­ple from Ele­gant Themes‘ email list:

This method stops many spam­bots from becom­ing full mem­bers of your list. They will not be count­ed in your total sub­scribers when your email mar­ket­ing ser­vice bills you. 

Dou­ble optin has a num­ber of oth­er ben­e­fits, too:

• You will only email peo­ple who tru­ly want to be on your list.
• You will not be email­ing address­es that don’t exist. This can hap­pen if some­one mistypes their email address when sign­ing up.
• Your emails will be more like­ly to get through. Some mail providers require dou­ble optin in order to deliv­er emails.

All rep­utable email mar­ket­ing ser­vices offer dou­ble optin. It often comes enabled by default.

Set­ting Up Dou­ble Optin With Con­stant Contact

Con­stant Con­tact is top of our list of best email mar­ket­ing ser­vices. It’s easy to set up dou­ble optin for your Con­stant Con­tact lists. 

First, login to your Con­stant Con­tact email mar­ket­ing account. Then, click on your name in the top right hand cor­ner and click the ‘My Set­tings’ link:

Next, click the ‘Man­age Con­tact Emails’ link. This will take you to the Con­tact Emails page. 

On the Con­tact Emails page, scroll down to the Con­firm Optin sec­tion. Here, you just need to click the ‘Acti­vate’ but­ton to turn on dou­ble optin:

You will then see a pop­up ask­ing you whether you want to con­tin­ue. Sim­ply click the ‘Yes, Con­tin­ue’ but­ton here:

Con­stant Con­tact will now take you straight to the optin con­fir­ma­tion email. You can edit the text of this email if you want.

New sub­scribers to your email list will now receive a con­fir­ma­tion email. They need to click the ‘Con­firm Sub­scrip­tion’ but­ton to become full mem­bers of your list.

The process is sim­i­lar for oth­er email mar­ket­ing ser­vices like Drip, Send­in­Blue, Con­vertK­it, MailChimp, etc.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some spam­bots are clever enough that they can click on email links and con­firm their mem­ber­ship of your list. In this case, you can try some of these oth­er meth­ods to pre­vent them from sign­ing up for your email list.

Using reCAPTCHA on Your Newsletter Signup Form

Using reCAPTCHA is a great way to block spam­bots from com­plet­ing your form and get­ting on your list in the first place.

We’re going to show you how to use reCAPTCHA with 2 pop­u­lar tools, Opt­in­Mon­ster and WPForms.

Using reCAPTCHA with Opt­in­Mon­ster to Pre­vent Email Signup Spam

Opt­in­Mon­ster is a pop­u­lar lead gen­er­a­tion tool that you can use on your Word­Press site. It lets you cre­ate a wide range of email signup forms, includ­ing pop­ups, slide-in forms, inline forms, sticky bars, and more.

You can eas­i­ly add a reCAPTCHA to your Opt­in­Mon­ster forms (optins).

To do so, you’ll first need to sign up for Google’s reCAPTCHA and reg­is­ter your site there. Just fol­low our step by step instruc­tions on using reCAPTCHA for help with this.

It’s easy to inte­grate Opt­in­Mon­ster with Google reCAPTCHA. Sim­ply login to your Opt­in­Mon­ster account, click on your pro­file name and then click on the ‘Sites’ link in the drop­down menu:

Here, you just need to find your web­site in the list and click on the ‘Edit’ link next to it.

Now, go ahead and scroll down to the Google reCAPTCHA fields. Copy your Site Key and Secret Key from your Google reCAPTCHA account here:

That’s all you need to do. All the email optin forms you cre­ate for that web­site will now be auto­mat­i­cal­ly pro­tect­ed against spam.

Using reCAPTCHA with WPForms to Pre­vent Email Signup Spam

If you’re using WPForms for your newslet­ter sign up form, it’s easy to use reCAPTCHA to pre­vent bots from join­ing your list. 

First, you need to enable reCAPTCHA under WPForms » Set­tings. To do this, you need a Site Key and Secret Key from Google. Just fol­low our step by step instruc­tions on using reCAPTCHA for help with this.

Once you’ve enabled reCAPTCHA, go ahead and edit your newslet­ter signup form. You just need to click on the reCAPTCHA field on the left hand side:

Then, you will see a mes­sage let­ting you know that reCAPTCHA has been enabled for your form. Don’t for­get to save your changes to your form.

Your form will now have the reCAPTCHA logo on it, show­ing that reCAPTCHA is active.

Most users will not even notice the reCAPTCHA, if you use the invis­i­ble ver­sion like us. They will only be prompt­ed to com­plete a reCAPTCHA test if Google thinks they might be a bot.

Using Smart Lead Verification from DataValidation

DataVal­i­da­tion offers an email ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vice that checks email address­es on your list. You can use this to remove dupli­cates, fil­ter out tem­po­rary and dis­pos­able email address­es, and ver­i­fy whether email address­es are active.

You will get a free qual­i­ty report for all the lists you upload or import into the DataVal­i­da­tion app:

You can then pay to down­load or export just the email address­es that are high qual­i­ty. This lets you eas­i­ly and quick­ly remove any spam­bots from your list.

Opt­in­Mon­ster offers this ser­vice to their Enter­prise cus­tomers. Just reach out to their sup­port team if you’d like them to help with this.

Checking Your List for Suspicious Email Addresses or Activity

If you don’t want to pay to use a smart lead ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vice, you can man­u­al­ly remove sus­pi­cious email address­es from your email newslet­ter list.

There’s no per­fect way to iden­ti­fy spam­bots, but one of the fol­low­ing indi­ca­tors can be good clues:

• They have an unusu­al look­ing email address, per­haps with lots of num­bers or mul­ti­ple dots in it.
• They open 100% of your emails and click on every link. While this could be a very engaged sub­scriber, it’s quite like­ly to be a bot.
• They have nev­er opened an email from you in a very long time.

Once you’ve found sus­pi­cious email address­es on your list, you can sim­ply delete these subscribers. 

What if you are unsure whether cer­tain sub­scribers are real peo­ple or bots? You could tag them, then email them. Ask them to reply if they want to stay on your list. Then, go ahead and delete any­one who doesn’t reply.

To add a tag to a sub­scriber in Con­stant Con­tact, click the ‘Con­tacts’ tab then click on your cho­sen list. Next, find your sub­scriber. The eas­i­est way to do this is to search by their email address.

Next, click on the three dots to the right of the subscriber’s details and click the ‘Edit’ link:

Tip: If you want to delete a sub­scriber, you can do that here by click­ing the ‘Delete’ link.

Now, it’s time to add tags in the ‘Tags’ sec­tion on the right-hand side.

Once you’ve tagged all the sub­scribers who might be spam­bots, go ahead and cre­ate a new cam­paign. Before send­ing out the cam­paign, use the ‘Nar­row by Tag’ option to send it only to peo­ple with the tag you set up:

Email newslet­ter spam­bot sub­scribers can be expen­sive and irri­tat­ing. Make sure you use at least one of the above meth­ods to keep your email list healthy and bots free.

We hope this arti­cle helped you learn how to pre­vent newslet­ter signup spam in Word­Press. You might also want to see our tips on how to get more email newslet­ter sub­scribers, and our list of the best mar­ket­ing automa­tion tools.

If you liked this arti­cle, then please sub­scribe to our YouTube Chan­nel for Word­Press video tuto­ri­als. You can also find us on Twit­ter and Face­book.

The post How to Pre­vent Newslet­ter Signup Spam in Word­Press appeared first on WPBe­gin­ner.