Co-registration (or “co-reg” for short) is a nasty word. You won’t find the word anywhere in our materials because it comes with a lot of baggage.
It used to be that tiny pre-checked box below the sign up form that read something like, “Hear from our third party marketing partners.” Or, you signed up to get your newspaper’s daily email and on the next page you were offered everything from diapers to car newsletters.
Your information got sold to god-knows-who and forever after you received emails from companies you never directly signed up with.
Big surprise – that sucks for everyone. – the advertiser, the subscriber and the publisher.
There are a million ways to do co-registration wrong – and one way to do it RIGHT.
Here’s how we do co-registration the right way:
1) Match the newsletter you signed up for with newsletters on the same topic.
If you sign up for a trading newsletter, you only see trading newsletters on the After Offers page.
2) NEVER pre-check a box or do “one-click to subscribe”
Not only does it result in crummy subscribers, it’s illegal now in the EU. The laws are only going to get more strict from this point on.
3) Clearly indicate the company behind each offering
A good subscriber means that when they get that first email from you, they remember that they signed up for it and recognize the company name and branding.
4) NEVER charge for duplicates
After Offers does not charge an advertiser for a subscriber that is already on their list – regardless of how many that may be. No ceiling, no cap. It’s just the right thing to do.
5) Have strict validation, quality scoring and bot detection in place.
Here is what we do after someone chooses an offer on an After Offers page:
Step 1: Validation
We use two independent services to do validation – BriteVerify.com and Kickbox.io. They both look at a list of things to determine if an email address is valid. They ping the SMTP server of the domain, they see if it is a “disposable” or 10-minute email address, etc.
99.9% of the time, the two services agree if it is good or bad. If even one of them says it is an email that will bounce or is from a temporary email service, it gets invalidated and does not get sent to you. You don’t get charged.
If it passes validation with both services, it moves to the next step:
Step 2. Quality scoring
Just because an email is valid, doesn’t mean it’s a good email. Kickbox.io goes an extra step and tells us what kind of “quality” this email is.
56dJJohn667@hotmail.com is not as good of an email as Steve.Rogers@gmail.com. They evaluate the email address for a lot of things. Emails that are all numbers get invalidated. Emails with invalid words or names will often get invalidated.
They score the email address from 1-100. Anything that gets a score of less than 70 gets invalidated and not sent into your system. You don’t get charged.
We may be occasionally throwing out a perfectly good email, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t rise to the level of quality we demand.
And finally,
Step 3: Fraud, spam trap and bot Detection
Running in the background of every After Offers page load is a service called E-Hawk. E-Hawk (E-Hawk.net) is looking for three things: Bots, spam traps and fraud.
Bots are a major nuisance. Bots can even click the links in confirmation emails. But they do exhibit some specific behaviors (like coming from known bad actor IPs, domains and countries).
Anything they suspect of being “not human” is invalidated automatically
They are also very good at detecting spam traps. But, also know that anyone that tells you they can eliminate ALL spam trap emails is not being truthful. They too can be programmed to click on confirmation emails and new ones are added all the time. All one can do is scrub a sign up like we do to throw out as many as possible.
It’s an expensive part of our business, but absolutely required to make sure our platform works the way it should.
I would encourage you to ask other sources you may be using what they do to make sure the quality is exceptional.