Do you have an Adobe Business Catalyst website with a lot of customers you wish to Opt-In ?
You can request Business Catalyst to set the master opt-in on your site, so all existing customers are "opt-in" to your marketing emails. [Forum thread here]
Send a support ticket to Business Catalyst to have them turn on the master opt-in option for your website and ask them to opt-in your entire database at the same time.
What is double opt-in ?
When a customer signs up to a newletter list on your website, Business Catalyst automatically sends the auto-responder to the customer. The tag {tag_verificationurl} in the auto-responder email is replaced with a link the customer clicks to confirm they want to receive your newsletters. This is known as double opt-in.
What if the customer does not click the verification link?
If the customer does not click the link, they will not be receive your newsletters unless you force opt in for their account in the admin panel, or have used the bypass double opt-in feature in your webforms, or have the master opt-in turned on by BC support.
What if I've turned off the auto-responder for a form?
If you've disabled the auto-responder on your form, the verification link will not be sent to your customers. In this case you will need to either:
Business Catalyst uses double opt-in to comply with anti-spam measures and legislation, but a lot of websites have a Newletter Signup form or similar where customers are expressly wanting to join in to your marketing list.
By default all newsletter forms are double opt-in and there are a few things you can do to skip this process.
How to: Force Opt-in on Newsletter Subscription Forms
To ensure your customers are going to receive your newsletters when they subscribe, you need to add the force opt-in parameter to your form.
Edit your newsletter forms and add &OPTIN=true to the end of the form action ( <form action="..." )
All new subscribers will then be opted-in as soon as they subscribe to a newsletter using this form.
Business Catalyst already includes a great reporting tool - but Google Analytics is still my prefered report engine. You can gain so much information about who and why people are visiting your business catalyst site - more importantly it can help you figure out why sales or contact forms are not being completed.
Eventually this page is going to hold all the tips I have about using Google Analytics with Business Catalyst, but for now I have one tip and that is how to add the analytics tracking code to your templates in a way that works with Business Catalyst and the Dreamweaver plugin Triangle.
Business Catalyst (BC) has a habit of decoding the tracking code and breaking it. (Those "%3C" you see in the google code are actually "<" but they need to be encoded to work).
The problem comes in with this part of the tracker code:
Notice that I've pre-decoded the string, removed the call to unescape() and broken up the string.
The important part here is that you must break up the <script tag into something like <scr" + "ipt ... this stops the webbrowser from seeing the script tag until the javascript tells it to (with the document.write() ). If you skip this bit you google analytics code will still not work and you will probably get javascript errors on the page.
To save time searching for the answer on both sites I've build a Google Custom Search engine that allows for searching both sites at once. I find this to be very useful so I'm posting the search box here so everyone else can use it too.
Custom Search
Of course you can search directly on each of their own sites - but the above search could save you time.
