Email validation

Email validation gives you more control over your subscriber acquisition by ruling out already existing subscribers. It is also giving you an option to create a whitelist or a blacklist of email addresses, domains, and country codes. With Email validation, you can make sure your visitors can only get one discount code.

You can use the email validation for any Campaigns with an Input Element for emails.

If a visitor tries to subscribe with a blacklisted email address, domain, or country code, they will see an error message that they are not eligible for the Campaign when they try to subscribe:

You can also enable "Block existing subscribers", which blocks visitors who have already subscribed to any of your Campaigns. They will see a message that "You are already subscribed with your email address.":

You will find a list of all the visitors who have already subscribed to any of your Campaigns on the Leads page of your OptiMonk admin:

If you enable the setting "Block existing subscribers" for email validation, we will use this list to check if the visitor has already subscribed to any of your Campaigns.

In this article, you'll learn

• how to set up Email validation for your Campaigns,
• how to create custom error messages for already existing subscribers.

Here is how to set up Email validation for your Campaigns

1) Log in to your OptiMonk account at https://app.optimonk.com/ 

2) Select Campaigns on the left, then select a Campaign you wish to edit (note: we recommend choosing a Campaign where you already have an Input Element for emails, but you can also add this Element to any of your Campaigns in the Campaign Editor):

3) Select the Variant you want to edit:

4) If you click on the Email address input, the Manage Input Fields option will show up on the right, under General settings:

If your Campaign doesn't have an Input Element for email, you can add a new Input Element under Elements on the left:

If you click on the new Input Element on your Campaign, you can select its type on the right, under General:

If you have not set an email type before, you can add as a new type anytime:

If you create a new type, you can select the type of the new field you would like to use:

5) Once you set the Email type, you will see further options. You can:

• make it compulsory to fill out the Email field:

• Block existing subscribers:
  • If you enable this setting, the visitors will not be able to subscribe with any email you already have on your Leads page.
  • The "blocked" visitors will see a fixed message "You are already subscribed with your email address"

Click on the toggle to Block existing subscribers:

• Create an "Allow list" of domains, that works as a whitelist:
  • You can specify a list of emails or email domains that you want to include in your Campaign
  • Visitors will only be able to subscribe with email addresses from the specified domains
• Create a "Blocklist" of domains, which works as a blacklist:
  • You can specify a list of emails or email domains that you want to exclude from your Campaign
  • Visitors will only be able to subscribe with email addresses that are not from the specified domains

When you create a whitelist (allow) or a blacklist (block) list of emails, keep in mind the following:

• You can specify email addresses, such as john.doe@optimonk.com
• You can define domains with the * character. For example, if you want to add the domain optimonk.com to the list, use *@optimonk.com
• You can also target domain country codes with the * character, such as .com, .uk, .us, .hu, for example. Example: *.hu
• User the Enter key to specify multiple rules

Here is an example of how to set this up. I have enabled email validation with the following settings:

• I have enabled "Block existing subscribers", so visitors will not be able to subscribe to this Campaign with an email address that is already present on the Leads page of my OptiMonk account (the Leads page is a collection of all of my subscribers that subscribed via any of my OptiMonk Campaigns)
• I have selected "Block", which means that the following email address and domains will not be able to subscribe to the Campaign:
  • john.doe@optimonk.com is excluded from subscribing
  • the domain of @innonic.com is also excluded, so my Campaign will not accept any email addresses that end with @innonic.com
  • I have also excluded any email addresses that end with .hu

6) Once you are ready, click on Ok then Save & Exit in the top right corner to finalize the changes:

How to create custom error messages for already existing subscribers

Your visitors can receive error messages when they try to subscribe to a campaign for two reasons

• if they filled in an input field incorrectly or
• they have already subscribed to one of your campaigns.

In OptiMonk, you can customize the error messages they receive

• to use different wording or
• to display the message in a different language.

To create custom error messages simply change the default error message on the right navbar.

Change the error message of required fields, for example from English into your own language:

Or change the message a visitor receives who has already subscribed to any of your campaigns below on the right navbar:

⚠️ If you set a custom error message, that’ll be the error message OptiMonk displays on your popup.
If you haven’t set up a custom error message, OptiMonk will use the default error message.

Thats' it! :) If you have any further questions or need any help, just let us know at support@optimonk.com and we would be happy to assist you :)