Stop allowing contacts to verify themselves multiple times?

Hey there! For all our sites that use Brevo, we have DOI forms to validate our list of contacts. The problem, however, is that there’s currently no way (that I know of) to stop people from entering the same email multiple times. This causes users to receive the same « verify your email » email as many times as they put the same address in.

We know the contact info will never be duplicated on Brevo, since any email entered more than once will just have their profile updated, but they’re still receiving this email and it’s not great.

We’ve tried to combat this by ensuring our welcome message drip can only be entered once, so people are receiving the DOI email but then if they’re already verified, nothing will happen after they click verify again. This is really frustrating though. Is there any way through Brevo or through our website to stop people from receiving this email more than once?

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Hi @rdav , thanks for posting on this community!

Indeed, for the moment contacts submitting forms multiple times will have to verify themselves multiple times. I agree it’s not ideal.

It happens that we had the same request a few days ago, in French, here: Double opt-in une seule fois

Thanks for the feedback, this is something we should improve indeed.
Adding you @Mohit in the thread so that you can follow as well.

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I had this same issue @rdav when I was testing, so I have set up Automations to manage this instead if this helps.

I’ve probably gone a bit overkill on mine as I allow 3 attempts, with a different confirmation message each time - I like to push the limits of these things :slight_smile:

If you are interested the basic setup is as follows:

Create a pending approval list and active users list

Set the form up as normal, but don’t send a confirmation email, just add to the pending approval list. I do send the user to a sign up confirmation page on the website as this tells them to expect the email.

Set up an automation that triggers on addition to the pending approval list
Check if user has tried either by being in a failed list, or using a contact attribute
Send the DOI email
Wait for a click response for a determined period
If the user clicks, I move them to active users and remove from pending
If the user does not click, move them to failed list / update contact attribute and block them

I only send to segments, so I can then filter a user based on their list - this way, if not an active user then don’t include them and this accounts for failed users and pending users.

If you want to get creative, I use a counter to determine how many times they processed and use that to feed the email that is being sent to them.

As an aside, I also discovered that if someone fills in the form with an active user account it also changes their subscriptions!

So as a bonus workaround for that:

Create a set of lists for sign up
Create a set of lists for active users that match
When the user activates, the automation will read each list and put them in the correct matching active list. E.g.
If contact in signup list A remove from Signup List A and Add to Active List A then go to next If/Else list check
If not, go to next If/Else list check
If contact in Signup list B etc.and repeat until complete.

One last comment - I allow users to put a custom greeting - for the same reason as the list workaround above, I only allow this at Manage Profile level not on sign up to stop someone putting a malicious greeting. Paranoid - perhaps, but inevitably someone will think of compromising this - and perhaps even more so if they read this workaround! OOps - sorry :innocent:

Also - Thank you Brevo for giving us these automations that are very useful! I have a little collection now to manage my user accounts

2 Likes

Wow, this is so extensive! Thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

Hi,
could you explain better how your solution works?
You say « Create a set of lists for sign up »
Then there must be some automation rule that

  • checks if an account added to the sign up list already exists in the active list?
  • if yes remove it from the sign up list
  • if no send a double opt in email
  • if that email is clicked move the contact to the active list
    is that how it works?

But how do you add such rules?