Why did my email subscriber list suddenly decrease?

[JFlores001]

Today (Feb 1 2024), I noticed that our email subscriber list was suddenly missing about 75% of subscribers. We had over 3500 and now are down to less than 800 in the list, and I'm not sure what happened. Does this have anything to do with the CNAME or DMARC requirements for authenticating our domain? Or was there some update to how Shopify cleans email lists? Did anyone else notice anything? We sent an email out just last Thursday to our full list, so something happened in the last week.

[Rileypriegel]

I had the same issue - were you able to figure out why?

[JFlores001]

I'm still not 100% sure, but I believe that it had something to do with the double opt-in. We have that enabled and I think it wasn't working correctly before. I now see customers have 'pending' in the email subscription column, which I take to mean that they weren't completely 'confirmed' subscribers before. It could have been because they were legacy subscribers from before the double opt-in (e.g. ones that were imported). In any case, it's frustrating because there's no way to resend a 'confirm your subscription' email, as I'm sure many weren't expecting it.

[Joris_]

The same thing is happening here. It seems that the new Shopify Checkout has something to do with it. There is a field for with "marketing options" where customers can subscribe to email. If they don't, your customers who are already subscribed get unsubscribed. Completely crazy, I know. But sometimes Shopify is like that. We are now checking if hiding that field from checkout solves the issue because loyal customers are unknowingly unsubscribed here.