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.
Topic summary
Multiple Shopify store owners experienced sudden, dramatic drops in email subscriber counts—ranging from 50-75% losses—within the past week of early February 2024.
Potential causes identified:
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Double opt-in enforcement: One user suspects Shopify may have retroactively applied double opt-in requirements, marking legacy or imported subscribers as ‘pending’ rather than confirmed. No mechanism exists to resend confirmation emails to these subscribers.
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Checkout field issue: Another user reports the new Shopify Checkout contains a marketing opt-in field that may be unsubscribing existing subscribers if they don’t actively re-check the box during purchase.
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Domain authentication: Initial speculation about CNAME/DMARC requirements hasn’t been confirmed as the cause.
Current status: The issue remains unresolved with no official explanation from Shopify. Users are exploring workarounds like hiding the checkout marketing field to prevent further unsubscribes.
I had the same issue - were you able to figure out why?
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.
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.
I had that shocking experience yesterday. From 1440 subscribers to 600. What’s going on, Shopify?