How to opt in contacts manually added to Salesforce

[Anonymous]

I'm developing a triggered email opt-in campaign for contacts manually added to SFDC by the sales team. And was keen to see what the community is doing around maximising conversion and meeting compliance.

My plan is to send these new contacts an opt-in email  
Then a reminder with an offer (like an e-book/whitepaper) a couple of days later
Then a last reminder (eg 'should I be emailing someone else at [company]?')
Then an alert to the lead owner (eg 'fyi your prospect hasn't opted in')

How long would you wait to send the the first email? Is too soon too creepy/stalky? 

Is wording an opt-in an email as a 'confirm your details to receive free valuable info' email ok in terms of compliance as long as my  form has a disclaimer? And am I allowed to send them 2 reminders if they haven't opted in?

Would you unsubscribe contacts who have gone through the whole flow and haven't opted in?

[Anonymous]

The answers will greatly depend on how your sales team imports contacts, and likely they do this in many ways.

• they might import their entire list of personal contacts for tracking
• they might import new contacts to an existing opportunity or account
• they might import a list of cold contacts they purchased on their own

On the personal relationship side, sending emails like this is quite aggressive.  On the cold list side, sending emails like this can result in high bounce rates and hurt your overall deliverability.

The best thing would be to learn how/why your sales team imports contacts and set up campaigns they can use in each case:

• Cold list warmup campaign
• Personal relationship campaign
• Existing account contacts campaign

These can be requested via Sales Insight, or, if you don't use Sales Insight, you might set up SFDC Campaigns that will then run the correct Smart Campaign within Marketo.