Removing email registration improved retention
solitaired.com
Removing email registration improved retention
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Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#2That's really interesting and definitely something worth trying. I wonder how the effectiveness of email changes with the goals for the user (play solitaire vs pay for a subscription, etc).
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#3I'm fairly certain I would rather collect the emails even if it means less retention. Not for marketing purposes but for support purposes.
With MakePostSell [1] a customer may add products to their shopping cart and interact with a shop as if they are logged in, but at the point of sale / checkout, we ask them to verify their email.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#4That's really interesting and definitely something worth trying. I wonder how the effectiveness of email changes with the goals for the user (play solitaire vs pay for a subscription, etc).
He does mention, somewhat off-handedly, that the lack of email makes password recovery harder. (Presumably impossible without some other communications channel like a phone number.)
And you really need to be able to recover account access for a paid subscription. It's probably also reasonable to assume that if someone is going to give you a credit card number and address, they're probably OK with giving you an email.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#5Have you considered that without email verification that a lot of those sign-ups were just bots?
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#6Great idea, but all these posts deserve the same qualifier: this should be considered an experiment / hypothesis, and not a recommendation that every other site / business / experience should apply without question.
There are times when removing email is best, and others where data or business vertical necessitates something different. You still need to verify with your users and do the appropriate testing / analysis / user research.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#7The article mentions the tradeoff of username Vs email of increased willingness for people to sign up Vs losing the simple channel for password reset, but does not propose a solution outside of non-expiring cookies, which to me isn't really a satisfactory solution (though perhaps it works OK enough in practice for some types of use cases).
In my view, for most applications, the upside is not really worth that downside. It got me thinking though, are there any clever solutions to do password reset without an email / social media account login / etc? Does anyone know of any good ones?
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#8This is pretty far from what would be needed to say 'Email registration is dead'. Users may be annoyed by it and it may help in niche cases to exclude email requirements, but for most webapps this will not be possible as users will not even be able to reset their password then.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#9I'm fairly certain I would rather collect the emails even if it means less retention. Not for marketing purposes but for support purposes. With MakePostSell [1] a customer may add products to their shopping cart and interact with a shop as if they are logged in, but at the point of sale / checkout, we ask them to verify their email. [1] https://www.makepostsell.com
Don't bother. If you collect email addresses, it's PII and someday you will have to account for that.
Instead, give them a searchable FAQ or a wiki and an email address to write to for support. Connect it to a ticket system that autoresponds with a ticket number.
(then you added your second paragraph while I was writing this.)
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#10That's really interesting and definitely something worth trying. I wonder how the effectiveness of email changes with the goals for the user (play solitaire vs pay for a subscription, etc).
I think age plays also a role. I have met various young people who have't entered the "working world" yet, that only have an email address because they needed one for registration and to recieve some school related information. But it is percieved as something completely arcaic and they never use it for anything else nor check it regularly. All communication is via messangers or social media.
On the other hand also elderly are or could be moving in this directions. E.g. my mother getting an iPad and apps like Whatsapp have completly changed "computers" for her. From, being mostly a chore that you have to use, to something really useful for getting information and to stay in touch with relatives in other countries