Have you considered that without email verification that a lot of those sign-ups were just bots?
Or users creating another account due to lost password (which is easier if you don't have to get another email address).
Removing email registration improved retention
51–60 of 180 posts
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#52The 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 downsid…
Allow to upload a PGP public key, and reset request page would just return an encrypted PGP message containing a link to reset the password.
Assumes: - people are less likely to lose their PGP key, than random password to a random website. - people have PGP keys - PGP key doesn't contain email address (it does).
Anyway, it would be reliable, and it doesn't need giving third party online service access to all your online accounts.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#53The 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 downsid…
Give a password reset code and ask the user to write it down on paper.
People likely to lose a password, would likely lose this paper code too. People using password manager would not lose the password in the first place.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#54In the end, it's all about time. People are rational creatures (despite rumours) and quickly decide whether they are willing to spend time to do the email activation thingie, and so they bail. Someone should do a survey of conversion rates vs time it takes to sign up somewhere, i bet there will be a strong correlation.
Anecdotally, i ve observed the opposite too. I don't require email to sign up, but there is an email field further down in the form, and yet 95% people DO enter an email that looks valid, and not just garbage. That said, only 5% clicked on the email verification link , presumably because they don't have to
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#55That'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 would suspect brand too makes a difference in whether people will give away their email address.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#56Email registration is the gateway drug to conversion. We AB tested this. Requiring users to sign up meant we got fewer sign ups but a higher conversion rate to premium. So although we had fewer users, more paid. Giving your email is a committment. Maybe once you've made a small committment it's easier to make a bigger committment. If you're running a commercial product, especially freemium, it's not just about number…
> Maybe once you've made a small committment it's easier to make a bigger committment. It's definitely not the whole story, but this is a pretty well-studied thing in psychology. A similar trick in social engineering is to ask your mark for a small favor, which will make them more likely to do you a bigger favor later. I've read about it many times, but can't for the life of me remember what it was called...
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#57I have a fake email address I use to sign up when I am forced to. I login to that email account once every month not to lose access, but other than that it is a huge swamp of unread emails.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#58I am not surprised. The list of services I no longer use because they constantly email me to generate "engagement" is quite long. And if I get too annoyed (about once or twice per quarter), I make the effort to not only de-register my account, but I often add the domain to my spam filter so I never see email from that domain again.
I just checked and I have a bit over 110 domains in my spam list that look like they were added over the years because of this. So I may have under-estimated how often I "blacklist" businesses like this.
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#59Email registration is the gateway drug to conversion. We AB tested this. Requiring users to sign up meant we got fewer sign ups but a higher conversion rate to premium. So although we had fewer users, more paid. Giving your email is a committment. Maybe once you've made a small committment it's easier to make a bigger committment. If you're running a commercial product, especially freemium, it's not just about number…
How do you know that it wasn't caused simply by selecting for more serious trialers? What makes you think the cause was "committing", and not a selection thing?
> We AB tested this
Re: Removing email registration improved retention
#60Email registration is the gateway drug to conversion. We AB tested this. Requiring users to sign up meant we got fewer sign ups but a higher conversion rate to premium. So although we had fewer users, more paid. Giving your email is a committment. Maybe once you've made a small committment it's easier to make a bigger committment. If you're running a commercial product, especially freemium, it's not just about number…
How do you know that it wasn't caused simply by selecting for more serious trialers? What makes you think the cause was "committing", and not a selection thing?
"More serious trialers" will be more likely to commit by entering an email; people who are not willing to enter an email are obviously not very serious trialers. It's just two different ways of saying the same thing.