I recently read something on A List Apart going against sign up forms, but what about activation emails? Are they a big no no, or a useful tool in the fight against bots? Is there any proof that an activation email actually drives away users?
Activation emails
1–10 of 50 posts
Re: Activation emails
#2The problem I've found is sometimes they are spam-trapped (at least in my experience) and so you can lose people who you would want
Re: Activation emails
#3Look at it from a business perspective:
What do you gain from having an e-mail:
- usually nothing, unless you send your users spam.
What do you lose from having an e-mail:
- around 10% of your potential customers. (the number probably varies wildly from site to site)
- People who lose their password can't get into their account, unless they choose to provide an optional e-mail adress.
To me that is a pretty clear choice.
Re: Activation emails
#4In my opinion the more hurdles you present the more users you drive away.
There are legitimate reasons for introducing hurdles like requiring registration, requiring activation e-mails, etc. Ask yourself whether the benefits of activating outweigh the potential downsides. If you're requiring activation e-mails to prevent bots from signing up, how significant of an impact will those bots have on other users? On a forum it may be pretty significant, as the site can be flooded with unwanted posts. There are other cases where a bot signing up would really have no substantive impact on a user, because they wouldn't be inconvenienced by the bot.
That's a rather roundabout answer, but it effectively boils down to this: you should remove every unnecessary barrier between your user and your site. I consider an unnecessary barrier something that doesn't improve the quality of the site and/or the user experience.
Re: Activation emails
#5People use Mailinator anyway so it is just one more airport TSA type annoyance that accomplishes nothing.
Re: Activation emails
#6I am going to stop using them.
Re: Activation emails
#7Look at it from a business perspective: What do you gain from having an e-mail: - usually nothing, unless you send your users spam. What do you lose from having an e-mail: - around 10% of your potential customers. (the number probably varies wildly from site to site) - People who lose their password can't get into their account, unless they choose to provide an optional e-mail adress. To me that is a pretty clear cho…
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Re: Activation emails
#8I've moved to using soft email confirmation, meaning that it doesn't prevent the user from doing anything, it just removes a message on their dashboard or whatever reminding them to confirm their email address.
Context is everything, but 99% of the time soft confirmation or no confirmation at all is fine.
Re: Activation emails
#9the way we're handling this:
1) require no registration
2) allow registration for convenience or features that obviously require it.
3) send out an activation email, but don't bug or even inform the user on the website about it.
4) don't enforce activation.
since for many users activation is an automatism already, you'll still be able to verify a lot of email addresses, but without having to wait/check-spam for the email.
Re: Activation emails
#10Look at it from a business perspective: What do you gain from having an e-mail: - usually nothing, unless you send your users spam. What do you lose from having an e-mail: - around 10% of your potential customers. (the number probably varies wildly from site to site) - People who lose their password can't get into their account, unless they choose to provide an optional e-mail adress. To me that is a pretty clear cho…
Confirmation emails might be useless, but notifications of new features are not spam.