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Removing email registration improved retention

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Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#41

Post by tapneal »

gen220 wrote: post #16
londons_explore wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get users to email a personalized support email address. Eg. help3a2fg@company.com The support team can figure out which account or anonymous cookie saw that email address. It's a handy way to still communicate directly with users while holding as little PII data as possible about them.

This is really clever! Thank you for the idea.

We're hoping to test an email password recovery option after the account is set up. It builds on the idea of getting more information after commitment.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#42

Post by tapneal »

Apreche wrote: post #5

Have you considered that without email verification that a lot of those sign-ups were just bots?

We use some tools to understand traffic and fortunately most of the traffic is clean. One downside with asking for usernames alone is that people (not too surprisingly), come up with creative but very profane usernames!

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#43

Post by ticmasta »

chrisdbanks wrote: post #28

Email 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…

I also don't understand the value in giving away more than you need to get someone to commit. If your product has any type of cost associated with converting you may be better to filter poor prospects early, i.e. those who won't even give out an email. This is likely better than carrying them farther down the process with more promising conversions.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#44

Post by amatecha »

franga2000 wrote: post #35
chrisdbanks wrote: post #28

Email 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...

You're just trying to get someone to do you a favor by looking up what that phenomenon is called! We're onto you! heheh ;)

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#45

Post by edmundsauto »

chrisdbanks wrote: post #28

Email 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?

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#46

Post by tapneal »

s3r3nity wrote: post #6

Great 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…

100% agree. This worked for us, but is likely to vary by business and this is not a silver bullet. I do think though people who register with email and convert tend to be people who would convert already (i.e., there is a bias already). Product managers can test opening up the funnel more by asking for emails later in the funnel.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#47

Post by tapneal »

InfiniteRand wrote: post #32

I like the idea of starting registration with no email but with the option to add a recovery email later on, once I am sold on the idea that this account is worth recovering.

That's something we're hoping to explore further. I think email for those with early interest often is a non-starter.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#48

Post by tapneal »

davnicwil wrote: post #7

The 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…

Agree. It will depend on site, but we often don't challenge if email collection is worthwhile. One idea we had is to ask for an email afterward as an optional password discovery option if the user wants it. That way they are in control.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#49

Post by tapneal »

milesvp wrote: post #18
davnicwil wrote: post #7

The 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…

Seems like a hard problem. You could keep track of IP addresses that the user plays from, and allow resets from that IP. You'd only want to do this for very low risk types of accounts. Sadly, game sites tend to be high target for account takeovers, so this may be a very bad idea. Adding some other fingerprinting would help. In fact, the more I think about it, there's a paper I saw that can identify users solely by th…

It would be awesome if there was a face unlock technology that can be integrated with sites for laptops. It would of course create privacy concerns.

Re: Removing email registration improved retention

#50

Post by tapneal »

ve55 wrote: post #8

This 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.

Totally agree. This will depend by business. We're were just pointing out that it makes sense to challenge the norm, because people are so reluctant to give their email addresses.
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