This is not advice any startup should ever listen to.<p>The most successful and lucrative form of marketing, by far, is re-marketing.<p>That is where you take someone who signed up but is not currently a customer and you target Facebook/Google ads specifically at that email address. I've seen conversion rates as high as 30% and it's typically pretty affordable.<p>It's such a critical part of marketing that many companies will take a loss on the initial "here is our product, please join" ads just so they can follow up with re-marketing in the weeks/months to come. And because people re-use their email addresses across websites you can target them on Quora, Reddit etc as well.<p>You can't do any of this without their email.
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 of signups.
>you can target them on Quora, Reddit etc as well.<p>This is one of the reasons I stopped giving out my primary email address for user signups. I use a service called Blur which allows for unlimited "masked" emails to be created, allowing me to give companies read-only email addresses. In the four years I've had it I have created 378 email addresses. If I'm including the email addresses that I've already deleted, the list gets to 400.<p>Marketing and the 3000 spam messages I get per month made me do this. It does not have to be this way, but as long as corporations can play fast and loose with my email address I will make sure they never get a real one to begin with.<p>Edit: Want to add here that I am not in any way sponsored by that company, I've just been using them for years now and think their prices are reasonable.
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.<p>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.
1) Everyone and their dog wants your email those days, which is bad due to engagement spam as mentioned in article, and privacy (those email addresses are probably flying around adtech servers which allow building up extremely detailed user profiles by those adtech companies).<p>Your website should allow "demo mode" to make me see what's the value it provides. No way I will go through registration on random pages that fail to immediately make me crave to use them. I ain't got time or will for that.<p>2) If you want to follow advice of the article, I'd rather not remove email field, but as I wrote before, allow demo mode, and at next step when actually registering the user, put a clear one paragraph sentence saying that you'll not be spamming me with your engagement stuff.<p>3) If you ask for email, absolutely verify it. There are way too many people who subscribe to all kinds of services using someone else's email. See this thread:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24359980" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24359980</a>
I 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.<p>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.
I 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.
I'm fairly certain I would rather collect the emails even if it means less retention. Not for marketing purposes but for support purposes.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.makepostsell.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.makepostsell.com</a>
I've started uses separate email addresses on my personal domain for each account I create, and so far I like this approach. I hope some company solves the problem of making domain registration as accessible as phone numbers are today so the average person can reap the benefits
10 years ago (!) Instapaper changed its tune and started requiring emails for new accounts. Before it had not required emails (just usernames) and even didn't require passwords, and after living with that for years Marco decided to switch back to the more traditional form.<p><a href="https://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738" rel="nofollow">https://blog.instapaper.com/post/2318776738</a><p>It's interesting to think that times may have changed and that people are hesitant to give out their email addresses anymore, but you are giving up some real benefits by leaving it out.
Anecdotal, of course, but in my experience many people won't sign-up using their email because they're tired of getting added to mailing lists and receiving spam. Now, you could use fake emails when you sign up for these, partially as a way of avoiding spam and partially to find out which services are the most annoying with their mailing. However, this gets tiresome and if I can find an alternative service that doesn't require me to give as many personal details, I'll choose it over that one.
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.
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).<p>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?
Honestly, I hate managing accounts and passwords so much that I'll walk away when a "create an account" is thrown in my face.<p>Login via Google / Facebook / Whatever is sometimes helpful, but it usually results in SPAM. For example, I logged into Redfin through Google and they immediately started spamming me.<p>Other times, when I login through Facebook and disable sharing my email, the site that I'm trying to log into has a "mystery error" because the concept of not sharing my email address never occurred to whoever wrote the integration.<p>Most of the time, I just use a unique email address with each site. My domain has a catch-all email address, so when someone starts spamming it, I know who did it.
Is anyone else here concerned / wondering if these numbers could be noise and loosely correlated? The leaderboard addition lead to a 22% user signup but there’s a 3-5% jump in number of sessions (games?) and it’s as a decimal position of 4. This feels like maybe there’s something more fundamentally wrong going on here...
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.
My pet peeve is with retailers which force you to register before even being able to browse their virtual store.
They will never get my business. I wonder if the CEOs of these companies have any idea how much business they're driving away.
Ask me email, but don't force me to verify it before letting me in. While I'm browsing, show me a prominent warning that my email is not yet verified. Include my email address in the warning so that I can catch possible typos.
That'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).
Reddit has regressed in this area. It now appears like an email is required for signup (even though you can leave it empty and click next). It probably deters people from creating accounts.
In 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.<p>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
Hopefully a lot of the remaining resons to collect emails start going away as WebAuthn gets adopted and better integrated into browser sync and/or password managers.