Tell me more ×
User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 3 down vote favorite

How many people sign up with a wrong (mistyped) email address when:

  1. you have a "confirm email" field
  2. you don't have a "confirm email" field

There is a very similar question on ux.se but it doesn't tackle the main question (namely if "confirm email" fields work or not)

share|improve this question
I found THIS ARTICLE on the subject. However it doesn't say to what extent this strategy improves having no confirm email field, which is why this isn't posted as an answer, but the article does promote the use of it with good reasoning. – AndroidHustle Nov 5 '12 at 9:44

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote

I have previous experience in monitoring an e-mail sending service at a paid membership site of more than 50 000 users. To register user had to enter their e-mail address, twice, and have an e-mail address that checked towards a regular expression making sure it was a well formed e-mail address. That regular expression wasn’t very well written since it allowed spaces in e-mail addresses.

We sent 50 000 e-mails at once, monitored the result and found that 200 e-mails bounced. That’s 0,4 percent which isn’t much – but having to correct 200 e-mail addresses isn’t funny. Fortunately the e-mail addresses where located in the database so we could easily detect those spaces-e-mail addresses and fix them. When that was done, still 20 e-mail kept bouncing.

It could depend on that the e-mail addresses didn’t exist anymore, the e-mail receiver service was down or a number of other factors not making the e-mail reach its destination. To deal with this for future sign-up we corrected the regular expression and we didn’t send e-mails that wasn’t validated by the e-mail recipient (through confirm your e-mail address with this link e-mail).

That ensured that we didn’t send e-mails to recipients who didn’t pass regular expression and ones that didn’t have a validated e-mail address. I think this technique works better than a confirm e-mail box.

share|improve this answer
1  
I find this a bit off topic considering what the OP is asking for Benny, wouldn't you agree? You merely touch the subject in your last sentence, and then it's based on your own preference. – AndroidHustle Nov 5 '12 at 9:58
@AndroidHustle Yes, I agree. But I think it's valid in the bigger picture what you use e-mails for, and how you make sure the e-mails in your system are correct. I may complicate the question a bit too much - but I feel the answer is still relevant - and answeres the question from a different angle than OP expected. – Benny Skogberg Nov 5 '12 at 10:04
1  
yea, I totally see what you mean. However I guess validating an email address purely on Regex can pose a few other problems. If a user accidentally enters an email address that is valid but isn't their own? Will the possible username then be taken until the confirmation has timed out? And how can that be communicated to a user that thinks they've entered the wrong email address? I believe the additional email address field is a good approach, and helps to work around issues like this that are hard to work around using automated validation strategies. Then again, just my thought. – AndroidHustle Nov 5 '12 at 10:13
1  
@Phil - Wouldn't it appear smart to take say 50 of the most obvious popular domain misspellings and ask the user "You entered hotmial.com. Did you mean hotmail.com?" (btw - it's possibly dangerous to visit all the websites of such misspellings to 'check them out' as they are sometimes there to capture unintentional visitors and can be NSFW or in fact not safe for anything!) Obviously there's not much you can do about misspellings before the @ though. – Roger Attrill Nov 5 '12 at 20:41
1  
@RogerAttrill Actually that's our fallback plan :) We'll have to gather some data first though... I'll update this post if we find out anything interesting. – Phil Nov 6 '12 at 8:33
show 1 more comment
up vote 4 down vote

In response to a question Do "confirm Email" Boxes In Sign-up Forms Work? on a marketing resources website, Steve Alker at UniMax Solutions writes as follows (my emboldening):

I’ve never come across any published data to say that it actually improves the ratio of people who fill in a form in over the percentage of people who decide to move on without completing the form.

There is however internal data from HP and Dell and informal feedback from CRMGuru, IT Business Edge and Technology Evaluation Centres which indicates that for sign-up pages which are a requirement for newsletters, white papers or other user demanded free information, that it does not diminish the sign-up rate to any appreciable extent.

You must understand that for at least the latter 3, the data is not really scientific, because it is before and after changes to the validation procedure on their websites were introduced, not as a result of a single or double blind market test with a control group, but it looks pretty convincing – you don’t lose people.

As a means of preventing unintentional incorrect email addresses being entered, the improvements cited has been as high as 41% and as low as 27% but at either end of the range, that is impressive.

I'm inclined to think that the percentages above refer to the improvement in the number of bad addresses, rather than the actual percentage of bad addresses. I agree there is not enough information in the quote and that this should not be used for making evidence based decisions.

The only good evidence on which to make decisions would be the OP's own A/B testing on signups with and without the confirm email address field.

share|improve this answer
Thanks for your answer Roger. I found this article before I posted here and it gives some hints, but it only cites relative % so I still don't really know how big the problem is. – Phil Nov 5 '12 at 10:03
It's nice to see a citing, but I have to say that I find those figures hard to believe! That would mean that about one third of all sign-ups people perform in general involve them entering an incorrect email address!? (Unless my maths is totally off) And that just sounds too much to be true. – AndroidHustle Nov 5 '12 at 10:05
@AndroidHustle - I'm inclined to think that the percentages refer to the improvement in the number of bad address, rather than the actual percentage of bad addresses. I agree there is not enough information in the quote and that this should not be used for making evidence based decisions. The only good evidence would be the OP's own A/B testing on signups with and without the confirm email address - in fact - I'll add that to my answer - thanks for the prompting :-) – Roger Attrill Nov 5 '12 at 10:15
@RogerAttrill Ahh, I bet you're right. I think you're spot on about the A/B testing. When I tried to investigate this subject I searched for posted A/B testing for sign up procedures with/without a confirmation email input-field, with no luck. I would gladly invite the OP to perform this test and it would be delightful if he could post his findings here. =D – AndroidHustle Nov 5 '12 at 10:20
After the edit this definitely deserves a +1. – AndroidHustle Nov 5 '12 at 10:21
show 1 more comment

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.