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I'm wondering if there are any stats related to how important it is to have an "Confirm Email" field. For something like newsletter signups, I regularly see a single email input field.

I'm sure it depends on the tactic and overall strategy, but lets put that aside for the sake of discussion.

  • How large is the LOSS in conversion due to email misspellings if this "Confirm Email" field is not included?
  • Is it a best practice to include "Confirm Email"?
  • And to take it one step further, do you have recommendations as to when it would be better to include it? (i.e. newsletter signup vs. profile registrations, etc.)

Thanks for the help!

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1) Unfortunately, I do not have data on conversion loss for that.

2) It depends of the importance of what you enter your email for. Having to type your email twice is not a good UX. Plus, many people will simply copy-paste the first email field into the second, making the "confirm email" field rather useless.

3) My recommendation would to NOT put a second email field but to always send a confirmation email when interacting with a user's email. And also notice him, after he clicked on the "Register/Subscribe" button that "We just sent you an email to [his email address here] to confirm that you are correctly subscribed/registered". And maybe telling him to check his spam folder if he can't see his email.

Sending an email saying makes it 100% sure that the process worked and the user has entered his correct email and will receive your newsletter.

Another positive side-effect point of sending a confirmation email is to prevent someone from subscribing other people. They will receive a mail saying that they subscribed to a newsletter that they didn't subscribed to and they can then click a link in your email to unsubscribe, preventing having further unwanted emails. You can also provide more details about when and where the subscription was made, so the user know if it was voluntary or not.

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  • The user journey you're describing sounds harder than just typing their email address in twice. You're asking them (in writing) to open another program, and then to take an action inside that program. It's a much heavier userflow. You can't assume the user will read the full contents of the confirmation page in order to use your site. That's also poor UX.
    – Racheet
    Commented Jul 2, 2015 at 12:05
  • @Racheet that's only true for the user who doesn't receive the email. For the majority who do receive it, it's good UX. It's a trade-off
    – Alex
    Commented Jul 2, 2015 at 12:34
  • The second email field is to prevent there being people who don't receive the email. So you're removing UX functionality without replacing it with equal value. It's definitely a trade-off, I was thinking about this in the context of an account creation form, where if the email is typoed, the whole site is unusable. So we might just both be willing to make different tradeoffs.
    – Racheet
    Commented Jul 2, 2015 at 13:19

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