Activation email? yes or no

on signup process

[Dilly]

I am currently in the process of launching a website that will require users to sign up to use additional features.

Should i have an activation email process for users that sign up?

or

Should i let them sign up straight away at first and add the activation email at a later date once the site has established itself?

or

Forget the activation emails altogether?

Thanx for your advice in advance.

[edited by: Dilly at 6:08 pm (utc) on Aug. 24, 2007]

[justgowithit]

How vital is it that you have a visitor's valid email address? Does it affect the operation of the site? If so, verify the email prior to going live with an account.

Should i let them sign up straight away at first and add the activation email at a later date once the site has established itself?

I don't think I've ever seen evidence that requiring visitors to verify their email address lowers new member conversions. Do you have data that says otherwise?

[Dilly]

Hmmm, thanx for the reply.
I havent got any evidence that it does lower new member conversions but thought generally that it would. I think ill justgowithit because my site is not solely dependant on email addresses.

[edited by: Dilly at 7:21 pm (utc) on Aug. 24, 2007]

[reprint]

Some users give a fake email address on sign up and so requiring activation will exclude those. Also some will forget to activate or the activation email will be caught by spam filters and so you can lose those people. Overall I have found this to be a very small fraction of users.

[Gibble]

Though, there's a point, if you send out many emails, notifications, etc that not having valid emails is VERY bad.

For example, we have ~30,000 members we send emails to for various things (mostly notifications from forums). When you send a couple thousand emails to yahoo, and they see a few hundred of them bounce within minutes of each other, they don't like it and you end up having to contact them, explain that the emails ARE solicited, etc. It's a hassle.

We've now implemented a stricter validation process, once your email bounces, your account is disabled until you re-validate it.

[ceestand]

I've been on the receiving end of e-mails asking me to verify my continued membership, either by clicking a link or replying to the e-mail. If I don't reply, the account is deactivated. Staggering this process would avoid the mass failed e-mail rate previously mentioned.

[Wlauzon]

If your site has captcha prob don't need it, otherwise you will get spam.

[Dilly]

Some very sound advice thankyou very much people.

[rocknbil]

You should also have a page available to manually enter or paste the verification code. If the link wraps onto two lines in the email it may not work correctly, and if they don't receive the auto-email it's easy to re-email it to them manually.