Account activation email best practices
In redesigning an account activation flow, it’s important to alleviate customer concern and build trust. Polished emails and a straight-forward sign up/sign in process also increase users’ perception of your product’s ease-of-use and customer satisfaction and increase the likelihood that they will convert to paid.
- Use company branding so that users are more likely to notice and to trust your email. This includes the company logo next to the sender name, as well as branding at the bottom.
- Use large CTA buttons to perform actions from the email. Sometimes buttons don’t come through well on email editors, so to be certain that users can access
- Assuage security concerns. This includes expiring activation links and enabling customers to get new activation links. Provide a quick way for them to get help if they didn’t request something like a password change.
- Use concise, engaging, active text.
- Send account activation, invite, forgot password emails immediately to the new customer.
- Ideally, don’t use a noreply@company.com, as that leaves users that may need help not knowing how to get it. (I realize that in the emails I created below for a B2B SaaS company, it does use noreply, but best practices are not to).
Activate account
After a user has signed up for your product, you often want to confirm that they are a real person with an activation email.
- Leverage the psychological principle that people are more willing to complete an action that they have already started than to start and finish one that they haven’t.
- Use engaging text such as “You’re almost done!” to increase the likelihood that they will notice, open, and click the CTA on your email.
- Provide a clear CTA that aligns with the user’s goal to get through the activation as soon as possible. In this case, I’ve used “Create password & get started”.
- Celebrate their small win, that they signed up and are embarking on a new adventure with your product (which, hopefully, will supercharge their work or life).
Reset password
If someone forgets their password and you don’t provide a quick way for them to recover access, they are likely to churn (especially if they’re just signing up for a free trial and thus don’t have a lot invested in your company yet).
- After they click Forgot password? on your sign in page, immediately send this email for them to reset their password.
- Assuage any security concerns they may have via a link that expires within x hours or days.
- Provide a support contact link to make sure that if they didn’t request the reset, they can get support to lock down their account.
Change password:
After they have reset their password, immediately send an email to confirm that it was successfully changed. Assuage their security concerns via a contact support link and CTA in case they weren’t the one who requested the change, so that they can respond immediately to any account hacking attempts to safeguard their data and work. In this case, I used“I didn’t do this”, to align with the user’s goal of undoing something that they didn’t do.
Invite sent:
The more people you can get a customer to invite, the more people will be putting their time and effort into sussing out whether your product will work for them.
- Any account owner or administrator should be notified when a new user has been invited to their account, who was invited, and who did the inviting.
- Assuage their security concerns by providing a Change account permissions CTA so that they can immediately change or revoke the access of a user that they do not want to have access to the account.
Invite accepted:
If the account owner or administrator has invited someone to their account, they should get a notification when the user accepted. If the invite wasn’t from that person, then you should add a CTA to enable them to change account permissions for that user, as shown above.
Let me know if you feel there are any best practices that I missed! Thanks for reading!