ou’ve worked your ass off to fill the top of the funnel, so you better ensure that your funnel is as water tight as possible. When a user expects the slightest bit of interest in signing up, capture their e-mail address. If they don’t finish the signup process within a reasonable amount of time, message them! Save their contact information to a marketing list, dedicated just for people who haven’t finished. For a while, you should even consider having the system e-mail your team as well, so you can reach out to them directly. Believe it or not, this has lead to some great conversations as well.
Can I just say that this is an example of what not to do? If I choose not to sign up for your service, sending me e-mails begging pretty please isn't going to magically change my mind. If anything, it'll make me less inclined to recommend your service to someone else (as well as me putting your e-mail address into an auto-trash filter).
@quanticle - There's a balance to be had there. Yes, being continually emailed by a service you had no interest in is a terrible idea. But we've found that people drop off for other reasons - technical issues, walked away and forgot, or had unanswered questions. An easily-ignorable one-time e-mail is harmless
My opinion would be that if you're getting a lot of these kinds of issues, the signup page could well be the culprit.
A much better solution is to have 2 boxes "Email address", "password" and a button to make it Go.
If you need "inside leg measurement", "first pet's tail fur colour", "crazy aunt petunia's whisker count at last birthday", you can ask for that as part of the natural flow of using your service later.
Get people in and using it, make it really clear before they click the signup button what the primary benefit of your service is.
Can I just say that this is an example of what not to do? If I choose not to sign up for your service, sending me e-mails begging pretty please isn't going to magically change my mind. If anything, it'll make me less inclined to recommend your service to someone else (as well as me putting your e-mail address into an auto-trash filter).