Sign-Ups With a Typo in the Address

The sign-up that went nowhere

Someone signs up on their phone, standing in a queue or sitting on the bus. They type their email address with one thumb, press send and see a thank-you message.

The address they typed ends in gmial.com, or hotmail.con, or has lost a letter in the middle. Nothing on the form noticed.

The confirmation never reaches them, and neither does anything after it. From their side, the business took their details and ignored them.

On the business's side, the list has one more address that never opens anything. Nobody connects the two.

How addresses go wrong on a phone

• A slip in the domain, such as gmial.com or hotnail.com.
• A wrong ending, such as .con or .cm instead of .com.
• Autocorrect changing a word or adding a space.
• A comma typed where a full stop belongs.
• An old address filled in automatically from an account long closed.
• A letter missing from the part before the @ sign.

The last is the hardest to catch. No form can know a name is missing a letter, which is why a confirmation email matters as much as any checking on the form.

What the person assumes

People rarely suspect their own typing. When nothing arrives, they decide the business is slow, disorganised or not interested.

For a newsletter, that costs a reader. For a booking, a class place or a quote request it costs more: the person may not turn up, may turn up unconfirmed, or may go with someone who wrote back.

And few try again with the same business. The silence already answered the question.

The business, meanwhile, sees an address on its list and assumes the person simply lost interest.

Send a confirmation at once

An automatic email sent the moment someone signs up does two jobs. It tells the person the sign-up worked, and if the address is wrong, it bounces.

Send it within a minute. Someone who signed up while waiting for a coffee checks their phone before they leave, and an email that arrives an hour later is easily missed.

For a mailing list, ask people to confirm by clicking a link in that email before they are added. Addresses with typos never confirm, so they never join.

Make sure bounces reach someone. Many website forms send from an address nobody reads, so the bounce that would have flagged the typo lands in an inbox nobody opens.

Show the address back

The simplest check costs nothing. On the thank-you page, show the address that was entered, with a line saying the confirmation has gone there.

Add a link to correct it. Someone looking at gmial.com in bold usually spots it at once, while the page is still open.

Do the same on any on-screen booking summary. Each time the address is shown back, the person gets another chance to notice.

Suggest a correction, never make one

A form can compare the domain someone typed with a list of common ones and offer a suggestion: did you mean gmail.com? The person taps yes or carries on.

It should suggest rather than correct. Some unusual domains are real, and a form that silently changes a correct address creates the problem it was meant to solve.

Ready-made lists tend to be American. Add the domains your own customers use, such as shaw.ca and telus.net, so suggestions fit the people actually signing up.

A worked example

A pumpkin carving class runs evening sessions through October in a rented hall, with pumpkins, tools and aprons provided and a small group at each table.

Registration opens in late August, mostly from phones after people see a poster or a Facebook post. Each sign-up triggers an email with the date, the time and what to wear.

Last October the instructor kept finding gaps: people on the list who never came, and a few who arrived saying they had never heard whether they were booked.

The list explained it. Several addresses ended in gmial.com or hotmial.com, one in .con, and the bounces had gone to the address the form sent from, which nobody checked.

Before this year's registration opened, the form was rebuilt: an email field that brings up the phone's email keyboard, a suggestion for common slips, the address shown on the thank-you page, and a phone number field for bookings.

Bounces now reach the instructor's own inbox, and anyone whose confirmation bounces gets a phone call the same day.

A form built for thumbs

Mark the field as an email field in the form's code. Phones then show a keyboard with the @ sign on it, and many browsers flag an address with no @ at all.

Switch off automatic capitals and autocorrect for that field, so the phone stops changing the address as it is typed, and make the box wide enough to show the whole address.

Skip the second box asking people to type their email again. On a phone it doubles the typing, and people tend to copy the first box into the second, mistake and all.

Typos and consent

A misspelled address is not always a dead one. Some misspellings of popular domains are registered by other people, and mail sent there may never bounce.

That puts your newsletter in a stranger's inbox, someone who never signed up. Under CASL, consent has to come from the person who receives the message.

Confirming sign-ups keeps those addresses off the list entirely, and leaves a record of who confirmed and when.

The counter-case

A list collected mostly at a counter, from customers who give their address in person, has fewer phone typos. Handwriting brings its own errors, which the same confirmation email catches.

And no form catches every mistake. A missing letter before the @ gets past every suggestion list, which is why confirmation is the backstop for everything else.

The approach stands: confirm every sign-up at once, show the address back, and suggest corrections without making them.

Before the next sign-up

1. Sign up yourself from a phone with a typo.
2. Check the confirmation arrives within a minute.
3. Send bounce notices to an inbox someone reads.
4. Show the address on the thank-you page.
5. Add domain suggestions, including Canadian providers.
6. Mark the field as an email field.
7. Require confirmation before adding anyone to the list.

Step three is the one most forms are missing. A bounce already says an address is wrong; it only helps if it arrives somewhere a person will see it.

How the sign-up box itself should be worded is covered in a checkout that signs customers up automatically.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.