Template
Verification email
The confirm your email message a SaaS sends at signup. It is the one email people sit and wait for, so it has one job: arrive at once and take one tap.
Your Product <[email protected]>
Confirm your email address
One tap and your account is ready. The link works for 24 hours.
Your Product
Confirm your email address
You signed up for Your Product as [email protected]. Confirm that this address is yours, and your account is ready to use.
Confirm email address
Reading this on another device? Enter this code instead: 482913
The button and the code work for 24 hours.
If you did not sign up for Your Product, ignore this email. Nothing is confirmed until someone uses the button or the code.
The Your Product team
Your Product Inc, 1 Example Street
The blueprint
Rebuild it anywhere
Subject lines (5 options)
- Confirm your email addressshown above
- Confirm your email for Your Product
- Your Product: one step left to finish signing up
- Your verification code is 482913
- Verify your email to start using Your Product
When it fires
- Trigger
- Fires when an account is created with an email address and a password, and when somebody adds or changes the address on an existing account.
- Timing
- Within seconds, on your transactional path. The person is looking at a screen that says check your inbox, and every minute the email takes is a minute spent refreshing it or giving up.
- Conditions
- Skip it when the identity provider the person signed up with, such as Google, says the address is already verified.
- Limit resends to a few an hour per address, so the resend button cannot be used to flood somebody else's inbox.
- When the address on an account changes, send it to the new address and tell the old one that a change was requested.
The body, block by block
The task, in the subject and the heading
Confirm your email address, in those words. People open this email looking for one button, and a subject that reads like a welcome or a newsletter sends them searching the inbox for the real one.
Whose address, and for what
Name the product and the address it went to. Somebody who did not sign up can tell at a glance that it is not theirs, and somebody who did can tell it is the right email.
One button
The confirm link, and nothing else to click. It opens a page in the product that says the address is confirmed and offers the next step.
A code for the other device
Six digits to type into the signup screen. People sign up on a laptop and read mail on a phone, and a code saves them forwarding the email to themselves.
How long it works
The expiry in plain words, with a new link one press away on the page an expired link opens, so running out of time costs a click rather than a support ticket.
The way out for the wrong person
One line: if you did not sign up, ignore this. It answers the only question the wrong recipient has, and it is what keeps them from reporting the email as spam.
The rest of the sequence
24 hours later, if the address is still not confirmed
One reminder with a fresh link and code. After that, stop: an address that ignores two of these may not belong to the person who signed up.
Subject Your Product: your email address is not confirmed yet
When to use it
Whenever an account holds an address nobody has proven yet: a signup with a password, an address added in settings, or one that was changed. Until its owner confirms it, you do not know whether a person typed their own address, made a typo or entered somebody else's, and every email before then goes to whoever that turns out to be.
It is also the one email in this gallery that people wait for. Everything else is read when it arrives; this one is expected within seconds, by somebody sitting on a screen that says check your inbox. That makes speed and plainness the whole job.
What kills this email
A link that confirms on the first visit
Some mail filters, often at companies, open the links in a message to check them before the person reads it. If loading the link confirms the address, the filter confirms it, and a link that works once is already spent when the person clicks. Open a page with a Confirm button and confirm on the press.
Sending it from the same place as your campaigns
A verification email that shares a sending domain and stream with your newsletters shares their reputation, so a run of complaints about a campaign can slow the email somebody is waiting for. Send it on your transactional path, from an address people recognise, with nothing promotional in it.
An expiry shorter than the inbox
A link that dies in fifteen minutes fails everybody whose mail is slow, held back for a retry by a cautious receiving server, or read later on another device. Give it hours, say how long in the email, and let the expired page send a new one.
Locking the whole product behind it
Making people confirm before they can see anything turns a slow delivery into a lost signup. Let them in, ask for the confirmation before the things that need a real address, such as sending mail or inviting a team, and remind them inside the product.
When not to send it
Do not send it when the address is already proven: a signup through Google or another identity provider that says the address is verified, or an invitation accepted from the inbox it was sent to. A second proof is a step with no purpose, and some people read it as a failed signup.
Do not use it for signing in. A code that proves the same person is back is a sign-in email, with a short expiry and different words, and mixing the two teaches people to act on confirmation emails they did not ask for. And send the welcome email once the address is confirmed, not in the same minute.
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