How to get more user signups (using the Sniper Link technique)

Do you want more user signups?

Well a signup isn’t complete until new users confirm their email.

And there’s a little-known way to increase your confirmation rates by 7%.

It’s called the “Sniper Link” technique.

It's easy to implement (especially if you're a technical indie hacker).

Let’s dive right in.

Problem: Unconfirmed emails = wasted signups

Between 27% and 61% of your new users will never confirm their email.

There are 3 main reasons for this:

1. Friction in your onboarding steps
2. Spam folders snatching your email
3. Distractions from other emails in your user’s inbox
   

Luckily, we found a tactic that addresses those three issues.

In fact, it increased our email confirmation rates to 94%.

It’s called the Sniper Link technique.

What’s a “Sniper Link”?

A Sniper Link is a special link that makes it easier for new users to confirm their email after a signup. It typically simulates an inbox search, which minimizes distractions while leading users to the inbox of their email service provider detected on signup.

With Sniper Links, your new users will only see YOUR confirmation email in their inbox, nothing else. It works even if you landed in their spam.

How do Sniper Links work?

Sniper Links work by showing a customized link based on the email service provider (ESP) detected from a user’s signup. Complete Sniper Links simulate a search query in the user’s email provider inbox that will only show your business’ confirmation email, even if you were to land in the spam folder.

What’s the structure of a Sniper Link?

Here’s an example of Sniper Link for Gmail users:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/bob.marley@gmail.com/#search/from%3A%40growth.design+in%3Aanywhere+newer_than%3A1d

This URL will simulate a search like this:

Let’s break down each part of the URL:

1. https://mail.google.com/mail/: Basic desktop link to the email provider.
2. u/bob.marley@gmail.com (“Account scope”): The specific email account to open. Useful when users are logged into multiple email accounts.
3. #search: Triggers the search query in the user’s inbox.
4. from%3A%40growth.design (“From filter”): Forces the search query to only show emails from your domain or a specific email address.
5. in%3Aanywhere (“Spam piercer”): Forces the search query to operate across any folder (not just your inbox). This means that the search result will also show results from the spam folder.
6. newer_than%3A1d (“Time frame”): Scopes to only show emails received within the past 24 hours (instead of 1d, you could also use 1h for the last hour). This parameter is especially useful when your system relies on “Magic Links” because people receive several login emails from your domain.

Obviously, these are the search parameters for Gmail. But every email service provider has its own system. See below for the full breakdown.

Sniper Link feature support by ESP

Some ESPs support more Sniper Link features than others. Here’s a summary:

Sniper Link experiment results

We ran a split-test experiment using Mixpanel.

The result:

• Variant B brought a 7% relative lift to email confirmation rates.
• We now have a 94% email confirmation rate on new signups.
• Users confirm their email 10% faster (based on the median time).
• This represents thousands of extra completed signups every year.

How to implement Sniper Links

Creating a Sniper Link requires three steps:

1. Identify
2. Scope
3. Link

1. Identify

When a user signs up, you first need to identify the email service associated with their address. You can do that in four different ways:

Let's cover each one step-by-step.

1A: Email Parsing

There are two main reasons to opt for this option:

1. You just want to start with a quick experiment
2. Most of your users don’t use custom domains

For example, this would be a starting point for detecting some Gmail users:

if (email.includes("@​gmail") || email.includes("@​google")) {
  //...
}

The only problem is that unless you’re a DTC/B2C consumer app, many of your signup emails will use custom domains (e.g., bob.marley@acme.com). In that case, you’ll need to use options B, C, or D below.

1B: Email validation service

If you’re like most established products, your forms probably already use an email validation service. These services protect your email list when spam bots try to overwhelm your signup forms.

But, some of those email validation services provide additional features.

One of them is the email service provider associated with an email address.

For example, we use ZeroBounce for our business. And Zerobounce’s API offers a smtp_provider field that can contain values such as:

• google for Gmail (e.g., @gmail.com, @googlemail.com, etc.)
• g-suite, for business emails using GSuite (e.g., bob.marley@acme.com)
• microsoft for Outlook (e.g., @outlook.com, @live.com, or businesses on O365)
• yahoo for Yahoo mail (e.g., @yahoo.com, etc.)

For Protonmail you can check if mx_record === "mail.protonmail.ch".

These values allow you to display a custom Sniper Link for each case.

1C: Email enrichment

If you don’t use an email validation service, but you already use an email enrichment service like Clearbit, you could always use that instead.

For example, Clearbit’s API returns a field named company_tech that contains values like google_apps or outlook, etc. From there, you can match the email service provider just like we explained in step B.

Note that Clearbit is roughly 27 times more expensive than ZeroBounce for this use case. So this is probably not the most cost-efficient approach.

1D: Manual Lookup

I’d only recommend this approach if:

1. You already validated a simple experiment (see Option A: Email parsing)
2. Your #1 constraint is your budget and
3. You’re a developer.

In this case, you could create some code or use a DNS resolver library that automatically looks up the email server information of new signups.

Here are some link examples of resources:

• Stackoverflow: How to programmatically look up email server information
• Ruby: Resolve:DNS
• Python: DNS Python

2. Scope

From there, you can generate the appropriate links for each provider. Here are some examples below. Make sure to replace the underlined {code variables} and sender email:

Note: the /u/0/ part of the Protonmail URL refers to the first user account. For example if someone has two accounts linked to their Protonmail session (e.g. bob.marley@protonmail.com accessed through /u/0/, the.wailers@protonmail.com accessed through /u/1/ ), this will only retrieve the first account. You could use a URL like https://mail.proton.me/switch to allow the person to pick their account, but by doing this, you lose the “From filter” and “Spam piercer” features.

💡Pro tip: Mobile Links

I added a column for the Mobile (iOS) links as an example just to show you that you can push the personalization even further. These href values will open the native iOS app on the user’s device. For Android, you could also use some Javascript to detect the mobile device and adapt.

The “Mobile (iOS)” links can’t simulate a full Sniper Link (with search), but it’s still a better user experience than having a mobile browser attempting to open your mailbox in a new mobile tab. Especially considering that most people have a separate app for their emails (e.g., Gmail App).

3. Link

Finally, on the page you show users after their signups, instead of passively writing “Check your inbox” as most companies do, you can display your Sniper Link based on the email service identified in Step #2: Scope.

Tadaaa 🎉! Now people will land directly on your email without being distracted, which is quicker for them and better for your onboarding funnel.

💡Pro tip: Start simple

The first version of our experiment that led to a 7% lift was very basic. We only experimented with cohorts of people who were:

1. Gmail users (e.g., @gmail.com and @googlemail.com and @google.com) because a quick look at our email database showed that 84% of our subscribers used Gmail.
2. Desktop users because it’s easier to detect a lift. In our case, most of our visitors are desktop users by the nature of our interactive full screen case studies, so that helped even more.

Every audience is different. And a user’s willingness to confirm a signup email depends on the product and context. So before you invest a ton of effort implementing a fully personalized Sniper Link, we recommend you run a simple A/B test with only a subset of your new users to validate if it’s worth the rest of the total implementation effort.

Your next steps

Less than 1% of onboardings use Sniper Links (few people know about them).

So, if you want to implement them here are some helpful links:

👁️ Example

We use Sniper Links on our sign up page. If you sign up, you’ll see how we adapt the post-signup step based on your email provider (please note that this will be a real signup, so you’ll receive our future case studies).

Additionally, here are 3 more free resources:

📚 Resources

1. If you're a visual learner, check this Sniper Link animated explainer
2. I made a 1-pager summary for you: Sniper Link cheat sheet
3. View this Trello case study (or our other case studies)

(By the way, this article was originally published on our site.)

Hope that helps ✌️

P.S. if you have any questions (or feedback on this) don't hesitate to drop a comment below. I try to reply to everyone.