Wordpress plugin to block temp mail signups

[d.healey]

Not a HISE related topic but probably relevant for a lot of people here. I get an annoying amount of sign-ups from people using temporary/burner email accounts. Especially for free products/lead magnets.

It's not so much that it bothers me they don't want to give a real email address, it's that it registers lots of bounced emails in my AWS SES history which Amazon doesn't like.

There are plugins out there that will charge you a fee to check each email, and I'm cheap so I made my own solution which I'd like to share here for anyone who needs it.

It's called Temp Mail Shield. Every hour it will pull an updated list of known temp email domains and store them in a json file, it will also pull a list of good email domains. When a user tries to register it will check their email against these lists. There is also a settings page where you can add your own block/allow emails or domains.

The plugin works with the standard wordpress registration form, the WooCommerce registration form, and any fluent forms forms that have an email field.

temp-mail-shield.zip

Try it on a staging site before pushing it to your live site, let me know if you find any issues. It's a very simple plugin so I don't expect any major bugs.

[Oli Ullmann]

@d-healey
That's great! Thank you!

[griffinboy]

@d-healey

Thanks very much!

[dannytaurus]

I hope this doesn't hurt your customer experience.

A lot of people are concerned with security these days, and who they give their email address to.

Using temp/throwaway email addresses is a fact of life these days.

[d.healey]

@dannytaurus said in Wordpress plugin to block temp mail signups:

I hope this doesn't hurt your customer experience

It's in their interest to use an email that they can access. In order to receive login details, invoices, product updates, security announcements, etc.

A customer who doesn't provide a real email doesn't benefit my business in the long term. So I'd rather not have fake emails as customers, I want to be able to communicate with my people.

At least on my site, nobody who uses a fake email for a free product has bought anything (not with the same fake email anyway).

[dannytaurus]

@d-healey said in Wordpress plugin to block temp mail signups:

A customer who doesn't provide a real email doesn't benefit my business in the long term

I wouldn't say that's necessarily true. After trying your free stuff, they could convert to a 'real' customer with a real email address. Or they could tell others about your products. I don't have any hard data but I'm pretty sure I get a lot of word of mouth.

But otherwise, yeah agreed. Fortunately it's something I don't have to worry about, selling on Gumroad. They have built-in email marketing and they take care of hard/soft bounces, etc.

At least on my site, nobody who uses a fake email for a free product has bought anything (not with the same fake email anyway).

Hmmm.. that's an interesting metric I'd like to know about my users.

[griffinboy]

@dannytaurus
@d-healey

A different strategy for this that I heard about from Relab, is that instead of offering free products / downloads as a means to convert cold traffic, you can offer an incredibly discounted product. Essentially free, but this way, the email list you grow might have more integrity + the bonus fact that the people on that list, are all people who are technically willing to give you money.

[d.healey]

@griffinboy Yeah I do that too, I posted about it somewhere on here. It is a good strategy. It's one I use with FB ads, the main issue is it makes your ROAS look terrible in FB analytics, but the longer term gain can be very good.

[dannytaurus]

@griffinboy I really dislike huge discounts as a marketing strategy. The biggest discount I ever do on my products is 20%. And I only send that out to my email list. It's not public on the site.

To be clear - my plugins are already very low price (max is $30) so I don't have a lot to gain with the 95% discount strategy. If you're selling at $100+ it makes more sense, but I still wouldn't do it.

I do a 20% launch discount, to my list, and a monthly(-ish) 20% discount on one selected product. And that email only goes out to folks who haven't yet bought that product.

My public product pages are never discounted unless you arrive via the link from my emails with the 20% code included in the URL, or you use a code from my email at the checkout.

Even for the Instagram ads I started running in July, I don't have any discount. It's just the demo video and a one sentence description. No discount, no pressure, no yelling. My approach is just "here's the product, hope you like it enough to buy it".

@d-healey Regarding ROAS on Meta, my takeaway is that you can mostly ignore that - unless you're very carefully and accurately attributing views/sales at the server level. It's way underestimated on my ads. The way browsers work these days has largely done away with simple pixel tracking/attribution.

My Meta ROAS is showing as 1.6 but I'm getting anywhere between 5-10x my daily budget back in extra revenue. No new releases, no sales, no other marketing, no extra email being sent out. I just started the ads and the money came in.

[griffinboy]

@dannytaurus

The idea isn't to discount any of your main products. It's to create a 'lite' version of one of your products, and make that super cheap.

Then after people have bought that, you send emails to upsell the full version. Then after they've bought that, you send emails to sell from the parallel product lines.

I agree with you that huge discounts are a bad idea on regular products. Unless it's very very infrequent. The point of normal discounts is to get money from people who would never buy your product at full price. Whereas the point of the strategy I'm referring to is to convert cold traffic and get people into your pipeline, lead magnet kind of idea. You can run paid ads on this lead and choose how much traffic to generate.

I'm no expert though, this is all just stuff that I've heard.

[ccbl]

Something to think about with this is that I, and many others, use what could seem like a burner email to sign up for everything as a security measure against data leaks.

Proton mail generates an alias so no two of my accounts online share the same email address, I still receive the emails though.

[d.healey]

@ccbl Yeah alias emails should be no problem, the only blocked emails are those used by temp mail and similar services.

[dannytaurus]

@griffinboy Gotcha. I do that but with free products. I have 'Plus' versions of a couple of my free products and a decent amount of people upgrade.

In my situation, I made the free products first and so many people asked for more features that I made the 'Plus' versions to satisfy that need.

You have to weigh the balance between the two approaches. Getting X number of folks in through heavily discounted product and possibly converting more of them to a higher value product, versus getting many more folks in through a free product and probably converting a lower percentage.

Only you can decide which is best, based on your products, your pricing, your market, and your customer list.