Launching a webservice today has become a pretty simple job. Launch a private beta, launch some teasers here or there, get a post on Techcrunch, attend to some conferences, make a press release and that’s it. You have a few thousands users registered to your website. And everybody is happy. NOT.

Not in a few days or weeks when you analyze your internal usage statistics and you realize that the visitors that have registered are not coming back. In that case there are strategies and strategies.

One set of strategies are to get back to the drawing board and see were you have failed. To see why your users were not happy and repair it. To add features that will keep the the users interested in you, to listen to your customers feedback.

And there are dirty strategies. One company has sent me today my username and password. As requested by me. NOT. It was my password but I couldn’t even tell what was that service about and when I have registered. Most probably because it sucked big time. It’s not a very popular service so I excluded the case where somebody has tried to brute force the account. The other explanation is that an internal bug triggered that email. But something makes me think that this was a marketing ploy. Dirty but CLEVER.

So. If you are in the position of having trouble with your users returning do this:

1. Start logging user activity.
2. Depending on your type of service set an internal threshold (let’s say 6 months)
3. Once an account has been inactive for six months, sent an automated email with BOTH username and password and make it look as it was requested by the user.
4. Analyze the results. See how many of the targeted accounts have been re-activated and how many of the re-activated accounts are starting to become active