user behavior - Activation email message optimization

I've got a site (e.g FooBar) and 1 out of 2 users registering never activate their account (via clicking on an email link) so I'm trying to improve this.

The flow is pretty standard:

1. user lands on my signup page


2. user enters email, password, password confirmation and hits Sign Up



3. 
   

   an email is dispatched to the user with the activation link:

   
   

   
   

   Subject: Activate your FooBar account
   Body: You've successfully signed up to FooBar.

   
   

   To activate your account please click http://www.foobar.com/a/sdj923ujf845

   
   

   Thanks,
   FooBar

   
   

   
   



4. 
   

   a modal message comes up:

   
   

   
   

   Instructions on how to activate your account have beem emailed to you. Please check your email.

   
   

   
   


5. 
   

   user has to open email from inbox and click on link

   
   

What I've done so far to improve on this:

• solved mail delivery issues of [3] (emails landing on Junk/Spam folders especially at yahoo and hotmail accounts)


• improved the message visibility of [4] since I converted it to a large modal message which the user can't miss


• made sure the content of [3] is simple and standard

My target audience is not tech savvy so I'm afraid that they don't understand the content of [4].

How could I improve the message? Would including the user's email address in the message make it clearer or worst? e.g:

Instructions on how to activate your account have beem emailed to your joe.doe@gmail.com email.

I've even thought of going wild and making the user's email in the message an active link pointing to the mail provider page (e.g joe.doe@gmail.com would point to http://gmail.com/) to make it even easier for the user but that would probably be too risky.

Note that I haven't got too many registrations per day to run an A/B test (Google WebsiteOptimizer style) to test the performance of different messages so I'm doing 100% guesswork here.

Also I'd love to go the verify later route but in this case it's not possible.

Answer

Instructions on how to activate your account have beem emailed to you. Please check your email.

The word "instructions" may be scary to some people. It makes activation sound more complicated than it is. I'd suggest changing the message to this:

Almost done...

We've sent an email to joe.doe@gmail.com. Open it up to activate your account.

A couple of reasons for this:

1. "Almost done..." is an attention grabber that makes it obvious that they're not done.


2. The activation process really is dead simple. You could be verbose and list the steps. But it'd be kind of like the instructions for pop tarts -- it's really unnecessary. In this case I think it's better to simply state their next step.

And I have one more suggestion. You mentioned that this appears as a modal message. This may be part of the problem. People have a tendency to close modal messages or dialog boxes without reading what they say. If you instead add the message inline with the rest of the page (and make it stand out), then it might work better.

The simplest example might be something like this...