There’s almost always reasons, or benefits, for visitors to register at a site such as expediting checkout, participating in a community, leaving a comment and accessing premium content, but these benefits aren’t always clear or well communicated in a way that compels people to create an account. And since we know that the majority of people dislike registration forms and setting up new username and password combinations, we can’t assume they’ll want to take action on a site without receiving some value in exchange.

The Registration Value Exchange

We address this very challenge and opportunity in our new interactive Prezi slideshow titled Reasons to Register Online: Increase Registration Conversion by Giving More Than You Get. In addition to best practices, we include real-world examples from brands doing a great job of communicating the reasons people should register at their site, and added a bonus checklist of recommended steps to point you in the right direction. You can check it out right here:

We’re pretty excited about our first Prezi, so let us know what you think and whether we should do more of these.

Signing up for a new website is a little bit like dating. As a brand, you need to get enough information from the website visitor to make their experience pleasant and useful. If you ask for too much information, however, they click away, never to return.

Social login is a great way to make it easy for visitors to give you their information. You just need to make sure they know what information they are giving you, and what’s in it for them to give you that info.

You can start your relationship off right by following just a few easy, clear steps.

Be Clear About What You Want

Facebook has made it very easy to clearly delineate what permissions you are asking for, and why you want these permissions. In addition to lining up each permission in a bullet point, Facebook gives you the ability to show a custom message for the registrant.

This little-used feature of Facebook registration apps can make a difference in your relationship with your customers. Learn how to customize these fields here.

Don’t Ask for Too Much Too Fast

Facebook supports the notion of progressive profiling. This means you can ask for a limited set of data up front to get the relationship started at registration and then later, when the relationship is ready, you can ask for additional information.

The key is to progressively ask for only the profile data you need, when it’s relevant to the action they want to take. This means you can ask for permission to share on their behalf when the user clicks a Share button, ask for movie interests when they join a ticket sweepstakes, or their friends’ info when its time to invite them to a party. Check out our detailed post on how to tackle progressive profiling, Don’t Be A Data Creeper.

What’s In It for Me?

Just because you know why people should register on your website, that doesn’t mean site visitors know. Lacking a clear call to action with associated benefits is one of the most common mistakes with online registration. Just like in dating, if you want something, you need to be clear about it.

Yamaha does a great job of this on their site, and offer both social login and registration with a Yamaha account identity to get the relationship started.

When the sign-in button is clicked, Yamaha clearly outlines the benefits of an information exchange.

As the web hurtles ever closer to dynamic, relationship based interactions, it is important for brands to become more engaging. Being clear about registration expectations and data exchanges is a small step in that direction.

What are some great permission screens that you have seen?

Image by @Rantz

My apartment building has several important doors. The front and back doors to the building, the door to my laundry room and the storage room. Fortunately, I have a single key that opens all of these doors in the same way. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be if I had to use a different key for each entrance?

In my previous blog post Five Most Common Mistakes in Social Login, number two was inconsistent registration flows. After reviewing hundreds of implementations of social login, I’ve identified this problem as far and away the most common, and needing of attention. Inconsistent registration flows are a problem because they lead to confusion for your site visitors, which could cause them to leave your site.

If your registration process looks and behaves differently across different points in your website, you can lose as many as 50% of your new registered users.

Many marketers have a habit of thinking about registration as a check-box on the website feature list. Registration is actually really difficult to do well, and when it’s done poorly it can:

• kill an otherwise effective marketing campaign by discouraging people from completing a download or registration call to action on your website
• cause shopping cart abandonment because your checkout process is too hard, long or confusing
• cause a customer to decide not to return to your website because they couldn’t get what they want in the first place

Marketers need to partner with their UX and technology teams to ensure that the registration, sign in and checkout processes on your website are easily understood, easy to use, and operate quickly and efficiently.

The image below illustrates what happens when registration flows aren’t thought through. These are all from a single website. If the user is logged in, they don’t stay logged in from page to page. The site’s commenting login is completely different from the main site login, and the checkout process has two different buttons that lead to the same place.

Site-wide registration and sign in

On entertainment, media, and news sites, site-wide registration usually sits at the top of the page. Quite frequently there is no call to action inviting people to register there, but web designers and marketers feel a need to put the registration link because of “best practices.”

The first thing that is needed in site-wide registration is a clear call to action that explains two to three benefits for registration. Yamaha does a great job of this with the modal overlay when their page loads.

Ideally, registration and sign in should look nearly identical, with the exception of the registration process possibly asking for a password. With social login, you can even use conditional logic to indicate the remaining fields that they need to complete after you pre-fill data from their selected identity provider.

Commenting, forums, and chat sign in

It is very common to use third-party tools for interactive website elements. Many people fail to realize that these can be registration points that are the first step in getting a site visitor on your mailing list or into your marketing automation flow.

Third-parties build registration functionality into their interactive tools to make using them easy. When someone clicks Log In within your commenting section, they should be routed through your main website registration flow so the data goes into your database instead of or in addition to the commenting vendor’s database.

Backplane is an open-source technology that enables interactive elements to easily interact with each other and your primary site registration process. The resulting user experience is one point of registration for all technologies on your site, along with one user profile in your database. You can see a list of Janrain partners who use Backplane here.

eCommerce checkout

It is very common for ecommerce websites to think of their site registration and checkout flows as two distinct entities. In some ways this makes sense. Checkout is where all of the attention goes, and any disruption can potentially cost millions of dollars. Even as they are increasingly using social login for engagement experiences, online retailers have been somewhat slow to implement social in their checkout flows because of this sense of caution.

In order to unify registration flows, it makes sense to implement the same login or registration options as the rest of the site. As a bonus, social login is proving to be very valuable for commerce marketers. L’Occitane recently showed that social login users have nearly 11% higher average order value (AOV).

Contests and sweepstakes

Contests and sweepstakes can drive a lot of traffic. Giving away the right product can get people excited and willing to give you their contact information. Take it one step further and put contest entrants into your registration database and opt them into your mailing list.

By creating an account for contest entrants you make brand, content and experience engagement seamless. There is often a post-contest glow for new entrants where they view a brand favorably. Encouraging them to comment, share, and otherwise participate deepens engagement with your brand, encouraging long term loyalty.

7 UP’s Every Bottle Wins campaign is a great example of how to use social login in a contest, and it has the added benefit of appearing inside a Facebook campaign page.

Lead generation forms

We are seeing Janrain clients roll their lead-gen pages into their registration flow as well. This is commonly accomplished by putting user data into the user database after the lead gen form is filled out. Janrain actually published a guide on how to integrate social login with Salesforce landing pages.

Once someone has given you their information in return for a download or registration, there is no reason to gate additional engagement points, and many benefits for you both to make it easier for them.

Just like having a single key for all of the doors in my building, working to integrate all of your registration points into a single cohesive flow makes things much easier for your customers.  Doing these sorts of integrations is certainly becoming more complex as websites are being developed with many moving parts, with more technology from a variety of vendors. Pay attention to keeping your user experience easy and quick, and consistent if you want to keep your campaigns effective, improve conversion rates, and keep customer loyalty.

Where have you seen a registration experience done well?

So many in fact, that centralization of updates, posts and news could have a positive impact on fans’ fragmented engagement and boost affinity. Interscope Records has long believed in making engagement easy for fans, which is one reason they chose Janrain years ago for their user management platform needs.

The new Interscope.com is a gold record

I had the privilege to get a sneak peak at their beta site a few months ago when our client, Lee Hammond was in town to speak with me at the Bandwidth conference. I was immediately impressed!

Attention, time and engagement is fragmented as people devote these precious resources across an increasing number of communities and social networks which makes it difficult for everyone to connect in a meaningful way. Interscope Records has recognized the need to unify the multiple streams of content into one home base for fans to get real time updates and engage with their favorite artists without having to visit multiple sites.

Streaming real-time tweets, news and posts at a central location, Intercope.com, with our partner Echo’s technology has created an immersive experience for music lovers. When they’re ready to comment, share or engage, fans can use social login as to quickly create an account with an existing profile from Facebook, Twitter or others like Google.

The social web is constantly evolving based on new technology, sites and networks, in conjunction with users’ expectations, needs and wants. The challenge for marketers goes beyond staying fresh and top of mind, but providing the content, resources and experiences that your audience wants today while looking forward at the same time. As organizations continue to increase onsite engagement and activity, we’ll recommend that they look to Interscope.com as a model of providing a high value user experience.

In sports, there is a reason why we keep score – to see how we’re doing and make improvements.  Marketing and technology are the same way.  Analytics provide the insights necessary to optimize web technology implementations and maximize return on investment.  As with other technologies you already use, your user management platform solution should include a rich set of analytics to make you much smarter about measuring the effectiveness of your user acquisition and intelligence programs.

Social Login Analytics

If you plan to let people log in to your site with their choice of social identities, it’s helpful to know which ones they ultimately choose.  Social login analytics help you track the most popular social providers over time and adjust your supported networks to cater toward your audience’s preference and maximize the likelihood of conversion.

Social Sharing Analytics

It’s a two-way street – marketers want to know where their site content is syndicated, and where their site traffic comes from.  Social sharing analytics provide both, enabling you to drive on both sides of the proverbial road, so to speak.  You will want to view reports on shared content by preferred social channel and measure referral traffic generated to your site from each social network.  These insights can be used to determine the effectiveness of refer-a-friend programs, and provide a clue into which social networks are most receptive to your content as you refine your broader social media strategy.

User Composition Reports

Successful marketing strategies are predicated on an understanding of your target audience.  To develop that understanding, your profile data storage solution should provide aggregate snapshots of the composition of your user database.  It should help you contrast geographic, gender and age breakdowns and determine the most prominent interests or favorite books, music and movies shared by your site users.

Behavioral Analytics

While traditional web analytics platforms are very good at telling you, on aggregate, how people are using your site, they often fall short at telling you who is actually on it, and what an individual person is doing.  Effective behavioral analytics should close the gap between user identity and site usage by reporting defined behaviors such as purchases, comments, reviews or specific page views on an individual user basis.  In short, they should augment your existing site analytics by providing the intelligence needed to identify influencers and create rewards programs that generate maximum ROI.

Integration with Dedicated Analytics Platforms

Detailed data about registration and login events, shares, or user profile attributes are most valuable when combined with insights from your dedicated analytics platform.  Whether you are using Adobe SiteCatalyst (Omniture), Coremetrics, Google Analytics, Webtrends or other software, it is crucial to pass registration events from social logins into your existing analytics funnels to test, iterate and optimize site conversion rates.  For example, how do site registration conversion rates differ for social login versus those users who sign-up the traditional way?  In addition, your social profile storage solution should enable you to pass user data attributes into your analytics data stream to drive deeper insights.  For example, are males or females more likely to complete a product purchase flow on your site?  Do older or younger audiences tend to prefer certain types of content on your site?  Event and data-layer integrations with analytics platforms make these types of insights achievable.

To learn more about single sign-on as well as other social and identity management technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

Imagine walking into a bar and getting asked to flash your ID to prove your age.  That’s expected, right?  Now, what if you walked into a different room of the bar and were asked to do the same thing?  Not only would this experience be undesirable, it might cause you to leave the bar or rethink returning in the future.  The same concept exists on the web.  If your brand operates multiple websites within an ecosystem, you should not need to force people to identify themselves again at every turn.

Single sign-on makes it possible to offer a truly frictionless experience across your sites.  It enables a person to register or log in on one site and navigate to all other sites in an ecosystem without needing to create a separate account or log in again.

Planning for Success:

Offer Instant Personalization When Users Navigate to New Sites

As users traverse your online ecosystem, lay out a welcome mat and offer a friendly message that greets them by name.  This facilitates trust and brand affinity among your users, and improves retention and time on site.

Don’t Exclude Users Based on Login Preferences

Some single sign-on solutions have been architected to work exclusively with traditional username/password accounts on a site.  Others only work when a user has registered via a social identity.  You shouldn’t need to choose between the two.  Single sign-on between your websites should just work, regardless of whether a user has registered with a social identity or the traditional way.

Enable Secure Addition and Rapid Deployment of New Sites

Single sign-on technology needs to scale with your organization.  Your single sign-on solution should allow you to easily enable (or whitelist) selected sites within your ecosystem for added security, and rapidly onboard new sites for single sign-on with the addition of just a few lines of JavaScript code.

Case Study:

Postmedia Network, which owns several of the largest daily newspapers in Canada, has enabled single sign-on across each of its sites, including NationalPost.com, VancouverSun.com and Canada.com.  Integrating single sign-on has made it easy for online readers to navigate across each of the sites while maintaining their account history and subscription preferences.

To learn more about single sign-on as well as other social and identity management technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

For marketers, generating quality site traffic is crucial.  Digital publishers determine CPM rates and revenue models based on quantity and quality of site traffic, and retailers rely on generating high-converting traffic to product pages to drive purchase behavior.

Social networks are a veritable gold mine to generate referral traffic, but many brands have struggled to achieve visibility within the news feed.  Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm can be a tough nut to crack – we know how you feel.  It is designed to promote relevance by favoring news feed posts from friends with whom you frequently interact. While your brand page may have plenty of fans and likes, your Facebook posts could get lost in the news feed unless consumers frequently interact with your messages or visit your page.

Social sharing helps circumvent this challenge by tapping peer recommendations to promote your site content in social feeds and drive quality traffic to your site.  It lets consumers promote content or activities from your site (such as comments, purchases and reviews) to their friends on multiple social networks, which fosters brand advocacy and drives qualified referral traffic to your site.  Some Janrain customers generate as many as 25 qualified referral visitors to their site every time content or activities (such as comments, purchases or reviews) are shared to a social network.

Social sharing harnesses the high EdgeRank affinity scores that your site visitors already have with their friends, and uses those friends as a channel to promote your content through word-of-mouth marketing.  Social posts that originate from consumers are more likely to filter to the top of the news feed than those from your brand.

Planning for Success:

Enable Sharing to Multiple Networks

People carry multiple personas online, and their sharing tendencies are a reflection of that.  We use Facebook to share personal updates for friends, Twitter to share content about our interests to a broad audience, and LinkedIn to share professional content.  Your social sharing tool should allow people to share content with multiple networks, all from a single interface.  This broadcasts your content across multiple social streams and casts a wider net for your brand.

Increase Utilization with Contextual Sharing

Many sharing buttons are presented as a game of hide-and-seek on a page.  Users need to seek out a button hidden on a page and click it to initiate a share.  There is a better way.  Prompt users to share content or site activities contextually – immediately after posting a comment, purchasing a product, writing a review, or achieving a game milestone.

Improve Relevance with Targeted Sharing and Refer-a-Friend Programs

While social sharing puts a megaphone in a consumer’s hands, sometimes a whispered conversation is a more appropriate way to share.  The most effective sharing tools let users browse a list of their social network friends or email address books and choose recipients for a shared message.  Users want to share relevant content and site activities with selected friends via direct message (Twitter), to their friends’ wall (Facebook) or privately via email, and targeted sharing makes it possible to create highly effective refer-a-friend programs.

Access Profile Data When Users Share

Most sharing tools only provide an anonymous view of who is sharing content from a site.  As digital marketers become more sophisticated about understanding their online consumer for targeting and personalization, your sharing tool should allow you to collect detailed and accurate profile information about the sharer.  Prompting users to connect their Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn identity enables users to opt to share (no pun intended) access to their profile data when sharing content from your site.

Don’t Redirect Users Away From Your Site to Share

Lots of free sharing tools redirect a user away to a social network to complete a share action.  Why would you want to send away your hard-earned traffic?  Browser redirects create a jarring experience for your users and increase the likelihood that they will bounce from your site altogether.  An effective social sharing tool contains the entire sharing experience on your site.

Case Study:

• Roadrunner Records generates an average of 25 qualified referral visits to its site each time a music fan shares a video, news article or other content to their social networks.

To learn more about social sharing as well as other social technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

Traditionally, brands have relied on three sources of data to inform customer intelligence – explicit data collected at registration, clickstream data, and transaction history.  Unfortunately, clickstream data can be unreliable due to the fragility of browser cookies, and the friction associated with traditional registration methods means that brands often struggle to convince consumers to share personal information at sign-up.  As evidence of this friction, 88% of consumers report having provided false personal information when asked to complete a traditional registration form.

So, where does this paradigm leave marketers who are seeking to develop deeper relationships with customers?  Brands can gain a more sophisticated understanding of their users by leveraging the profile data that people already maintain on their social networks.  Social profile data includes not only basic demographics such as name, age, gender, geography and email address, but also deeper psychographic information such as interests, marital status, political views, hobbies and friends.

Because the profile information that users maintain on their social networks is transparent to friends, family and coworkers, it is more likely to be current and accurate than personal data that users may supply during a traditional registration process.  And unlike the clickstream, social networks maintain declared data on users (in other words, information that consumers have provided about themselves), which possesses a much higher degree of integrity and stability.

Social login makes it possible to gain permission-based access to profile information from a user’s social network.  When a user chooses to register or login on a site with a social identity, a permission screen asks her to approve sharing her profile data.  Depending on the identity provider, brands can choose which data fields and permissions they wish to request, and the person can choose which specific profile fields she is comfortable sharing.

Once brands have access to social profile data, the next step is to store and utilize it in a flexible database that can pair legacy data, site activity data and offline or third-party data with a social profile to build a true 360-degree view of a user and inform data-driven marketing programs.

The vast amounts of demographic and interests data contained in a social profile provide the foundation for customer intelligence and effective targeting and segmentation. A platform to collect social profile data via social login and store and leverage it in a flexible database makes it all possible.

Planning for Success:

Unify Data Silos with a Centralized Repository

It’s hard to fight a battle with one hand tied behind your back.  Similarly, marketers struggle to make smart decisions when they lack a unified view of a customer because online user data is stored in multiple silos such as email, CMS or CRM.  Social profile data is most useful when it is combined with existing information you already collect about your users, such as site activity data, transaction data, or offline data.  An effective database solution should marry user data across each of these disparate sources to provide a single, global view of a user.

Define a Flexible but Structured Schema to Store User Data

User data needs structure in order to be actionable.  For example, it can be a colossal challenge to query age ranges for users in a database when dates of birth are stored in inconsistent formats.  Your database solution needs to normalize profile data that gets placed into the system, and enforce some structure to ensure that the data can be easily queried and applied for practical use in marketing campaigns.  A flexible schema ensures that profile information stored in your user database works with you, not against you.

Feed Profile Data into Third-Party Applications

Simply storing social profile data isn’t enough.  The data needs to be easily accessible for applied use, which is why your user profile management system needs to be pre-built to support integrations with component technologies commonly used by brands to connect with consumers.  For example, your database solution should integrate seamlessly with email marketing solutions, eCommerce and merchandising platforms, personalization and recommendation engines, CMS, and targeting systems.

Improve Targeting and Segmentation Using Social Profile Data

Your user profile database should make it easy to create target segments of users and feed user data into your email marketing system to send tailored offers.  Suppose, for example, that you wish to promote an upcoming concert in London by sending a tailored email offer to 18-24 year old females who are located in the United Kingdom and fans of Taylor Swift.  Or, perhaps you would like to target male users with a declared interest in camping, in order to personalize product recommendations on your eCommerce site.  Social profile data improves the relevance of marketing initiatives.

Refresh User Profile Data to Keep Your Database Up-to-Date

If one of your users changes her email address or location, how likely is she to let you know about it?  Data quality is a problem for marketers, many who are working with databases that have been infested with John Doe and cartoon characters.  Since our social network profiles are transparent to friends, we are all more likely to keep the information stored accurate and up-to-date.  Each time a user signs in to your site using a social identity, you can collect a fresh copy of profile data from their social network to help maintain a clean and current database.

Incorporate Progressive Profiling to Build a Richer Understanding of your Audience

Hopefully you wouldn’t put someone through the wringer on your first date by asking 50 questions … Right?  Dating advice is surprisingly relevant when it comes to learning more about your online users.  Don’t ask your users to share their life story on your first date.  Build progressive profiling workflows that invite users to share more information about themselves at the right moments.  The points at which people post comments, share content, purchase products or write reviews all present an opportunity to inquire and build a deeper, more comprehensive customer profile.

Case Study:

Sears uses social login to collect a rich set of profile data from shoppers, including interests and social graphs (friends).  Using this data in parallel with its personalization engine, Sears offers relevant product recommendations for shoppers based on the interests in their social profile, as well as gift ideas for a shopper’s friends based on the birthdates and interests of those friends in her social graph.

To learn more about collecting and storing social profile data as well as other social technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

A lot of work is involved with building and maintaining a registration system.  From all of the front-end development work associated with creating registration screens and forms as well as user profile pages, to the back-end work associated with ensuring data quality and managing workflow.  They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and believe us – neither are robust registration systems when built from scratch.

The challenge for brands that try to do so is that most are not in the business of registration systems.  Therefore, it is a distraction from a company’s core competency and costly to devote IT resources to building and maintaining one.

Planning for Success:

Quickly Create Customized Registration Screens that Match Your Site’s Look and Feel

With the exception of your home page, registration screens serve as the “front door” of your site.  When using a hosted registration system, they need to be easy to create and deploy, as well as customize to match your site’s look and feel.  Your hosted system should support registration and profile management screens that are written and easily deployed via JavaScript and not rendered via iframes.  Screens rendered via JavaScript possess faster performance and response times, and are more easily customizable either by editing the code or injecting CSS styling.

Drive Mobile and Tablet Usage with Responsive Design

There is nothing more annoying than visiting a site on your mobile or tablet device and encountering screens that are akin to peering at an ant colony – there is a bunch of tiny stuff on the screen, but you can’t really tell what’s going on down there.  If you are vexed by text that is microscopic, then ensure that your hosted registration system supports responsive design.  Registration and profile management screens should dynamically adjust to different form factors on various mobile and tablet devices without any work on your part.

Improve Data Quality with Comprehensive Back-end Tools and Workflow

Data integrity is critical for any successful online business.  Your registration system should support a comprehensive set of tools and workflow out of the box, such as password management and reset logic, email verification workflows, in-line field validation, CAPTCHA spam prevention, dirty word filtering, COPPA flows and terms of service acceptance.

Put Users in Control of Their Data with Public and Private Pages and Fields

User profile pages are an excellent way to foster community on your site.  But some people are more introverted than others.  Give users control over the visibility of their profile and let them toggle individual fields on their site profile to be displayed as public or private, depending on their preference.

Case Study

Universal Music Group outsourced its registration system to focus web development efforts on building more engaging music artist sites.  In doing so, Universal Music Group has been able to rapidly deploy site registration screens that are custom-branded to match the look and feel of each music artist site.  In addition, Universal Music Group is building community engagement through the use of profile pages that allow music fans to specify public and private fields and make their presence heard on an artist site.

To learn more about how to effectively utilize user registration and other technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.

If you’ve ever been frustrated by visiting a website and getting prompted to fill out a registration form from scratch that requests a dozen pieces of information about yourself, you are not alone.  In fact, 86% of people out there find this process so tedious, objectionable and abhorrent (okay, maybe we are exaggerating just a bit on that last adjective, but then again, maybe not!), they may leave the site altogether when asked to register. For brands seeking to acquire users online and learn more about those users to better target, engage, retain and monetize their audience, this is a giant problem.  Traditional registration processes pose a barrier to customer acquisition.

Thankfully, there is a solution, and it is known as social sign-in.  Consumers already actively maintain identities on social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo!, and 77% would prefer to use one of those existing identities to register on sites.  Social sign-in lets people securely and easily sign-up on a site within just two clicks using an existing social identity.  During this process, consumers can choose to share demographic information from their social profile with a brand site.  This data can be utilized to pre-populate a sign-up form if there are additional data fields you need to collect, which eliminates the need to enter redundant data, improves data quality and accelerates registration.

For consumers, social sign-in is often 5X faster than traditional registration, and it eliminates the need to create or remember passwords on each site where an account is created.  For brands, social sign-in improves registration conversion rates by 10-50% and enables permission-based access to a rich set of profile data from a user’s social network account, which can be used to improve personalization and targeting within marketing programs.

Planning for Success:

Enable Sign-In with Multiple Social Networks and Email Providers

When it comes to social sign-in, people clearly prefer choice.  While in Q2 of 2012, 48% preferred to use their Facebook identity to sign in to websites, a clear majority would rather use a social identity from Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, LinkedIn or other networks.  Social sign-in preferences tend to vary even more greatly in different geographic markets.  For example, Hyves enjoys significant popularity in The Netherlands, Orkut is a leading social network in Brazil and India, and Mixi is popular in Japan.  To maximize registration conversion rates, cast a wide net and provide users with ample choice.

Display Social Sign-In Prominently on Register Pages

It sounds simple enough, but if you want to encourage users to register with a social identity, make sure they know about it.  Place your social sign-in option “above the fold” on your registration and sign-in pages, either adjacent to or above the option to register the traditional way.  We also recommend incorporating messaging on your registration page that explains the benefits of registering, and doing so with a social identity.

Provide Incentives for Users to Register and Sign-In

At Janrain, we often mention a “give to get” paradigm that exists.  If you want users to register on your site so you can learn more about your audience and better target them for marketing programs, you need to provide a compelling incentive for users to register.  Prompt visitors to easily register on your site with a social identity within the context of their experience on your site – whether that involves posting a comment, purchasing a product, publishing a review, accessing premium content or collecting virtual or physical rewards.  Make sure to communicate the benefits of registering to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Let Users Link Their Multiple Social Profiles to a Single Account

Let’s say a user registers on your site using a Twitter identity, and then decides to delete her Twitter account a few weeks later.  Does that prevent her from accessing her account on your site?  Not if your social sign-in solution supports linking multiple social profiles to a single user account on your site.  Account mapping gives users additional sign-in flexibility by enabling them to access their account on your site with any of their preferred social identities.  And even better, it helps you build a richer profile on your users by pulling in profile data from multiple social networks.

Create a Friendly, One-Click Return Experience

As mentioned above, 86% of people admit to leaving a website when they forget their password, making forgotten passwords one of the major sources of customer attrition for brands on the web.  The good news is that social sign-in eliminates the need for a user to create or remember a password on your site.  If a user has previously registered or signed in on your site using a social identity, your social sign-in solution should welcome them on return visits with a friendly message that remembers their preferred identity provider and invites them to sign in again.  This improves customer retention rates and reduces support costs associated with forgotten passwords.

Case Study

Savings.com saw registration rates double on its site after enabling social sign-in.  Social sign-in helps Savings.com acquire more users in its database to build community and empower email marketing campaigns and special offers.

To learn more about how to effectively utilize social sign-in and other technologies, check out our Definitive Guide to User Management.