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?

Consumers trying to log in and take action are highly valued. So, let’s see – what options do we give these valuable consumers when they have login challenges? We let them try a few passwords. I don’t know about you, but the more passwords I try, the more annoyed I become. Or, we may let them work through a number of security questions in hopes they will remember the answers to arcane questions about what they ate for lunch last Thursday. And, we supply the “Forgot Password” option, forcing the consumer to access email for instructions on password resetting. That “Forgot Password” email is often one of the top performing email automations. No surprise there — you’ve got an active, engaged audience ready to take action, yet, you’ve put a major hurdle in their way. It can get even worse if you end up with a frustrated consumer calling for support. That’s time and money down the drain for both the consumer and the company.

As we are deep into Holiday 2012, with Cyber Monday online spending soaring to $1.46 Billion and holiday season ecommerce increasing 16% versus the corresponding days last year (comScore), the year ahead is poised for strong online retail performance. Mobile also continues to surge into the 30 – 40% range of site visitors for many online retailers, with a profound impact on site activity and conversion. With all this action and opportunity at hand, it’s an important time to reflect on what can be done to enhance engagement with consumers and pave the way for action.

That’s where social login comes in. With social login, you preempt a bad consumer experience and prevent virtual aisles packed with abandoned shopping carts. Today, over 77% of consumers prefer social login and it’s a clear starting point on the road to consumer engagement, conversion and an overall better experience. Janrain customers, such as L’Occitane, are already driving a 12.05% lift in conversion rates since deploying social sign-in.

It has been said that “showing up is half the battle.”  Once the work is done to acquire a consumer that is ready to take action on your site, half the battle has been won. From there, it’s about removing any hurdles that prevent consumer action. With key holiday online shopping days behind us and 2013 coming up fast, it’s time to line up new ways to acquire more customers, understand them better and engage them in actions, not distractions.  Beyond that, there’s a lot more to say about the rich data set social login helps to harness. More on that later.

How have you overcome the conversion hurdle on your site?

In those cases, incentivizing your website visitors to share with others by offering refer-a-friend participation bonuses can concentrate many users into sharing all at once. This creates momentum in social channels that can drive awareness within those channels, and create a virtuous circle of interactions. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, for example, uses interactions on posts to determine what to show in a user’s feed. If more people interact with a post, it is more likely to be shown higher in the feed.

So, when considering how and when to use a refer-a-friend program, keep these best practices in mind. 

Create value for both the user and their friend

Giving incentives to users for their advocacy is a no-brainer. People love to get something for their ability to influence. But, their friends and other relationships will not participate solely because someone they like asked them. Those second-degree connections need something more compelling than social pressure to engage with your brand on your timeline.

Daily deals sites employ this model effectively. LivingSocial gives a credit to the user if their social connections respond to a deal. That’s great motivation to share in the first place. What makes the program successful is that the second-degree connection gets an outstanding bargain – 50% off a massage, with a fast expiration, prompts those new customers to convert quickly.

Make the incentive relevant

Discounting your product is the first thing that comes to mind when considering potential rewards for refer-a-friend program participants. But, discounting hurts the long-term value of the customer, who comes to expect discounts as a normal part of the buying experience.

There are times when discounting makes sense, of course, for refer-a-friend programs. When the purchase is for a group activity, the discount provides a way for more friends to participate. This aligns your first customer – the referrer – with all of their referrals. The goal is for everyone to have a shared experience, and the discount becomes a mechanism to catalyze group action. Some examples include golf tee times, theater tickets, or books for a reading club.

If your product is not group-oriented, consider other types of incentives, such as increased reputation or status within your community context. These separate the quest for participation from the transactional element, and help customers feel like they are not trading on their personal relationships.

Decide what comes next, first

Combining both a discount and a strong word of mouth recommendation is a marketing one-two punch. These are two of the most powerful, and most widely exploited, marketing tactics. But, they are only good for a short-term boost unless you have a plan in place to turn the new customer into a repeat customer quickly, to cement the emerging relationship with your business.

A refer-a-friend program is not a marketing strategy, it is a new customer acquisition tactic. In order to use it effectively, you must plan out the next several customer touchpoints. This could include inserts into the delivery packaging to encourage repeat visits around a specific product category; a multi-touch email campaign to continue building mindshare; or a personal follow up from the referrer to thank the new customer.

Regardless of the specific next steps, you must determine them as part of the launch of a refer-a-friend effort. Once a campaign begins, you will be busy with the tactical elements of running the campaign, and won’t have time to build out the ongoing strategy. Advance planning is the only way to capitalize on success.

Janrain’s Strategic Services team offers Refer-a-Friend programs with these best practices in mind, and with easy tracking and reporting to keep you focused on program success.

Have you set up a similar program? What type of incentives did you use to increase shares?

Registration Conflicts for Users and You

The study reveals the challenges and friction that people have with registering online, which translates into the problem you may have with website conversion. A reported 86% of the people said they’d rather leave your site, go to a different site or never return to a site than create a new account.

If converting website visitors to registered users and customers is one of your primary online objectives, these findings represent significant opportunity for your business. With eCommerce conversion rates averaging 3%, even the smallest improvement impacts the bottom line.

When Mickey Mouse Converts

The research also indicates that many users that do create a new account turn over false information with 88% admitting to providing incomplete or incorrect profile data, thereby defeating the very purpose of your registration program. Many users claim they haven’t seen the benefits of sharing personal information like relevant ads or offers, or a personalized experience. Without these benefits, it’s easy to understand the hesitancy users have in sharing their data; it’s a delicate balance of give and get.

Social Login Fans Are High-Value Users

While there is clearly a problem with traditional registration programs, the good news for marketers is that there is a solution that users are requesting, and already utilizing across the web. The research concludes with findings that people who are fans of social login will prove to be high-value users that are more likely to return to your site, purchase your products or services, and influence and be influenced by social networks.

Ready for the full report? Download it here.

Social logins made it easy to quickly register users to websites and social sharing generated significant qualified referral traffic, an average of 12 referral clicks per post, back to sites, validating the premise that our friends, family and coworkers – our social graph – wield much influence on our online activities and purchase behaviors.

By accepting social logins and enabling social sharing, marketers suddenly found themselves with instant access to a wealth of information about a user’s social graph, their hobbies, interests, and demographic data. The next logical step is to use this data for content personalization, user segmentation, and targeting. However, long development cycles involved in redesigning backend databases to store social data and associated infrastructure costs, have kept marketers from taking advantage of this information.

Help has arrived in the form of a powerful combination of Janrain Engage, a turnkey solution for social login and Janrain Capture Express, a comprehensive hosted database for social profile data. Users login with their preferred social account such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn or others via Janrain Engage, grant the website access to their information via a permissions page. Capture Express then automatically stores the profile information on behalf of the website. Profile data can be easily and readily accessed by the website via APIs and used for content personalization, targeting, further mining and analysis.

Finally, marketers can take advantage of social data without the hassle of database redesign initiatives, ongoing maintenance schedules and capital expenditure.

In addition to Capture Express, Janrain Capture comes in two other versions: Standard and Premium. Please visit our plans page to learn more about the features and benefits of each. Also, feel free to check out the video we put together that provides a good overview of Janrain Capture:

Fylde Borough Council is a Government district in the United Kingdom that provides a range of services for its citizens, including housing, parks, leisure, city beautification and environmental health.  Fylde’s website provides information on local services and a community to stimulate engagement with local residents.

The Challenge

Fylde’s key online objective was to increase engagement with community members and facilitate greater participation.  Fylde conducted several focus groups that revealed how users behaved on its site, and it became clear to the Council that requiring users to create a site-specific username and password posed a challenge to growing membership and providing a personalized user experience.  “One of the things that always comes up is that people are sick of creating more user IDs for different websites,” said Andrew Cain, Fylde Borough Council’s Transformational Services Manager.  “That led us to seek a more open login process and find ways to encourage more people to login.”

Fylde recognized that its online customer service tool (Get Satisfaction, a Janrain partner) made it easy for visitors to sign-in and share feedback with an existing account from Facebook, Google or Twitter, and determined that it could accomplish its online goals by extending such functionality to its own website.

The Results

Fylde launched Janrain Engage in mid-September and has experienced a 100% increase in registration rates compared to when only offering a legacy username/password system.  Fylde serves personalized content to registered users based on their location.  This has helped return visits and logins increase from 1.6 logins per user to 3.3 logins/user since implementing Janrain Engage, resulting in improved long-term engagement with Fylde residents.

Signups for email newsletters and alerts have increased substantially, helping Fylde keep users informed of local news and more effectively solicit feedback on Council policies.  Previously, only 24% of users chose to sign up for email alerts, but that percentage has increased to 87% since launching Janrain Engage.  Andrew Cain attributed this to the fact that users can easily share their email address from Google, Yahoo!, Facebook or other social networks when registering with the site, reducing the hassle associated with newsletter sign-ups.

Forgotten password inquiries have also decreased dramatically by eliminating the need for users to create or maintain a Fylde password to access the site.

Speed of deployment was a key factor in Fylde’s decision to use Janrain Engage.  “From a development point of view, it’s been incredibly easy to setup,” Andrew Cain said.  “The documentation was perfect and the setup was pain free.  We were able to set up a test deployment in about a day.”

Longer term, Fylde plans to evaluate launching social sharing features, which would enable members to share local events with their friends on the social networks, driving increased traffic back to the Fylde website.

We just published a success story highlighting the benefits Citysearch has experienced since choosing Janrain Engage to manage its social connection to Facebook.  These include:

• 12% of user-generated content from Citysearch is shared with friends on Facebook
• Content shared to Facebook is viewed by an average of 40 people and generates 28 clicks back to Citysearch.

Here is a short video that demonstrates how Citysearch is using Janrain Engage:

Citysearch is similar to a number of additional Janrain customers that initially integrated directly with Facebook to increase online registration rates and drive qualified referral traffic to their site.  After recognizing the challenge of allocating internal resources to maintain the Facebook implementation and the benefits to supporting multiple social networks and identity providers, these organizations migrated to Janrain Engage.  As a hosted solution, Janrain Engage handles all of the “plumbing” changes from Facebook and other identity providers on behalf of customers like Citysearch, enabling them to focus on their core competency.

By leveraging Janrain Engage to connect its site to a social network like Facebook, Citysearch has exposed its content to a new audience and increased site membership.

The critical foundation underlying these new success metrics is knowledge of your users. This marketing brief outlines some easy steps you can take to accelerate both the registration process for your site and effective ways to encourage visitors to become engaged members on your site. Topics discussed include:

• The “give to get” paradigm of providing incentives for visitors to register
• Member acquisition strategies – benefits to offer your members
• Expanding your membership through word-of-mouth marketing
• Optimizing the registration process
• Offering registration with an existing social network or email identity

We invite you to download Creating an Effective Online Member Acquisition Strategy, the new Janrain Marketing Brief, and share your feedback.

Beginning in 2007, Interscope Records began accepting AOL identities for login on its 125 music artist websites through an in-house implementation of OpenID. Below is a screenshot of Interscope’s third-party login system on Eve.com in 2007:

And on another site:

By 2008, with additional social networks (such as Facebook, Google and MySpace) becoming available for login, Interscope sought to leverage the new identity providers, make the user experience more intuitive, and minimize the challenge of scaling and maintaining the system.

Interscope turned to Janrain Engage in late 2008. Choosing Janrain has enabled Interscope to instantly leverage additional social networks (such as Twitter and Windows Live) as they become available and outsource maintenance of the disparate APIs from each network.

The result? 55% of all logins across 125 music artist sites occur through Janrain Engage, with that percentage as high as 89% on sites like LadyGaga.com. Overall registration rates on all artist sites have improved by 10%, in part due to the intuitive user interface provided by Janrain Engage:

Here are slides from the presentation at Cloud Identity Summit:

Click here to read more about Interscope’s success with Janrain Engage.