That isn’t a statistic on which most digital marketers would like to hang their hat. Just for the sake of comparison, how long would an NFL kicker stick around if he missed 98% of his field goal attempts? How about an attorney who loses 98% of her or his cases? It doesn’t require an advanced degree to figure out that a physician who misdiagnoses patients 98% of the time will probably earn a one-way ticket to the Island of Misfit Doctors.

As marketers, we can and simply must do better. One common reason why brands miss the mark is because, often times, consumers visiting their website are anonymous. Some brands have set up sophisticated targeting methods based on a user’s IP address and website behavior, but that information will only get you so far. It doesn’t tell you who that visitor truly is, nor does it provide information such as a name, verified email, confirmed location, gender, date of birth, interests or hobbies.

Why Registered Users Are More Valuable Than Anonymous Site Visitors

It’s difficult to target potential customers without first understanding who they are. A person’s identity, as discovered online through a registration process, is the foundation for effective customer engagement. Just how valuable is a registered user on your site? Research tells us that registered users:

•  Spend 54% more time on site than anonymous visitors
• View 4X more pages per visit to a site than anonymous visitors
• Return to a site 9X more often than anonymous visitors
• Remain customers 50% longer than anonymous visitors

How Social Login Improves Customer Acquisition

Now we know that registration is paramount for brands seeking to acquire users and customers online. But most site visitors remain averse to the process. Research shows that 86% of consumers may abandon a site when asked to register by filling out a traditional form from scratch. Why? None of us enjoy entering a bunch of redundant information about ourselves on a form. Nor do we delight in remembering yet another username and password combination for each website that we frequently visit.

Social login solves this challenge. It enables consumers to quickly and securely register and log in to sites using an existing identity from networks such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn, while eliminating the need to remember yet another site-specific password. And 77% of consumers prefer social login to traditional registration, making it a win-win both for digital marketers and consumers.

What benefits do companies experience after deploying social login on their websites? Read on for a sampling of results:

• Social login triggers a 12% increase in shopping cart conversion rates
• Social login leads to a 50% increase in website registration rates
• Visitors who begin a registration process using social login are 2X more likely to complete the process than those who choose traditional registration methods

How User Profile Data Closes The Targeting Loop

If we assume that a lack of deep customer insight is the primary cause of mistargeting, then getting people to register and provide personal information is the cure. As evidenced, social login plays a large role in improving user acquisition. Now that you’re signing up new users and collecting user data, the question becomes – how do you utilize it to better market to your audience?

In an era characterized by short attentions spans and fierce competition for consumer mindshare, your marketing needs to reach the right customer at the right time with the right message. Developing a true understanding of an online consumer makes this possible.

Social login provides permission-based access to a rich set of demographics (age, gender, location, relationship status, political and religious views, etc.), declared interests and friends – in other words, the information that people maintain on their social profiles. Leveraging this profile data within your online marketing initiatives can dramatically improve results. Let’s take a look at a few example results:

Content Personalization and Product Recommendations

• Personalized product recommendations lead to a 30% increase in purchase conversion rates and a 10% increase in average order value for a sporting goods retailer
  • Shoppers who interact with personalized product recommendations are 4X more likely to make a purchase
• Personalized product recommendations lead to a 79% increase in purchase conversion rates and a 25% increase in net revenue for an apparel retailer
• Personalized content based on location demographics results in a 100% increase in conversion rate, a 100% increase in revenue and a 167% increase in new customer acquisition

Email Segmentation

• Email segmentation based on demographics and interests leads to a 244% increase in email open rates, a 161% increase in email click through rates, and a 330% increase in revenue per mailing
• Email database segmentation leads to an 80% increase in email open rates
• Personalized eCommerce emails leads to a 30% increase in average order value
• People who register via social login are 34% more likely to open email and 63% more likely to click through on an email

Targeting

• Targeted advertisements secure 2.7X more revenue per ad than non-targeted ads
• Targeted ads are twice as effective at generating conversions from clicks

Many digital marketers know that they can do a better job of micro-targeting consumers with content and offers that are more relevant. For a long time, their ability to effectively segment online audiences was constrained by immature technology and insufficient access to reliable, accurate consumer data. That paradigm has now changed. With the emergence of technologies such as social login to acquire registered users online and solutions to store and activate rich user profile data from social networks, the cure for mistargeting is at our fingertips.

If you’re unfamiliar with Umbel check them out here, especially if you host ads on your websites. They have smart technology that analyzes almost every data point you could imagine across your users and properties. Umbel’s segmentation capabilities identifies audience groups based on these data points, including social data, and delivers an interactive dashboard giving clients the ability to easily visualize this information. Umbel customers are able to take this insight and increase ad sales across their properties.

One of our first joint customers to leverage this new partnership and integrated solution is the Daily Beast. For the Newsweek/Daily Beast Company, truly understanding their readers and building the most compelling audience stories for advertisers backed by real data is a critical part of their transition into the 100% digital NewsBeast news organization. We are excited to be working with Umbel to give joint customers the ability to analyze their audience like never before.

Check out Umbel’s announcement on our new partnership here.

“We knew it was the perfect time to implement new solutions that would support direct customer relationships and allow us to engage with our product users in ways that offer true value for them.” – Matthew Moller, Director of Digital Engagement, Samsung

A critical step in developing valuable relationships is having a reliable way to reach customers: a verified email address. Matthew recognized early on that making it easier for customers to register and create an account would open the door to these relationships. Janrain social login was the right solution to reach his objectives, offering customers a simple method to create a new account, that also gave Samsung permission to access a verified email address and other useful profile data.

Samsung found the Janrain solution incredibly valuable because they often miss out on the direct customer connection when people buy their product from carriers, eCommerce sites or retailers. Now they can better know their customers, learn more about them and improve their marketing communications.

Samsung priorities

A top priority for Samsung is a commitment to keep their customer profile data safe and secure to maintain the trust they’ve built with consumers. Leveraging Janrain social login allows them to create a personalized experience and expedited registration without requiring users to register a username or password. Samsung also wanted an innovative partner that is constantly evolving within a rapidly changing environment, which Janrain has proven to be.

Results: High value customers

By offering account creation on their site using social login, Samsung is definitely removing hurdles for customers ready to register a new product. In doing so, Samsung is collecting valuable data on these customers, including a verified email address. This has significantly improved their email marketing efforts as they have found that social login users are:

• 34% more likely to open email
• 63% more likely to click through a link in the email
• 506% more likely to leave a product review

“The quality of profile attributes that we’re adding to the Samsung customer database is powerful data that has the potential to significantly impact our future marketing programs.” - Lee Talbott, Sr Manager at Merkle, Samsung’s CRM agency partner

Read the full Samsung Customer Success Story

The results, while not altogether surprising, do shed light on the social advertising landscape and the challenges for Facebook and Google to overcome consumer privacy concerns as they relate to ad targeting directly on their own sites.

The wording of the Harris Interactive survey, which asked consumers about their comfort level with “targeted offers”, clearly implies an eCommerce context.  As a retail company, it is naturally within Amazon.com’s purview to serve up personalized offers in the context of facilitating commerce.  But consumers do not as easily associate Google or Facebook with commerce, despite the advent of f-commerce.  Google is still perceived by most consumers as a navigation portal to the rest of the web, and Facebook is seen as a way to interact with friends, thus causing many of us to be less amenable to targeted offers from either service.

However, as consumers, we’ve been conditioned over the years to understand and appreciate Amazon.com’s personalization feature.  Amazon.com is transparent and provides clear messaging to shoppers and customers that new products are recommended based on “items you’ve viewed” or past purchases.

Amazon.com’s model of targeting is far less nascent a concept than Google targeting users based on their search history or Facebook targeting based on social profile data.

It is also important to emphasize that the Harris Interactive findings are not an indictment of using social profile data to offer more personalized experiences or improve targeting on your own site.  Consumer research we commissioned last October shows that a majority (51%) of consumers are open to a more personalized site experience from social login.  This is due to the fact that social login enables true permission-based marketing, because consumers have the choice to grant permission to their social profile data when registering on a brand’s site.

What’s our conclusion from Harris Interactive’s study?  To us, the key takeaway is that consumers will respond positively to targeting and personalization, but such efforts need to be within the right context, and brands need to be transparent about what consumer data they rely on and how it is applied.

So, where does this leave those marketers seeking to develop deeper relationships with customers?  At Janrain, we think brands can gain a more sophisticated understanding of their online 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, 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 first-party, declared data on users, which possesses a much higher degree of integrity and stability.

The question then becomes how to get a hold of this data?  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 user can toggle specific fields that she is comfortable sharing.

Once brands have access to social profile data, the next step is to store and utilize it.  Janrain Capture is our solution to automatically store and leverage social profile data.  As a customizable database that can pair legacy data, on-site user activity data and third-party data with a social profile, companies such as Universal Music Group, Postmedia Networks and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group are using Janrain Capture as a central hub to inform data-driven marketing initiatives.

The solution provides a window into profile attributes to help brands better understand user composition within the database.  Here is a visualization of age, gender and location demographics reporting available within Janrain Capture:

But user composition reporting isn’t limited to demographics.  Brands can also analyze psychographic attributes such as interests and favorite movies, books and music:

This degree of user intelligence serves as the basis for effective targeting and segmentation.  But simply visualizing demographic and psychographic data isn’t enough.  The data needs to be easily accessible for applied use, which is why Janrain Capture is pre-built to support integrations with component technologies commonly used by brands to connect with consumers.  Janrain Capture integrates with email marketing solutions, eCommerce and merchandising platforms, personalization and recommendation engines, CMS, and targeting systems, to help brands drive improved return on investment from campaigns and programs.

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, when collected via Janrain Engage social login and stored within Janrain Capture, makes it all possible.

The “corner store” aphorism is a timeless piece of marketing jargon commonly heard in boardroom discussions.  While marketers aspire to replicate the corner store experience when managing relationships with customers, few actually possess the requisite tools to execute this objective at scale.  We don’t think this goal should be so unattainable, and by taking advantage of social profile data, it doesn’t need to be.

Now that app developers are coming to market with different tools that allow organizations to replace the over-used Like button with a more actionable verb, the challenge will be to look above all the noise created by a constant stream of data to find valuable nuggets that can be leveraged for impact.

Meaningful Actions Add Up to Impact

We’ve heard for well over a year that marketers must look “beyond the Like”, but never has it been more important as people are Liking brands, products and pages in random fits of clicks. A fan page Like isn’t as valuable as a page Like plus a wall comment, just like following a brand isn’t as valuable as making a purchase and then sharing that action to the social stream. Consumer actions add up to meaningful value but it’s important to look at the type and combination of actions.

The Key is to Consider Context

In addition to noting the type of engagement, it’s also important to understand the context in which people interact with your brand, whether on your site or a social network like Facebook. Let’s look at an example of Julie who has previously purchased basketball gear from SportsAuthority.com for her son and has connected her social identities to her Sports Authority profile.

She’s now a new runner and impressionable when it comes to the topic. She recently “Liked” many running pages and blogs on Facebook, read product reviews and now needs new running gear. With insights into her intentions via the actions she’s taking online, Sports Authority can personalize offers and messages to her that are more likely to get Julie’s attention.

Recognizing Buying Signals

Consumer brand marketers now have visibility into the various activities that indicate someone is ready to buy. These insights can trigger marketing programs that help the buyer move closer to a purchase – product recommendation, ad messaging, email promotion, etc.

Many website owners are missing access to the pre-purchase research consumers are doing on their site that indicate interest. If you can encourage visitors to sign into your site early using a social profile identity with special offers or the promise of a personalized experience, you immediately gain access to their data so that you can start to build their profile and a relationship.

Context becomes important again as you look at the various activities people might take to indicate their buying readiness. Liking my friend’s cat pictures doesn’t imply that I’m ready to buy cat products, or even own a cat. But Liking those pictures, posting my own to the Purina site, visiting PetSmart.com and Liking their Facebook page are strong indications of my interest and intentions.

Bringing It All Together

The Holy Grail in developing smart user intelligence is pulling together actionable data from multiple sources to create a full 360-degree view of individuals within your audience. With data held in social profiles (interests, activities, etc.) + purchase history + site behavior you develop this rich profile of individuals.

For the marketer that cracks this code, the spoils are great. Consumers prefer a personalized experience on your site – who wouldn’t? In fact, recent research indicates that 51% of consumers find a personalized experience compelling enough to increase the likelihood that they’ll return to a site and buy products.

The benefits for website visitors are a more pleasurable experience, one where they can easily find or discover what they’d like and make their purchase. The advantages for organizations leveraging social profile and open graph data are clear when you can improve your marketing efficiencies and increase sales.

Sometimes that is a great feeling, because it shows that the company knows you, and wants to deliver something that is just right for you.

Other times, it can feel like a violation because you may not understand why the company is making that recommendation. You might wonder just how much they know about you…

The truth is that customer data can give us the ability to create even more personalized experiences than ever before. But, that means we must be careful to show users personalized information in ways that are sensitive to their needs, and make the experience better – not scarier.

I’ll be hosting a webinar about just this topic: Minority Report Marketing – Creating Personalized Experiences without Being Creepy. Please join me next Wednesday, 10 AM PST/1 PM EST where we will review examples of personalized experiences that run the gamut from delightful to disturbing, and also show you how to identify the opportunities for personalization of your own brand communications.

Top of your list should be the session led by Jamie Beckland, Janrain’s Digital and Social Media Strategist Friday, January 20 at 8:45am. Set your alarm clock, grab some coffee and get ready to explore the social profile data opportunity.

Minority Report: Creating Personalized Experiences without Being Creepy

Demographics have been used to target consumers for decades – because they were the best information we had. But now, knowing someone's age or gender is not enough to create passionate fans. You need to know the psychographics of your customers – their interests, priorities, and concerns. Psychographics will allow you to understand the mental model of your customer, which changes from hour to hour, and give you the ability to target messaging, offers, and experiences to the user in the way that is most relevant for them.

This session will review how to collect and use psychographic information about your users, based on their social network identities. This information can be used to influence every part of the user experience, from initial consideration, to login, to reward your most loyal users. We'll review examples of how to effectively create personalized experiences, and how to avoid the creepy feeling that users are being spied on.

If you read Jamie’s Mashable post about marketers going beyond demographics with personal data, you know how passionate he is about this topic and won’t want to miss this event.

At the same time, we’ve entered a landscape where individuals expect brand interactions to be personalized, and online experiences to be social.  As a marketer, how do you align your online initiatives with these shifting paradigms?

The answer rests with social data.  There are over 1.5 billion online users with active social network or email accounts.  Think about the wealth of data each of us maintains on these accounts – demographics, interests, opinions and friends.  Marketers can tap into this trove of data with permission from users by offering social login and employing a database or CRM equipped to store social profiles.

But collecting social profile data is only half the battle.  Understanding how to utilize it to increase engagement, conversions and customer lifetime value is critical.  Our new white paper, “The Future of Marketing is Social Data”, discusses these concepts with practical tips about how to leverage social data in your marketing efforts to:

• Offer faster, more accurate recommendations to customers
• Serve customized content
• Create highly personalized and relevant ads
• Test messaging for online and offline campaigns
• Incentivize loyalty and reward influencers

Check out our new white paper and let us know what you think.

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: