Conversion rates are the bane of many an e-commerce website owner, struggling to keep potential customers on their site after working so hard to attract them in the first place. Losing visitors before they commit to a purchase or call to action is highly frustrating, seeing diminishing numbers complete each step of the customer journey.
This makes it hugely important to create simple, short and intuitive customer journeys - so minimal effort is required on the part of your visitors to go from entering the site to completing an order/enquiry.
Often the most convoluted and time-consuming aspect of many e-commerce customer journeys: the creation of a new user account can lead to many visitors dropping off the site. Even short account creation processes with minimal fields can deter uses – potentially decreasing your online conversion.
In fact, research by Web Hosting Buzz shows 86% of people say that they are bothered by the need to create new accounts. This could represent a hugely significant volume of potential customers dropping off before reaching the check out or CTA.
The option to sign in via a social profile could remedy this issue, completely removing the need to create a bespoke account for every website. One click authorising the social sign-in could be all that is needed for users to access all the member privileges of the site.
Signing in using a Facebook, Twitter or Google account will appeal to many users of these social channels who are slightly reluctant to create a whole new profile. Facebook is by far the most common medium for this approach, accounting for almost two-thirds of social sign-ins in the UK.
This is hardly surprising when statistics show that roughly half of the UK’s population use Facebook (a percentage which would be considerably higher when accounting for Facebook users against internet users).
Adopting Facebook-supported social sign-in could automatically give half of the country access to the members’ area of your website – accommodating a hugely simplified customer journey.
Additionally, these platforms already cater for customers using a variety of devices: Identity and access management specialists, ProofID, expand upon this benefit for accommodating social sign-in:
“Responsive design continues to be of utmost importance for online services – ensuring they aren’t losing traffic and conversions due to inefficient and ineffective layouts on any device. And Facebook’s cross device relevance helps solidify its position at the peak of social sign in provision – minimising the number of users lost during the first steps of the customer journey.
“The sheer usability of Facebook on phone, tablet or web browser means that a huge percentage of the network’s users are always logged in, regardless of the device they are using. This helps support one-touch access – incredibly important to all users, especially those using device with a fiddly touch screen. In fact, Facebook’s largest domination of a social sign in sub-section is mobile applications – where the network accounts for more than 75% of all sign-ins.”
And finally, if granted access to the data provided by users’ social media pages (it is possible to create an authorise option for users), it is possible to reevaluate your services and amend them to your target demographics’ tastes and habits. Users are far more likely to share their tastes and beliefs on a social media profile page than when signing up to a new account on an e-commerce page.
Basically, this can serve as a form of market research, social-led changes to your services could help improve conversion rates in both the short term and the long term.
By Scott Beaman, Content Marketing Manager, Banc Media
