One of the most common best practices marketers love giving out is adding social login buttons to speed up signup processes, optimize their registration forms, and increase conversion rates. However, do best practices work for everyone? In this post I take on social login – is this the right choice for you?

First thing’s first –  what, exactly, is a social login?

A social login (sometimes known as a social sign-in) is when a company decides to give users the option to register to its site using an existing login from a third party social network site (such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest).

These days, many companies are choosing to provide a social login or sign-up option. There are pros and cons and a lot of discussions about this, as we started to discuss in our last post about registration best practices, both on the business/company side and on the user side.

You can find it in different formats and on many different sites.

Here is a break down of the reasons why you should, or perhaps should not, use social logins.

Why you Should Use Social Logins:

1. Fighting the Password Fatigue: When you are an active member of the online community, you have several sites you may use that require a password. Each site has their own password requirements – from having 6 characters minimum to needing 8 characters with a mix of capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and at least one of these: #@$!&%*. over 57% of users have over 5 passwords they need to remember. There are already solutions like Lastpass and Password Safes (or if you’re like me – you have a note somewhere titled “Songs To Learn To Play” – to throw people off- where you write all your passwords down, or maybe on a page at the end of a notebook or something…shhhh) to remember all these endless passwords.

   This is no joke! According to research by Janrain and Blue, 92% of people will leave a site and don’t even bother to reset their password if they have forgotten their password information. So with all of this fatigue and low energy, Social Logins provide a solution for this problem because there is no need to remember more passwords or create any either.

   

   Janrain and Blue research

2. Speedy registration process:  Let’s get some numbers straight:

   • 86% of users say that needing to create a new account bothers them.

   • 77% of users support the use of social login buttons and say that every website should support them (Webhostingbuzz).

   These all lead to the fact that many users use fake emails and details to sign up, making the information you are collecting irrelevant. Social login buttons provide a quick and hassle-free way for your customers to sign up and get going. As Cialdini explains, asking potential customers to take a small step (in this case signing up in a click) is a great way to get them started with a larger request (paying). 
   

   ---

   86% of users say that needing to create a new account bothers them
   Click To Tweet

   ---

3. Market Research Advantage - When a user signs in with their social account, you, as a company/marketer can gain information on them, including photos, birthday, email, and contacts/friends. Depending on the allowance in relation to your site, you can also learn about their likes and dislikes, their employment, where they went to school, where they live, their age, sex, and everything they may have on their profile. This can make your target audience easier to research, understand, and target! Social logins can open a whole new world of data about your customers’ purchasing behavior.With over 1 Billion active Facebook users (as so beautifully illustrated by Webhostingbuzz’s infographic) that means you have 1 billion potential users for whom you can make registration speedy, with just one click!
4. User Engagement – Facebook collected data on its own social logins (so you may want to take this data with a grain of salt) but according to them: People who sign in to the Huffington Post with Facebook spend 8 minutes more than the average reader and view 22% more pages. If that’s not proof enough, users that visit NHL.com via their Facebook sign in spend 85% more time and watch more videos and read more articles than users that are not connected with Facebook. Connecting via a social network can:

• increase time on a site,
• increase engagement with material
• It’s easier to hit “like” and “share” when you’re already connected
• and it naturally just opens your Facebook so all of your friends can see it too!

These are all great but there are also some disadvantages to this whole big social login phenomena everyone has been rushing to and some things you may want to consider before putting these on your site.

---

Social logins can open a whole new world of data about your customers’ purchasing behavior.
Click To Tweet

---

Why You May Not Want to Choose Using Social Logins:

1. Choice Anxiety – another way to say ‘analysis paralysis’ which happens due to the stress of making a decision and having to choose. With marketers wanting to appeal to all target markets and not “miss out” their landing pages end up looking like this:

• Facebook login –  to give their younger audience an easy way to log in

• Email registration option – open for those who don’t feel comfortable or do not use social platforms.

• Google+ –  because some people prefer to login with their email/google account

• and Twitter social logins- they’ve noticed their target audience can be active there

Here’s what your customer is probably thinking:

“Oh this is a cool site and exactly what I was looking for! Okay I have to Sign Up. Do I want to sign up with my Twitter, my Facebook, my Google +, or my Email? Hmm….Do I want to give access to my social profile or do I want to put in my email and make up a password? I don’t know! I can’t decide!….I don’t have time for this. I’ll have to come back later”

2. Branding Considerations – Mailchimp wrote an interesting article about adding social logins. First of, if you’re branding yourself, you want to consider whether you want to be associated with these social networking third parties. You can test how much they increase their conversions (in Mailchimp’s case it helped by about ~3%) and see if it’s worth it. If a social network account gets hacked – their account with you can get hacked as well. If one of these third party social networks do something that has negative PR implications, which you have no control over and had nothing to do with, your website may suffer the consequences as well.

 

3. Trusting A Third Party Server- When your registration logins rely on someone else –  a third party, with third party servers, if they crash, or shutdown, or other things that-shall-not-be-named happen, then your user cannot enter your site to his or her account. You may want to produce a backup plan in case this happens.

4. User Accessibility – If you choose to use social logins through platforms like Facebook, you may end up rendering your website useless because some libraries, schools and workplaces block social networking sites due to productivity and security reasons. In addition, some countries (e.g. China) have active censorship regimes where third party sites may not be censored, but they are blocked because the social network site, and therefore the login, is blocked.

5. User Privacy Concerns: One thing to note is that there are users who know the power and access they give to companies when using a social login, and they will choose to not sign up to a company that only has a social login because they are willing to take up another password into their memory so as not to endanger their privacy. It is also important to remember the users that may not have social profiles (although with over 1 Billion Facebook users and over 500 million Google+ users, what is the likelihood of that?)

Now you know the general pros and cons of social logins but social logins are not for everyone. As a business, there are some things to consider when thinking whether you should use a social login.

Are Social Logins The Right Registration Tool for Your Site?:

1. What are you offering? If you have mostly content and you’re sending it out via email, then you want users to put in their email and not necessarily connect to their social network. If you are offering products, and people are able to like them and add them to their wishlist, etc – then a social log in may be perfect for you!

   

   Airbnb.com

2. Who Is Your Target Audience? Depending on your target audience and their use of social networks, you may want to consider whether you want to increase choice anxiety if most of your users are ages 35+ or living in China.

We did our own experiments with Facebook login options in registration forms.

One test we ran attempted to solve the Choice Anxiety issue by putting the Facebook login option but kept the email option as a link below for those who want that. It’s there as an option, but it’s not another button that pulls away attention.

 

This variation increased registration by 35% and increased “Create A Store” by 85%.

Another test we ran was by adding a social login option here:

This variation increased registration by 14%!

As you can see, using social logins can increase registration and purchases.

While these tests improved registrations, you should take the points mentioned above into consideration, and test the addition of social logins to make sure they work for you. Now that you are informed, you can decide whether you think this is the right choice for you, and test how social logins influence your registration rates!

---

Using social logins can increase registration and purchases
Click To Tweet

---

If you have any thoughts, numbers, and tests and have seen your registration increase with social logins – please share! We’d love to hear your stories!

P.S Author’s Note: As an avid reader who is concerned about privacy and the direction in which this global connectivity, data-sharing, technological society is going (but not enough to erase my Facebook account or Google accounts) , I recommend reading Dave Egger’s book, The Circle, a dystopian science fiction novel (that is now being turned into a movie with Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, but we all know you should read the book first!). If you’ve read it- let me know! I’d love to discuss it with you!

There are so many reasons you would want someone to register for your site. Whether you have an e-commerce site and want to get users’ emails for your abandoned cart and email marketing blasts or you planned a webinar and want people to sign up through your landing page  - you want those users to register! It’s a great way to increase returning users and you can use it as a tool to increase purchases or other conversions you have for your site!

 ”The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%” -Marketing Metrics

Here are 9 Best Practices for registration form optimization- and at the end of this post you’ll get an update on our latest case study results for the Registration Page Test we ran with Piktochart!

1. Short Is Sweet

If you can reduce the amount of required fields you need in order for users to sign up, try it in a test.  The thing about people these days is that we have a lower attention span than a goldfish (As of 2015 research, we have 8.25 seconds attention span, and a goldfish has a full 9 seconds).

 

In that same research, statistics show that only about 28% of words are read on a page with over 593 words, but 49% of words are read on a page of 111 words. Just to put this into perspective, 593 words is longer than the amount of words in Taylor Swift’s song, Shake It Off, and 111 words is the first verse and chorus of that song.

 

This means we want to keep our registration page with a minimal amount of words, and a low amount of fields because we want people to:

a. Stay  attentive for long enough to register.

b. Feel assured it will end quickly and easily!

This is important to test and not just change on your registration page as it is dependent on your target audience. There have been businesses who have found that when you actually increase the amount of fields you get less registrations, but those who do sign up are more likely to become paying customers. So test and see how your audience responds, checking both registrations and final conversions.

If you find that you need to add more fields, and you cannot make it short and sweet – consider splitting your registration page into easy, simple steps over a few pages and keeping a progress bar so that users always know where they are in the process and how close they are to the finish line! (aka completing the purchase you oh-so-want them to make). If you do decide to test this, we recommend you set up event tracking on each button to track the progress of users through the steps. If there is a drop on a certain step – work on optimizing that page!

2. Keep It Clean

When you want someone to do something on your page, you want to make sure they do only that and have no distractions. You want to make it clear that this is what you want them to do. It’s a simple website optimization technique – take away all distractors. As we saw before, data shows that many internet users do not have a strong attention span. That not only relates to time but also- oh look! A cute puppy and baby youtube video!….You get my point. Therefore, you want the least amount of distractors on your page so that people focus on doing what you want them to do: register.

Another tip to help focus your user is using an image that directs attention to the Call to Action you want them to click on or form you want them to fill out.

 3. Personalize It

Part of registering for your site involves trust. The user needs to trust that:

1. You will not give out their private information.

2. You will not bombard them with emails that are not interesting to them.

3. Signing up will give them value.

4. You are a trustworthy and honest person and they want to join your community.

You can use geo-location to personalize a site,  meaning you show the user that you know where they are. This can appear in many ways. You can make a site in their language. You can put the currency of a product to their local currency. You can give a local phone number for support, or offer free shipping! All of these will help users want to register more!

4. Make It Easy

If you can spare your users the time to fill out the form, do so. For example, if you need an address, perhaps ask for a Zip Code – and then City and State are all filled out! Or use a drop down menu that guesses the completed outcome, so that people can stop typing early.

5. Guide Your Audience

Nothing is more annoying than being told you are wrong about something when you didn’t have all the facts in the first place. You should be clear about what you want your user to do. If you write just “Username” and “Password” within the fields but the Password needs to be 7 characters long and include numbers and a capital letter, you’re going to need to tell the users about it, before they get that error message. There are different ways to do this. You can write it into the form field (showing them what you want them to do) or with small text or a question mark by the field.

6. Social Sign Ups

The Big Dilemma. We discuss in our articles on CTAs and conversion optimization and how important it is to have just one call to action. But then there are Social Sign Ups, and if you offer the Facebook login, do you offer a Google +Login? and then you have two Calls to Action! But if someone doesn’t have a social login, or they prefer not to connect to their social profiles, do you also provide an email login as well?

Well, in this case we would start with considering your product. What information would be most useful for you? Are you providing a newsletter, in which case you’ll want an email? Or are you capable of providing notifications, etc on social profiles?

Next, if you found that you prefer collecting data and connecting with users via their social profiles, we would recommend researching your target audience. If your target audience is young and tends to connect with social media, consider putting only one social login option. If you have a range of audiences, consider placing on large call to action, and other options as text links below. Or if you want to put all three, which we considered doing, you can do so but give them equal priority so people can choose what they are interested in most.

7. Something Special For Mobile

Statistics from 2015 research show that Mobile Internet Surfing time is now passed desktop and other mediums, mobile at 51% compared to desktop at 42%. This shows you how crucial it is to be able to access your site from mobile. But the mobile experience is very different from the laptop experience. It is touch screen, the screen is smaller,  and the loading time can differ. Therefore, you should make sure you have a separate registration form specifically fit for mobile.

8. Use Helpful Validation

Validation means when you make sure that your user has filled something out correctly, and if not, they get an error message. Error messages show up when someone forgets to fill something out, or they didn’t follow the directions correctly, or their phone number was entered in the wrong format and they get a message saying “Hey! Correct this!” This is the aspect of the registration process that a lot of us don’t think through but there are good ways to validate and there are not as good of ways. You can also have your registration page validate while an individual types it in to the box, or when the person hits the “submit” button. We recommend you think this out and match it to your page – whether you have a pop up alert, or small red letters near the appropriate field.

My favorite registration process is by Prezi and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, when you put in information, Prezi have these exclamations in green that interact with you and cheer you on. I wanted to fill out more info just so I could see what was waiting for me! They also use conversational language like “So what do you do?” which feels like they are really just trying to get to know you. Lastly, they give options to connect with LinkedIn or Facebook in case you are interested, but use text links so as not to give more than one call to action.

They use humor in their little exclamations, like “You’re on a roll!” which made me smile while going through the process as well – I won’t tell you all the text so that if you ever go through it, you’ll enjoy the surprises. But that’s not all – they have very clear Validation messages as well:

They show you what you got right with the green arrows and the green outline, and they show you what you’re missing with both a red line and an explanation. They keep true to their straightforward style by explaining to you why they want you to fill out that field – to give you a better experience! It feels personal and motivating.

The Registration page is that page in the process where a user decides whether they are sticking with you and want to get that added value, or not. So make sure that, from the homepage, your users know what they’re getting. Use these tips to make the registration easy, straightforward, and filled with the energy you want your users to feel!

 

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…(*drumroll please*)…  The Piktochart Registration Test results!

Original:

Variation:

We designed a page that had less text above the fold, emphasized email more so than social log ins by moving them under the email registration, and kept the energy going from the previous page through the registration process with the bright colors, the fun mascots, and the big bright button. We kept the social proof (testimonials and relevant numbers) on the page below the fold for the information seekers who still weren’t sure.

We tried two different variations actually – one with the social logins below the email sign in, and one with the social logins beside the email registration – for equal focus.

Overall, these pages increased registration conversions by 14%!

What does your registration page look like and do you have your own registration best practices?

 

 

Choosing the right place to start your optimization process is a super important decision. With so many conversion strategies and methods out there it’s hard to know where to start and how.

Where to start: It is customary to divide the user flow into Upper funnel (i.e banners, landing pages, lead generation) and lower funnel (registration forms and pricing pages etc.).  When choosing the starting point of your test you need to take into account that the “lower” the point is in the funnel the less traffic you’ll have for the test.

To help you get started and locate where you need to start optimizing, we’ve listed 3 basic metrics you should be following as soon as possible. These metrics will help you decide where to start optimizing and how.

 

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric measures the amount of users who visit your site’s first page, and stop there. For example: if you have 10,000 visits a month to your site and 5000 users leave before doing anything else on your site, your bounce rate is 50%. If your visitors are leaving without taking any actions you may need to work on:

1. Call to action buttons – One of the most important parts of conversion is creating the right call to action buttons. You can find 3 tips to improve your call to action buttons here.
2. Messaging – Check your messaging. Using emotional conversion optimization can vastly improve your conversion optimization and get visitors to take the next step in your site. Check out these 3 emotional triggers to optimize your messaging.

From the screen capture below you can see our clients bounce rate throughout the course of a month. Once standing on over 60% bounce rate, has now changed to less than 10% by simply locating the leaks and addressing them.

One important thing to remember is that bounce rate is a natural part of a website and some people just don’t find what they’re looking for or have found what they were looking for and don’t need to continue on, so you won’t be able to minimize it to 0% but you can reduce it a lot and learn from it.  In many online campaigns even 95% bounce rate is good for certain media channels so it’s always good to compare this data versus any other traffic sources performance for a base line.

• Note that there is a difference between exit rate and bounce rate as Google explains here.

 

Funnel Visualization

Google analytics offers an option to follow your funnel and find the “leak”. Once you’ve set your goals on Google analytics the “Funnel visualization” option will be available. Following it will give you a lot of insight on the amount of visitors who have entered each part of the funnel, the amount of visitors who converted and their flow.

This is a wonderful tool to illustrate where is the most significant “leak” in your funnel, assisting you to take the right action in order to optimize it ( learn to avoid shopping cart abandonment).

For example, as you can see below, 50,516 visitors entered our client’s homepage, 52.56% clicked on the button to proceed. On the side you can see where users went to if they didn’t convert, like the pricing for example. This flow will help you understand where you need to optimize or where you can add conversion metrics.

Below we can see that many visitors end up on the pricing page instead of signing up, so we could add a call to action on the pricing page and increase conversion from there.

 

Technology

One metric you do not want to miss out on is the technology your visitors are using. On Google Analytics you will find (in the Audience category) the option to see which browsers your visitors are using, their version and whether they’re using mobile, desktop or tablets. Once you have this information you can:

• QA – Does your site work on all Chrome versions? Are you compatible to Safari? Run a string of tests on all browsers and make the corrections, do not lose customers because of bugs.

• True Story: In one of our recent tests we discovered that our client’s landing pages weren’t compatible with older versions of IE, which resulted in almost 0% conversion rate. This simple fix boosted their conversion rate by over 50%. Below you can see the difference from before we started optimizing and after, with over 250,000 visits via IE this was a massive optimization:

 

• Optimize: A new study shows that you could lose 40% of your visitors if your site isn’t mobile compatible. Is your site/product mobile responsive? Prepare yourself for your mobile traffic and do not lose it. A simple redirect to a mobile friendly page could save your conversion rate. Know your limitations and address them.
  • Tip: To know which pages you need to optimize for mobile add a secondary dimension in Google Analytics (while in mobile overview) – “landing page”, and see where those mobile visitors are going, that way you won’t need to optimise your entire site to mobile immediately but fix it on the go.

Conversion optimization is an ongoing process that requires many conclusive tests and iterations. Testing too many variables at a time can cause a mess and testing the wrong variable can waste our time. Be sure to work out a test plan before starting out and use Google analytics to tackle the right areas.

What are the metrics you watch to help you decide where to optimize?

 

P.S. We would really appreciate it if you share this post and let us know what you think!

Statistics on registration forms are pretty grim: 86% (!) of users leave a page instantly when they’re required to fill out a form.
Thanks to hundreds of lead generation/signups tests we’ve done in the past 4 years, we’ve come up with various tips and tricks that can help reduce abandonment rate significantly and improve the quality of leads dramatically.

How to create converting registration forms:

1. Auto fill –  Don’t waste your user’s time and energy. Use auto complete to detect the their full name, address and email address. The less you ask of a user the more inclined they will be to fill in the form.
2. Minimize your requests – Remove all the unnecessary fields, they can complete them later on. Ask only for the most basic information and create a quicker process for the user. Give the user the feeling that your form is a 30 second fill out and no more.
   Facebook’s signup process: To make things simpler, facebook could create one field for first & last name and make it look shorter. They could also have just one field for the email address and only after the user clicks “Sign up” show a message that says: “we’re sending you an email, make sure your the address is correct.”Groupon does it in an great way, asking one short question at a time and slowly navigating the user towards the end.

   

3. Help the user – Add small question marks next to your fields including explanations of each field. You’d be surprised to learn the kind of questions that prevent users from filling out a form, things that might seems obvious to you, but aren’t clear to others.
4. Messaging – Be specific, use a title that explains exactly why the user needs to sign up, for example: Signup to get a free e-book!
5. Call to action – Don’t forget to end your form with a clear call to action that indicates the end of the form and the continuation of the next steps.
6. “Show password” – Instead of asking your user to fill in their new password twice for validation, give them the option to “show password” and go over it by themselves. This will reduce the amount of fields and will give a sense of an easy and quick form.By giving users the option to “show” the password, mailchimp reduces the sign up fields to the minimum required and still allows users to verify their email.

7. Social sign up – Make it quick and easy, allow users to sign up or log in via their Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin account.
8. Mobile forms: One of the most important parts of filling out a form on mobile is to be able to see what you are actually doing, Don’t forget to zoom in on each field the user is updating. Another tip is to enable only the relevant keyboards in each field – i.e in the phone field to create the numbers as the default keyboard.
9. Mobility- some users like to use their mobile horizontally and some vertically, don’t forget to make your mobile forms accessible on both screen options and allow for easy usage.
10. Shipping and billing – Allow users to simply auto-fill their payment address from the shipping address instead of filling in their details twice.                 
11. Make required/optional fields clear to the user – If some info isn’t required, we advise you remove it completely. If you still want to keep it in the form make sure it is clear to users what’s mandatory and what’s not.
12. Clear errors – Errors a very important aspect of filling out forms. Locating the errors on the bottom or hidden will make it difficult for a user to understand why they can’t submit the form.

Filling out a form should be a simple step along the funnel. Make sure to test your registration forms as much as possible and of course, learn from your insights. If you want to get some more information, contact us here.