Power consent-forward data with your login box.
Customer identity technology can help marketers get zero-party data they need.
This technology is how consumers sign up and log in to websites and applications, and how businesses secure, analyze, and expand upon these authentication flows. CIAM (customer identity and access management) platforms help streamline these processes.
Your login box is an essential component in the end-to-end digital customer relationship, which integrates into your Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. You gather both first-party and zero-party data as your customers sign up and return using your login box to power your ongoing relationship.
Since identity is the gateway to your app, you want to make it simple and inviting. By doing so, it becomes easier onboard new customers, retain existing ones, and capture critical zero-party data. Thoughtful choices here can lead to proactive consent. Here are a few examples of how your login box can give you a hand.
Nobody likes waiting for stuff. Research from Auth0 (now the Okta Customer Identity Cloud powered by Auth0) shows that 48% of consumers feel frustrated by lengthy sign-up processes.
According to research from WPForms, 67% of consumers admit to abandoning forms mid-completion. Separate research from Okta Customer Identity Cloud shows that length is the most commonly-cited frustration among consumers.
Progressive profiling is the antidote. You only ask questions when absolutely necessary, and data collection occurs throughout the customer life-cycle. So, when someone creates an account, you might just ask them biographical questions: their name, their email, and so on. Questions about their shipping details can wait until they’re ready to buy something.
A customer can create an account and start exploring in less than a minute, reducing your chances of form and cart abandonment. Since you are only asking questions when required, you may notice a welcome uptick in data quality, with potential customers no longer incentivized to make things up in order to create an account.
Because you’re gathering information over time, and with a keen eye for context, progressive profiling means that you only ask questions to those they relate to. This is an easy and subtle way to personalize the experience.
Personalization matters, with research from McKinsey showing that 71% of consumers get frustrated when a website has a one-size-fits-all approach that ignores their needs, or simply who they are.
The faster the account creation and authentication, the lower the friction your customers will experience. One UX-boosting technology is social login and SSO (single sign-on). With this, your customers can sign-up or log in in a couple of clicks using their accounts with other third-party services, like Facebook, Google, or Apple.
Data from Okta Customer Identity Cloud shows that 40% of consumers are more inclined to sign up for a website or app if it supports social login. Similarly, there are multiple studies showing research that businesses with social login enjoy higher sign-up rates. The actual numbers vary, but they all reveal vast improvements.
Social login can also help with your progressive profiling efforts. Many identity providers – like Facebook or Google – allow websites to automatically obtain basic biographical details on their users, like a person's name or email address. Apple’s social login product, Sign-In With Apple (SIWA), does too, although consumers can choose not to share certain details, like their email address.
Data obtained in this way is more likely to be accurate, and better still, doesn’t require the user to type it out, saving them effort and further reducing friction.
A strong CIAM platform is designed with customization in mind. Many offer native support for the tools your business – and its marketing team – already use, like Salesforce and Hubspot. If a ready-made extension doesn’t exist, you can typically create your own using the platform’s APIs and SDKs, or via a no-code/low-code interface.
In practice, this makes it easy to combine the zero-party data captured during the sign-up process with the first-party analytics data generated elsewhere. With a few lines of custom code, or a ready-made plugin, you automatically export customer details to a CDP or CRM platform for valuable marketing insights.
If you want to show customers that you’re serious about their privacy and security, a CIAM platform can help. They make it easy to deploy the features that really boost security – like multi-factor authentication (MFA) and biometric authentication – which, in turn, shows your customers that you’re a modern, vigilant, and proactive organization.
Many platforms offer additional security measures. These include the ability to warn when an attacker is attempting to brute force (or, guess) someone’s password, or identify suspected bot traffic.
And, as mentioned earlier, CIAM platforms also give you the flexibility to implement UX- and trust-boosting design patterns, like progressive profiling. By staggering your data collection throughout the customer lifecycle, and only asking relevant (and time-appropriate) questions, you’re less likely to scare off a potential customer.
With a CIAM platform, it becomes easier to customize the moments during and immediately after a person authenticates or creates a new account.
By writing a few lines of custom code, and using the data you already have on hand, you can identify deals and promotions likely to resonate with a person and display them at login. In another example, you could create a promotion that only appears to those who have created an account, logged in several times, but are yet to make a purchase.
CIAM platforms are endlessly customizable. And so, you can create rules and behaviors that meet your business needs and objectives, while also delighting your customers. As the Salesforce State of the Connected Consumer report shows, 56% of all consumers expect their offers to be personalized.
As the Salesforce State of the Connected Consumer report shows, 56% of all consumers expect their offers to be personalized.
