Progressive profiling best practices.
Here are progressive profiling practices based on Okta Customer Identity Cloud research and own customers’ experiences.
Start by asking: “What is the least amount of data we need to let someone create an account?” This is what you need in your minimum viable form (MVF).
For the most part, it’ll consist of a few basic details. Email address. Password. Perhaps also their name – although this isn’t always necessary.
Some organizations will need to ask more probing questions, particularly those in highly regulated industries, like finance and healthcare.
The great thing about starting with an MVF is that it’s a baseline. Any extra fields you add will only increase customer acquisition friction. If you start with three fields, but then add a fourth, you can mentally calculate that you’ve just increased the amount of effort required by a third.
A baseline can easily become a limit. And that’s the beauty of starting small.
But what about the other questions that once populated your sign-up form? Here, we’re going to divide them into groups and identify the contexts where it’s appropriate to ask them. There are three main context clues to look out for:
Start with the user: If your customers include both ordinary consumers and businesses, it doesn’t make sense to ask a private individual about their business size and industry. Inquire based on user type.
Buyer's journey stage: Ask for shipping details and credit card number after someone’s decided to buy something rather than before.
Feature or use triggers: In some cases, your customer may need to provide additional information to use a certain feature or service, like verifying their age or identity. Wait until they are about to use that particular feature rather than ask at the beginning of their buyer journey.
Don’t make the customer repeat themselves
There’s an axiom in programming: “Don’t repeat yourself,” or DRY. It’s fundamental to writing clean, easily maintainable code.
In short, if you repeat a task multiple times throughout an application, it’s easier to write the code for that task once and reference it when needed. Saves time and maintenance.
Apply this to progressive profiling to avoid introducing unnecessary friction.
Social login can shorten the sign-up process to a couple of clicks. In many cases, you can obtain the data you need straight from the person’s preferred social platform.
Meta, for example, allows websites to access the names, email, and profile picture of anyone registering with their Facebook accounts. You can access additional information — like their age and location — by going through Facebook’s App Review process, and by obtaining the consent of the customer. Other platforms – like Google, Github, and Salesforce – offer similar social login capabilities. While Apple’s social login product, Sign-In With Apple (SIWA) does too, consumers can choose not to share certain details, like their email address.
Social login also allows smaller organizations to leverage the trust and brand recognition of larger technology companies. Your company can benefit from the long-standing relationships between your customers and the technology products they use. It’s a subtle – but powerful – way of nailing that first impression. As data from Okta Customer Identity Cloud shows, 40% of consumers say they’re more likely to sign-up for an app or online service if it supports social login.
As data from Okta Customer Identity Cloud shows, 40% of consumers say they’re more likely to sign-up for an app or online service if it supports social login.
One factor that likely contributes to this trust is that social login allows you to be transparent with what data you collect, and why, in compliance with government regulations and consumer expectations by including privacy-forward features and consent forms.Progressive profiling improves data over time. Kickstarting your progressive profiling strategy with social login is easy to implement and delivers results from day one, making it an easy win.
Match effort to value — from the customer’s POV
Consider your questions from your customer’s point of view. If you were signing up for a free trial of a product, would you want to write a resume or would you just want to see if it works as expected? Your customers don’t care about your next big campaign. They have their own objectives. Considering their point of view saves everyone time — and makes it less likely that they’ll abandon the form.
Data from an Okta Customer Identity Cloud survey shows, form length is the most common consumer frustration. To mitigate that, show your customer that their efforts have a pay-off and will help them complete their task.
If you ask questions unrelated to the customer’s needs or objectives, it may arouse suspicion or irritation.
It wouldn’t make sense for a SaaS app to ask an individual customer questions that only apply to larger business clients. They don’t have a business, so they can’t tell you its name, industry, or the number of employees on staff.
This hints at another key advantage of progressive profiling: you can deploy your sales team more effectively, giving them stronger leads rather than sending them after individual consumers that will never – ever – sign up for an annual enterprise plan subscription.
Your progressive profiling strategy is part of your customer’s digital experience. Ask yourself how it is adding value to their digital experience?
According to a 2021 survey, 92% of consumers expect customers to keep their personal information safe. Consumers routinely find themselves embroiled in data breaches, and so, they’re cautious about how much information they share with a third party.
A Thales survey found that 33% of consumers have fallen victim to a data breach, with 82% of victims saying it had a “negative impact” on their lives. The impact might be something as simple as having to change their passwords, or something more serious – like having their identities stolen, having to activate a credit freeze, or having another account compromised with their (now-leaked) credentials.
By asking fewer questions, you can limit the harm a customer might experience should the worst happen.
Even if you’re confident in your security, treating data with the respect it deserves can foster a sense of trust in new customers. And that might make them willing to sign-up and spend money.
Companies with lengthy signup processes often have data quality issues.
If your signup form asks questions that the customer simply can’t answer (like asking a personal customer about the number of employees at their non-existent company), or doesn’t feel comfortable answering, what do you think will happen?
Some customers will make up answers to protect their privacy. And so, your bedraggled sales team will expend valuable time and effort chasing a lead that really isn’t a lead.
Progressive profiling helps with customer acquisition, data quality, and reduces form abandonment. Fantastic benefits, but there’s an added advantage: it gives your organization more access to data that your customer has deliberately shared with you — zero-party data.
Given the looming retirement of the third-party tracking cookies, zero-party data is quickly gaining in value, especially when combined with first-party data.First-party data typically refers to the information automatically acquired when a customer uses a site or application (like search history, analytics, and so on), but it can remain anonymous unless your customer shares additional data with you.
First-party data will help you understand the preferences and habits of each user. Zero-party data will allow you to put a name to the anonymous first-party data generated by unauthenticated users, and provides demographic information that will help your marketing team adapt to this changing world. (Please check in with your legal team to review data privacy regulations that apply in your customers’ regions when combining zero and first-party data.)
As Kerry Ok, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Okta Customer Identity Cloud, explained: “Progressive profiling will help organizations transform their mindset from focusing purely on digital transactions to a higher goal of forming digital relationships. These relationships will take more time to build — but they will last longer, especially if they’re built on trust, loyalty, and customer happiness.”
Progressive profiling isn’t merely relevant to consumer-centric applications and services. If you’re a purely B2B player, your customers expect you to deliver the same polished experiences as the apps they use in their personal lives. And they’ll take those expectations into the workplace.
