Sign-on, Sign-off: Data-Driven Marketing Conversion

We data miners love to collect pieces of information and whip it into compelling insight. It’s what we do, but that job can be seriously derailed when consumers suffer from sign up fatigue. A new study from Blue Research shows that consumers are completely exhausted when it comes to having to complete sign in pages.

In fact, “more than three in four (survey participants) say they have given incomplete or incorrect information rather than share personal data with each website.”

Think about it, you’ve probably done the same thing yourself. So often we’re asked to share information in order to complete a purchase that marketers are looking for a new way to simplify the process for consumers and still get the details and data we need.

The answer, some suggest is social sign-ins.

“With social sign-on, retailers have access to richer profile information because the data elements collected on social networks are more extensive than what web retailers request from customers registering on their sites,” notes the report Social Commerce: Personalized and Collaborative Shopping Experiences.

The encouraging news is 66% of respondents to the study are for a shift to social sign-on. Essentially that would mean personal data would be pulled from a social account or email. The bonus for marketers is that this would likely improve the quality of the data, avoid out of date data (most social users update their information frequently), and potentially reach more desirable customers according to eMarketer.

The survey found that study participants for social sign-on were more likely than critics to be planning increases in holiday spending, and they also indicated they would be doing more of that holiday shopping online.

Furthermore, a social sign-on could create a whole cache of useful data marketers could use to better serve consumers. Consider Facebook “Likes” alone and you have a good idea of what a savvy data miner could potentially use to better target consumers. Yet, like any new technology,  implementing a social sign-on will require research, development and certainly a defined strategy, however, it’s something we expect to see more of it in the next coming years.