A unique tool comes along every now and then with the capability of providing an outstanding benefit for both shoppers and merchants alike. Social media has proven to be one of them. Offering marketers, a wealth of information about their customers, social media is a marketing manager’s dream come true. Leveraging social logins for ecommerce provides business owners access to that information, while simultaneously making it possible for customers to purchase items on your site without creating user IDs and passwords.
Convenience Amplified
In a lot of cases, when customers are forced to register for a site to make a purchase, or they are asked to recount a user ID and password, they simply abandon the purchase. In others, people have been known to enter false information to avoid subsequent marketing offers.
Meanwhile, social media users are always “logged in” because once a user does so with the platform of their choice, they remain so until they specifically log out. Because their photograph and contact information is required to open a social account, their identities are pretty much verified. This means you can permit their presence on your site in exchange for access to their social feeds. This alleviates password fatigue on the part of your customers while helping you tailor your offerings more closely to their preferences.
Personalization Opportunities Abound
Form completion can be more readily automated, as key information can be drawn from the user’s social profile. This means your website theme can draw from their profile to pre-populate forms, which will save your customers time. This also makes it easy for patrons to share purchases with their friends: “Look at the killer snowboard I just got! Can’t wait to try this bad boy out at Heavenly Valley!” With full access to your shoppers’ social profiles, you can send them birthday greetings, funnel ads related specifically to their interests and/or upcoming life events and you can even suggest gift ideas for their friends.
Narrowly Focus Your Marketing Efforts
With social logins, your email campaigns can be extremely personal, which means the odds of your messaging being perceived as spam drops significantly. After all, you’re speaking to your customers’ declared interests. You can time emails to appear as they’re planning vacations, weddings and all the other significant life events they share on social media.
Smart marketers also use this information to put a human face on their businesses, because this information can be used to send a wide variety of other types of messages as well. You can console a customer on the loss of a pet or a family member. You can offer congratulations when they get job promotions and you can celebrate the birth of children, kittens and puppies. Delivered without sales pitches, these messages tell your customer you care about them as individuals.
On the Other Hand…
Employing social logins also means you’ll be placing the logos of sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in rather prominent positions on your website. This means real estate you could have used to promote another aspect of your business will feature those entities instead. For some, that’s a huge ask, even with the opportunity to get inside the heads of their customer base.
Further, if one of those sites suffers a huge PR setback, you’ll be identified with them every time someone hits a landing page on your site at which their logo is evident. Ultimately though, as with all of the other tactical decisions about your business, you’ll have to decide if the benefits of leveraging social logins for ecommerce make sense to you.