How to Improve Sign-Up Page Conversion Rate with Single Sign-On 

From online shopping to streaming, many platforms in the digital realm now require, or at least strongly encourage, users to create personal accounts in order to access the best of their services. For users, account creation for a specific platform can provide a multitude of benefits, including exclusive offers on products and services, early access to content, or the ability to create wishlists and track orders. For businesses, users creating accounts allows them access to marketing data and increased opportunity for promoting more of their product or service to customers. 

Despite all the offerings of creating an account, users are routinely hesitant to do so, with the average website conversion rate for sign-ups equating to only 2 to 5 percent. There are a few reasons for the low nature of this average, but luckily there is a method a business can put into place to improve their own sign-up page conversion rate. 

What is Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of users or visitors on a platform to take a desired action. This rate is determined by dividing the total number of users by the actual amount of users that follow through with said action. For example, imagine a YouTube creator is desiring their viewers to click their channel’s “Subscribe” button. If they have had 100 total viewers, and 5 have followed through with clicking this button, then their conversion rate for this scenario would be 5 percent.

There is no one conversion rate per platform site, as what the rate is describing is determined based on the path a user takes within this environment. In the case of sign-up pages, conversion rates in this sense refers to the amount of users that follow through in creating an account out of the total users which visit a website. As noted before, conversion rates on website sign-up pages remains low, with the highest average conversion rate regarding the path from a site’s home page to a call to action only lying around 11 percent.

Why Users Don’t Want to Make Accounts

Users may want to create accounts on a website to reap the benefits of special offers or full access to the features of a platform, but the task of signing up can be enough of a roadblock to forgo these benefits. In a 2019 survey conducted by MarketingCharts, it was found that the most prevalent reasons for why users did not want to sign up for accounts on eCommerce sites related to the disruption of their privacy and time. The reasons in detail are as follows:

1. Marketing Emails 

The most common reason why online users do not like to make user accounts is the possibility of unsolicited or too many marketing emails. Multiple platform websites today use email addresses as an option, or the only option, for account sign-up. Though some sites are explicit in their email distribution and ask for permission from the user before sending out marketing emails, this is not necessarily mandated for all businesses.

In the United States, under the FTC’s CAN-SPAM Act, businesses that have your email address do not need prior consent to add U.S. users to their mailing list or send commercial messages. With this in mind, as of 2020 87% of B2B marketers utilize email as their main content distribution channel. Creating an account on a platform that requires an email address at sign-up opens the door for unwanted marketing content and an overflowing inbox.

2. Nervous about Providing Personal Information 

Signing up on a new site with an email address, phone number, or even just your name immediately creates a risk to online privacy. If you use a Gmail address to sign-up for an account on a website, Google already allows the businesses behind these sites to track a user’s online behavior in order to create personalized ads. In the case of a data breach on a site that has collected your phone number, a simple search engine result of someone’s number can bring up websites which display the owner’s full name, age, home address, family members, and more. Similar instances can occur in the case of providing a legal name when signing up online, where a breach and search can easily lead an attacker to find your social media and other personal information. The internet knows scarily more about the average user than one may expect.

3. Too Long of a Process 

The less fields required to be filled out in a form, the more likely a user is to complete the form process. Having to provide excessive amounts of information in order to make an account can be time-consuming, and often discourages a user from following through with a sign-up. Concise, accessible, and easy to understand sign-up forms appear to be effective in improving conversion rates. One of the most ideal options for converting users at sign-up is making it a one-click or one-step process, which can be provided by a single sign-on service.

The humanID Single Sign-On Solution

Single sign-on (SSO) is a login authentication method which allows users to login to multiple applications at once by using one set of credentials. SSO authentication serves to reduce password fatigue and save time for users while logging in, as they would not have to re-enter a username and password for each online session. Many websites are already utilizing SSO to make account creation a quicker and simpler process, being a step in the right direction for improving sign-up conversion rates. However, while implementing an SSO system for a sign-up page resolves the issue of shortening the time it takes to create an account, there still comes the issues of solicitation and privacy.

A handful of websites which do have SSO implemented are providing the option of SSO through preexisting social media accounts (Facebook, Google, etc.), where you are able to login using these account’s credentials. Some SSO systems also still require credentials such as a username, email address, or phone number for use in the initial login. All of these options of SSO remain susceptible to data tracking and user identification. One SSO solution however does not store any of this personal information, and still allows for an easy sign-up process.

humanID offers all of the benefits of a usual SSO service, but also offers complete anonymity to its users. When encountering a sign-up page which utilizes humanID, the software will only ask a user for their phone number for initial login verification. Following this, the number is hashed and is automatically deleted, and the user will then be identifiable only by a non-reversible hash. By providing no personal information at all, users will never have to worry about unsolicited emails or about data exposure. This anonymous and time-saving system efficiently solves all three prevalent reasons for hesitance when it comes to account creation. As such, single sign-on solutions such as humanID inherently work to improve sign-up conversion rates.