I have quite excitedly signed up for the London 2012 Olympics ballot. But I’m not sure I really like the idea of paying for something so unknown. Why do I need to pick which qualifiers/semis/finals to go to when I don’t even know if Canada (sorry but I am Canadian so no blue allowed in my various Olympic outfits) is going to be playing? Whilst I’m sure the level of sport will be good I just won’t have the same emotional investment if I end up watching Uzbekistan v. Uruguay in the Men’s Beach Volleyball quarter finals. What I can say though is that my ticket application process was an altogether fast and painless experience.
Sign-ups are a really important part of any online platform that requires information from its constituents. One of the best websites for this is Vimeo, enter your email & password and you are through and operational. The consumer in me says, ‘I hate filling out forms, and I resent having to wait to get through to the content I’d come for in the first place.’ I’m one of the first people to give up and go elsewhere.
For many businesses the sign-up can be the single most important point of operation yet it’s also the one place where customers may leave in droves. In marketing terms, the email & password system of signing up is frustratingly simple and devoid of the intimate details that we like to have in order to understand our customers.
So, now we have a paradox: how to get the information that you need as a marketer without irritating the consumer with a grueling sign-up? As far as I can see within my limited realm there are 3 things most organizations can do:
1. Get that foot in the door: Staggered sign-up
2. Auto-fill: Accurately & Inaccurately
3. Social Media Based Sign-Up
Staggered Sign-Up
Basically what it says on the tin. With staggered sign up you get the basics (a la Vimeo) to create an account and get that persons foot in the door and accessing the content they want to access, thereby keeping them happy. From there you can send them an email with ‘suggestions’ of activities such as filling out their profile etc., with carefully presented incentives such as the benefits of a profile picture (let the community know who you are!). If you are an e-commerce site much of the communication & personal details can be appropriated from the card details needed to complete a purchase & contact for shipping etc. While this is great for getting traffic through the site, information is disparate so having a really good auto-emailing campaign to encourage further activity, and a comprehensive CMS to manage and compile all the customer information is a top priority. This method can also result in several inactive users with little means of reactivation contact besides email. So be sure you are collecting accurate email addresses! Double opt-in (whilst an extra step) is best practice anyways and ensures your database is correct.
London 2012 did a variation of this with Registration first to determine which events you are interested in and if you qualify for the ballot etc., followed by the actual ticket application process.
Auto-fill
Accurate auto-fill is simply filling in the customer data with copied data from another source (i.e. the credit card details mentioned above). It’s inaccurate data that can prove especially useful*. When a customer is required to fill out personal information they tend to leave it unless they need to in order to get the product (credit card & shipping address). So the personal details that we need for marketing are left out. Having an auto-fill which is pre-set to Female when the customer is actually Male triggers the human desire to not be incorrectly perceived. This encourages people to put in those little details and enables marketing to conduct proper demographic segmentation. However as far as Olympic tickets were concerned much of the information needed to be known prior to purchase so this was not possible.
Social Media Based Sign-Up
Whilst not widely adopted, I am increasingly seeing this option available. It accomplishes two things – gives the consumer an easy-to-remember and fast way of signing up AND gives the marketer access to the wealth of information social media sites such as Facebook can provide. It also gives the opportunity to implement some very powerful peer advertising situations. I recently signed up for Nike Running’s Nikeplus community. Using the Facebook option meant that I instantaneously had a profile picture & my demographic data was complete. In addition not only is Facebook able to access the wealth of information regarding my Likes, Fanpages etc., if I purchase Nike merchandise online whilst logged in – I have the option of posting a message on both Facebook & Twitter (with options to deactivate and adjustable privacy settings for everything of course, we don’t want to be invasive!). This is where I feel like the Olympics missed the boat and could have made their ticket sign-up even easier. Facebook has global reach and provides much of the needed information already, which could speed up the application process for some including making it easier for those who don’t use English as a first language.
That being said, the 2012 Olympic ticket application process was fairly straightforward and easy-to-use. The Olympics are virtually guaranteed a certain amount of dedicated audience and so far the only issue seems to be with the Visa-only payment process (another rant for another place). I’ll be watching closely, with fingers crossed for my Men’s Volleyball tickets.
*Richard Sedley introduced the concept of the incorrect auto-fill to me at a talk at Digital Futures. Richard has a great Customer Engagement and Persuasion blog called Loopstatic where you can find all sorts of Consumer Behavior goodies.