Transforming prospects into customers: The role of guest checkout and customer accounts

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Marketers may debate the number of layers in the marketing funnel, but they all agree that somewhere between awareness and loyalty is a decision to purchase – aka the coveted “conversion.” It’s that magical moment when a prospect becomes a customer, and great marketers put a lot of thought into making it easy. 

It takes a mix of technology, psychology, and design to create a checkout experience that gives customers everything they need – and nothing they don’t – to motivate that final click.

One question digital leaders face is whether to offer customers the option to checkout and make a purchase as a “guest” without creating an account.

At Strivacity, we’ve helped all kinds of brands build successful sign-up and sign-in journeys – including helping them weigh the pros and cons of allowing guest checkout vs requiring new customers to create accounts. 

Here’s a look at how these options impact revenue and how modern customer identity and access management (CIAM) can pave the way for guests to become known customers.

The pros and cons of customer accounts

As modern marketers know, customer accounts have a lot going for them. 

When a consumer shares their information, it’s a strong signal that they intend to purchase again in the future. This enables the brand to nurture the relationship and demonstrate their customer focus by 

• Offering loyalty rewards and targeted offers
• Sharing value-added content marketing
• Making it easier for the customer to track their orders and manage returns
• Streamlining customer service requests

And, of course, having rich data on campaigns, geos, and customer lifetime value (CLV) can help brands improve their products, services, and marketing efforts.

For all their business value, however, customer accounts do have some downsides. Depending on how you build the registration process, creating an account can take more clicks or time than consumers will accept. This resistance is often called form fatigue, and the opportunity costs can add up fast. In a recent Capterra survey, more than 80% of consumers reported abandoning purchases because the account registration process was too complicated. 

What’s more, spiking data breaches have many customers justifiably concerned about the privacy and security of the information an account asks them to share. For those potential buyers, even if your registration process is engineered for delight, it won’t help because they’re just allergic to forms.   

Why some businesses prioritize guest checkout

Given these concerns, many buyers see guest checkout as the safer option. In fact, Capterra found that 43% of U.S. consumers prefer to check out as guests. 

By removing a hurdle that busy consumers see as a dealbreaker, guest checkout helps ensure that brands don’t lose sales. It also serves the needs of one-and-done impulse buyers and gift shoppers who may see no real value in creating an account.

Bottom line: With guest checkout, brands can boost initial conversion rates. And that’s just smart business. 

Which businesses benefit most from guest checkout?

The pros and cons of requiring customer accounts vs allowing guest checkout aren’t universal. Their relative weights vary depending on your business goals and customer base.

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How CIAM supports great customer experiences

CIAM refers to the software solution that allows you to build and optimize sign-up and sign-in journeys – including the steps for creating customer accounts. (That’s the short definition. You can get a full explainer here.) 

The best of these solutions also make it easy to bridge the gap between guest checkout and account creation by giving customers a third option: social login. Great CIAM also lets brands implement what’s called progressive profiling, which circumvents form fatigue by building customer profiles over time.

Let’s look at how social login and progressive profiling benefit brands and consumers alike.

Improved customer experiences

Social login lets customers check out using their existing credentials from, say, Google or Amazon. If they’re logged into their social accounts already (and these days, most people are), they’re done in a single click. Because they can skip the username and password fields entirely, social login solves for account fatigue. For more on whether social login makes sense for you check out our blog: The pros and cons of using social login providers.

Progressive profiling lets you gradually collect visitor data over time, with the ultimate goal of building a robust customer profile – without overwhelming people up front.. Each time a customer visits your site, the checkout experience presents a new question, building on information collected during registration and prior visits. 

The end result: Your marketing team gets all the data they need to truly understand what customers want, need, and value, so you can optimize every aspect of the customer experience to delight them.

Rich, accurate data

Social login gives your marketing team access to a trove of data for personalizing future campaigns. Email addresses and names come in as third-party verified data, reducing the risk that customers will inadvertently or deliberately enter incorrect information. 

Progressive profiling also supports data accuracy. At key touchpoints in the journey, you can ask customers to verify, update, or add new information, which helps ensure that your profiles remain valid over time.

Higher conversion rates

Because social login and progressive profiling simplify and streamline the checkout and registration process, both can help your brand reduce cart abandonment and boost overall sales. These features also give you sufficient information to launch abandoned cart journeys and remarketing flows – which, according to Hotjar, have impressive click-through rates and impacts on your online sales.   

Personalized marketing 

Combining data from social login with data collected over time through progressive profiling enables businesses to build rich customer profiles. And the richer your profiles, the better you can tailor marketing efforts, personalize product or service recommendations, and enhance the customer experience. 

Greater security and compliance

You might wonder whether CIAM can deliver the benefits of social login, progressive profiling, and rich data without compromising security or getting sideways with privacy regulations.

In fact, social login in particular enhances security by leveraging the advanced identity verification measures used by massive platforms like Apple, Microsoft, and others. A great CIAM solution reinforces that level of security at the integration point with your customer sign-up experience. 

On the compliance side, progressive profiling helps ensure that your brand collects only the information necessary at each stage of the journey. Your CIAM provider can and should be able to ensure that data collection complies with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA, so your business can avoid legal issues related to data privacy.  

6 recommendations for a checkout page that converts

1. Show customers you understand their preferences by offering both account creation and guest checkout options.
2. Enable social login as a convenient and secure option for new users.
3. Use – and clearly communicate – incentives like discounts and loyalty points to encourage customers to create accounts.
4. Require only essential information (like phone number or email) to create accounts. 
5. Identify key touchpoints when you can request additional data without disrupting the customer experience. Follow-up emails, personalized offers, and account settings pages are effective ways to collect more information over time.
6. Review metrics on your sign-up journeys periodically and optimize for your customer base. 

All the CIAM benefits in just a few clicks

Great CIAM offers all kinds of valuable options for enhancing the customer experience, improving the accuracy of customer profile data, increasing conversion rates, and ensuring security. By implementing a feature-rich CIAM solution, your brand can build smooth, personalized customer journeys that drive growth, revenue, and customer loyalty.

At Strivacity, we engineered our platform to make it easy for brands to set up and maintain social registration and progressive profiling – without a ton of coding or huge development costs.

See it for yourself in our self-guided tour!