The concept of digital identity has evolved significantly over the last 15 years. Though traditional registration forms that require usernames, email addresses, and passwords are still mainstays across the Internet, we’ve also seen the proliferation of simpler, more modern methods of authentication.

Social login, for example, has been widely adopted by both businesses and consumers. Allowing users to verify their identities and log in to websites and mobile applications using existing profiles from networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn not only creates a more streamlined experience for consumers, it also enables marketers to capture and leverage rich, first-party social identity data.

Users clearly enjoy the ease and speed of social login — Facebook Login was used more than 10 billion times in 2013 alone (Facebook Newsroom). Organizations also understand the value of the identity data housed within social profiles — hundreds of thousands of websites and apps across the Internet now employ some form of social login (Datanyze).

As the evolution of digital identity continues, we’re seeing even more unique and integrated means of online verification. Let’s take a look at three interesting methods of identity authentication in use today.

Apple Pay

When Apple introduced the iPhone 5S, the company introduced a new hardware feature called Touch ID. Touch ID allows users to unlock their smartphones, tablets, and certain operating system applications using just a fingerprint. A year later, when Apple unveiled the iPhone 6, we saw the introduction of Apple Pay, a mobile payment system.

The combination of Touch ID, Apple Pay, and Apple’s native Passbook app effectively digitizes a user’s entire wallet and identity as a consumer, using biometrics and NFC technology to authenticate shoppers at the point of sale. Goods can be purchased using only a smartphone, without the need to swipe a credit card.

Twitter Digits

In late 2014, social networking company Twitter introduced Digits, a tool that allows users to sign up for mobile apps and authenticate their identities without the need to create new login credentials. Rather than creating new usernames and passwords, consumers can log in using their cell phone numbers — an identification mechanism they already use every day.

With Digits, online accounts are tied only to mobile phone numbers, eliminating password fatigue for users, and reducing the amount of spam or inactive accounts businesses have to deal with. An individual signs up using his or her phone number, receives an SMS code, enters the code into the verification field, and the process is complete.

Log In with PayPal

As eCommerce and mobile commerce continue to grow (Internet Retailer), we’re seeing more and more consumers leverage authentication solutions from payment providers. PayPal, for instance, has its own third-party identification solution for websites and apps called Log In with PayPal.

Log In with PayPal allows consumers to log in to web properties using their existing PayPal credentials. This option streamlines checkout processes and provides enhanced merchant experiences as most shipping and payment details are stored within PayPal.

Consumer identity, as well as the means to verify consumer identity, are becoming increasingly important across the Internet, and businesses need to be adequately prepared.

In order to successfully embrace and prepare for the continued evolution of digital identity, brands need a customer identity management solution in place that is capable of normalizing both structured and unstructured consumer data, as well as maintaining compliance with the ever-changing APIs of third-party identity providers.

To learn more about how concept of identity will continue to diversify, download our free eBook, “The Evolution of Consumer Identity.”

– Reeyaz Hamirani, Corporate Communications Manager
@Reeyaz21

The post 3 Examples of the Evolution of Identity appeared first on Gigya's Blog.

As the Interactive portion of SXSW 2015 comes to a close, we’d like to take a moment to thank all of our guests who came out to the third annual Gigya Grill. This year, we took over the La Sol y La Luna restaurant in Austin for three days of networking, great food, and fun. From Casino Night with a live DJ to the Matt Wilson Band and an award-winning gelato station, we hope our attendees had as much fun as we did.

We also hosted an insightful panel discussion entitled Exploring the Future of Digital Identities. An amazing collection of marketing experts discussed how identity is shaping the way businesses understand and build meaningful relationships with their customers. Moderated by Dave Scott, Gigya’s CMO, the panel featured Peter Scott, Vice President of Emerging Media at Turner Sports, Chris Schlosser, Vice President at MLS Digital, and Gigya’s CEO, Patrick Salyer. For those unable to attend or catch the live stream, you can watch the recorded panel discussion here.

Here’s to another successful year at SXSW! We’re looking forward to bringing the Gigya Grill back to Austin for SXSWi 2016, and hope you’ll join us!

The post SXSWi 2015 Recap: Highlights from The Gigya Grill appeared first on Gigya's Blog.

As Aristotle said, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Unfortunately, as organizations grow, consumer channels multiply, and Big Data gets even bigger, many companies fail to heed these words of wisdom. 

Consider the following statistics:

• Just 17% of marketers say their mobile strategy is fully aligned and integrated with their overall marketing (FierceCMO)
• Fewer than 1 in 20 marketers claim that their marketing technologies are fully integrated (Signal) 
• Less than 25% of CMOs believe there is adequate collaboration between marketing and IT (Accenture)

Let’s dig a little deeper into these three stumbling blocks, how they affect business performance, and what marketers can do to get past them. 

Siloed UX Across Devices

With mobile web usage having officially surpassed desktop usage for the first time early last year (Search Engine Watch), marketers already know the importance of connecting with consumers via smartphones and tablets. However, 83% of consumers say that a seamless experience across devices is important (ExactTarget), requiring marketers to go beyond basic “mobile friendly” experiences. 

Unfortunately, this is where the silos set in and marketers fall short. Modern brands must strive to provide users with cohesive journeys as they use multiple devices both simultaneously and sequentially. 

The key to doing this successfully? Identity. By asking a user to register and log in across devices, marketers can maintain a single view of the user’s profile and activities, making it possible to create experiences where each device picks up where the last one left off.

Siloed Data Channels

Marketers are implementing a growing number of technologies in an effort to reach their customers across touch points, including email, advertising, social, and more. In fact, according to a recent survey, 53% of marketing departments use five or more marketing technology solutions, while 15% use ten or more (EContent). With each adoption comes yet another source of user interaction and insight. 

In theory, this sounds great, but the problem is that none of these siloed systems “talk” to one another, with only 24% of markers claiming to have a clear understanding of their customers across channels (Experian). This leaves marketers with multiple, disparate views of the same exact customer, making it nearly impossible to provide users with relevant experiences and accurately attribute ROI. 

Leading brands like Learn Liberty are adopting database solutions that break down data silos by consolidating unlimited volumes and varieties of data across marketing platforms. By housing customers’ permission-based social and on-site behavioral data in an advanced database built with a dynamic schema, Learn Liberty is able to export this information directly into its email automation system of choice, Marketo, using a direct integration. The ability to generate more relevant and timely Marketo campaigns from these insights has resulted in a 152% boost in site referral traffic from email marketing.

Siloed Business Departments

Traditionally, IT and marketing have functioned in two separate spheres of the organization, with IT knee-deep in algorithms and APIs, and marketing laser-focused on crafting the perfect banner ads and email campaigns. But as businesses face increasing pressure to become more data-driven, marketers place a growing burden on IT to turn customer data into actionable insights. 

Days are often spent working overtime to crunch numbers and create reports for marketing managers, sales teams, and C-Level execs to quickly digest, many of which are outdated well before completion. 40% of CMOs believe their companies’ IT teams don’t understand the urgency of integrating new data sources into campaigns to address market conditions, while 43% of CIOs say that marketing requirements and priorities change too often for them to keep up (CMO.com). 

However, as customer data becomes the linchpin of business success, and CMOs’ technology budgets surpass those of CIOs, there is an unprecedented need for these two departments to collaborate and work closely together. Marketers must turn to IT to implement a dynamic, consolidated customer data management solution that gives them a single view of customers across channels. This solution must also have the power to turn Big Data into digestible, actionable insights for use across marketing platforms and campaigns. Helping marketers manage customer data more effectively ultimately reduces maintenance burdens for IT, leaving developers with more time to focus on innovation.

As customers continue to demand more personalized, seamless experiences, silos within organizations will become increasingly detrimental to marketing success. For more information about how your business can function as a whole rather than “the sum of its parts,” download our white paper, “Achieving A Single Customer View: The Holy Grail for Marketers.”

The post 3 Silos That Stunt Marketing Success appeared first on Gigya.

To reach customers with a level of relevance that grows conversions and loyalty, marketers must understand their users. We’re not talking about observing anonymous on-site behaviors and researching general browsing habits – we’re talking about really learning who they are.

Prompting users to self-identify by registering and logging in on your sites and applications is necessary, but easier said than done. Here are three strategies to help you convert unknown users, eliminate reliance on anonymous data and get to know your customers more granularly.

Create Points of Engagement

Requiring users to identify themselves and provide you with their personal information requires some incentive. The ability to seamlessly and directly interact with your brand and site community encourages users to not just register for your site, but also to log in and engage time and again. Consider these notable engagement statistics:

• 32% of companies using ratings & reviews saw a registration conversion increase of more than 50%
• 30% of brands using comments were able to boost registrations by 25-49%
• 30% of companies using gamification improved registration conversion rates by upwards of 50%

Engagement is only as valuable as the insight it generates. Providing site visitors with ways to interact directly with your brand results in a greater quantity and quality of data to guide the creation of personalized user experiences, more focused content strategies, lucrative product roadmaps and much more.

Implement Single Sign-On (SSO)

Driving registration flows across a single web property can be difficult, but for brands with multiple domains, this challenge can be two, three or even ten times more difficult. Single Sign-On (SSO) allows users to authenticate just once and move seamlessly across your web properties.

SSO syncs logged-in states as users navigate from one of your web properties to another, or to a third-party application that sits within your site. Allowing users to leverage the same identity across domains facilitates a single, complete customer view, as well as simplifies back-end identity data management for enterprises.

For example, as properties of a larger parent company, Food Network, HGTV and DIY Network enable users to log in on just one of these sites, and then unlock the ability to navigate across all three properties while maintaining their logged-in states.

Link Anonymous Data to Known Users

By employing cookies across web properties, brands have compiled masses of anonymous user data. While this data gives some insight into behavioral trends for site visitors, it fails to uncover the interests and identities driving these actions. What’s more, device-specific data is becoming increasingly unreliable as users connect and share across a growing number of mobile devices.

Integrations between identity management solutions and DMPs or automation tools make it possible to link existing, anonymous consumer data to known user records once a user registers on-site. When a user registers, your site can send the now authenticated user’s site ID to your DMP, and the known user is synced to the DMP against the anonymous ID and data on record for that user. Moving forward, the user’s identity data can be passed directly from the identity management platform to the DMP and attributed to the correct user based on the site ID match – even across devices and domains.

User anonymity is a major stumbling block for many businesses. To read even more tips about turning anonymous site visitors into known customers, download our Social Login 101 white paper.

The post 3 Tips to Turn Anonymous Users into Known Customers appeared first on Gigya.

Balancing data privacy while providing consumers with personalized experiences has always felt like somewhat of a paradox for marketers. Though this balancing act may seem arduous, the variety of marketing technologies and data-driven strategies available today make it entirely possible.

In order to better understand the current state of data privacy and personalization, Gigya commissioned a consumer-facing study with OnePoll to collect the perspectives of 2,000 US and 2,000 UK male and female adults ages 18 and older.

The study, which is conducted annually, examines consumer attitudes around data privacy, the prevalence of social login, and the importance of personalized marketing. The 2015 State of Consumer Privacy & Personalization revealed continued explosive social login use, driven by an aversion to completing lengthy registration forms and having to create more usernames and passwords. Most notably, the report highlighted a clear evolution in the concept of digital identity, Identity 3.0, which is characterized by increasing acceptance of next-generation authentication methods like biometrics. Predictably, the study also showed heightened demand for data privacy and more relevant marketing communications, which consumers believe can be achieved through business transparency and personalization.

Key findings from The 2015 State of Consumer Privacy & Personalization showed:

• The move toward Identity 3.0 is in full swing. Adoption of next-generation authentication methods is growing steadily, with 59% of US consumers acknowledging a willingness to register or log in to a website or mobile application with an existing identity from a payment provider such as PayPal or Amazon.

   

• Biometric technologies are emerging as popular options for authentication. The study shows 41% of US consumers have a high level of comfort logging in to a site or mobile app using a thumbprint or face/eye scan.

   

• More than 90% of US and UK consumers are at least somewhat concerned about data privacy and how companies are using customer data.

   

• Irrelevant marketing communication is another issue plaguing consumers. Per day, 30% of US consumers and 35% of UK consumers receive between one and three irrelevant messages. Even worse, 17% of US consumers and 14% of UK consumers receive more than 10 irrelevant messages per day.

   

• 88% of US consumers have logged in to a website or mobile application using an existing social network identity, an 11% increase over last year’s findings.

For even more interesting statistics about data privacy, Identity 3.0, and how brands can build trust with consumers, download the complete study here.

– Reeyaz Hamirani, Corporate Communications Manager
@Reeyaz21

The post New Study: The 2015 State of Consumer Privacy & Personalization appeared first on Gigya.

Balancing data privacy while providing consumers with personalized experiences has always felt like somewhat of a paradox for marketers.

In order to better understand the current state of data privacy and personalization, Gigya commissioned a consumer-facing study with OnePoll to collect the perspectives of 2,000 US and 2,000 UK male and female adults ages 18 and older.

The study, which is conducted annually, examines consumer attitudes around data privacy, the prevalence of social login, and the importance of personalized marketing. The 2015 State of Consumer Privacy & Personalization revealed continued explosive social login use, driven by an aversion to completing lengthy registration forms and having to create more usernames and passwords. Most notably, the report highlighted a clear evolution in the concept of digital identity, Identity 3.0, which is characterized by increasing acceptance of next-generation authentication methods like biometrics. Predictably, the study also showed heightened demand for data privacy and more relevant marketing communications, which consumers believe can be achieved through business transparency and personalization.

We’ve compiled highlights from the study into the infographic below:

To see even more interesting statistics about data privacy, Identity 3.0, and how brands can build trust with consumers, you can download the complete study here.

– Reeyaz Hamirani, Corporate Communications Manager
@Reeyaz21

The post Infographic: The 2015 State of Consumer Privacy & Personalization appeared first on Gigya.

The results of Gigya’s 2015 State of Consumer Privacy & Personalization report reveal that, while social login usage continues to skyrocket, consumers are also showing a marked interest in next-generation authentication methods to meet growing demands for privacy and personalization.

Join us as Gigya’s Craig Ferrara discusses the rise of Identity 3.0 and what it means for businesses, including:

• Apple IDs as a potential new form of third-party digital identity
• Consumer interest in biometrics
• Using social identities to connect the IoT

About Our Speaker

As Gigya’s Director of Creative Services, Craig manages the Creative Services and User Interface Design team. Craig is responsible for designing the look and feel of the integration of Gigya’s technology, as well as providing consultation that Gigya offers clients post go-live to improve analytics and adoption. 

At the end of the webinar, you will have the opportunity to submit your own privacy, personalization, and Identity 3.0-related questions to Craig.

The webinar will be held on Thursday, July 30th, 2015 at 8:00 a.m. PT. Please click here to register.

We hope you can join us!

The post Live Webinar: Balancing Privacy and Personalization with Identity 3.0 appeared first on Gigya.

With consumer data pouring in across mobile, social, email and wearables — just to name a few of today’s consumer channels — it can be excruciatingly difficult for marketers to navigate the Big Data landscape. 

First and third-party data are two distinctly different classes of information that are traditionally juxtaposed against each other. So how are marketers to decide which of these two data types will best serve their respective businesses? Let’s explore the differences between the two, how they’re collected and why marketers should be using first-party data to improve their campaigns.

What is Third-Party Data?

Third-party data is information collected about unspecified consumers who are not necessarily a company’s own customers. Businesses purchase this information from data brokers who scour disparate and unrelated sources, such as government lists, voter documentation, questionnaires and surveys, to compile data sets. Typically, third-party data is aggregated from online tracking cookies, email lists and data marketplaces.

Here are some examples of third-party data points collected by data brokers:

• Employment information
• Credit score
• Allergies and ailments
• Home address
• Birth date
• Voter registration information

Evidently, companies can access a lot of information just by purchasing third-party data from data brokers. But how accurate is this data and how does it impact marketing campaigns? Third-party data is prone to three major inaccuracies:

Lack of Relation

First, data brokers create inaccurate consumer profiles by piecing together data from unrelated and unaffiliated sources. It’s like trying to complete a customer puzzle with a bunch of different pieces from different sets: there’s no way to flawlessly and fully complete it. This lack of relatedness among various sources can lead to some stretched and inaccurate conclusions. For example, just because an individual types “cute dog photos” into a search engine doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she is a dog owner.

Out-of-Date

Second, third-party data can be severely out-dated, as it can be bought and sold for many years without any real updating. This means major life-changing events, such as moving or getting married, can go overlooked by companies using third-party data. Consequently, brands relying on third-party information risk exposing their customers to irrelevant experiences, and no one likes irrelevant experiences. In fact, in a recent survey, when asked about their reactions after receiving irrelevant information or product recommendations from a company, 47% of US respondents and 44% of UK respondents claimed that they ignored all future communications from the business.

No Cross-Device Accuracy

Lastly, traditional third-party tracking cookies, one of the most well-known and widely-used forms of third-party data, only monitor device-specific behaviors. Heavy reliance on tracking cookies results in an inability to understand users’ cross-device activities, which is especially vital to grasp as the average US consumer owns four devices (Nielsen), more than 20% of consumers between the ages of 18-49 visit websites from four different devices each week (Experian) and 46% of consumers use multiple devices to accomplish a single task (MarketingLand).

With so much room for error, marketers who rely heavily on third-party data to understand and reach their customers are setting themselves up to deliver ineffective campaigns and waste marketing spend. The inability to know exactly who they’re reaching prohibits them from adequately measuring and optimizing their campaigns.

So, how should businesses move beyond third-party data to improve the success of their marketing efforts? Leverage first-party customer data.

What is First-Party Data?

First-party data is data collected by companies directly from their customers. It’s collected from interactions and behaviors across devices, websites, mobile apps, registration fields, subscription data, social networks and more.

Here are some first-party data points about an individual that can easily be obtained by companies via permission-based methods such as traditional registration forms, progressive profiling or third-party identity authentication:

• Relationship status
• Purchase behavior
• Favorite brands and companies
• Favorite TV shows, musical artists, etc.
• On-site actions and activities

With such a large quantity and extraordinary quality of accurate, rich information, marketers can create personalized and relevant marketing campaigns to better appeal to their current and potential customers and see conversion rates skyrocket.

Marketers, ask yourselves, when creating your marketing programs, would you rather use anonymous data collected from various sources, or permission-based, first-hand data gathered directly from your actual and potential customers? 

To learn more about the hidden costs associated with third-party data, check out this free white paper.

The post The Three Major Inaccuracies of Third-Party Data appeared first on Gigya.

Think for a minute about all the identities people have online – the apps, the emails, the e-commerce sites, cloud accounts, streaming video, and the bills paid electronically. Conservative estimates say average users have 20 to 25 digital identities. For some double-thumbers, it‘s more than twice that. Sometimes, we even have more than one identity…

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