Sales Funnel Step 1: Designing your door
“Push, if that doesn’t work, Pull, if that doesn’t work either then we are closed”
This article is about your door design; The first step of letting your customers in to your sales funnel.
In a physical world, brick and mortar stores had to ask themselves “Do we build a push or a pull door? When does a sliding door make sense? Should a sliding door slide right, left, or up?”. While those questions might strike you as unimportant, successful stores knew that a good customer experience starts at the door and they did make this time investment to ask those questions.
The same goes for an online business. The questions around your “virtual” door might be a little different but the concept remains the same; “Do we use sign up forms or social login buttons? How long should our signup form be? Do we let customers in once they signup or do we have to validate their data first? etc.”.
Naturally, there is a lot of research around the topic; Social signups boost your registrations because they have a lower barrier to entry than signup forms. Shorter signup forms convert better than longer ones. There are tons of examples of signup/login form designs that convert etc. etc. But the one question that is usually overlooked, and a fundamental one to ask, is “Do I build my own door, hinges, lock mechanism, etc. or do I get a pre-built standard parts?”. As always, the answer is; it depends.
Apple decided to build its parts. They wanted a certain user experience and decided that existing parts don’t help them build the door they want (the signature huge panels of glass in Apple stores are something that Apple designed, created, and, of course, patented the heck out of). While custom building everything around your door can sure make up for a unique customer experience, it is also very risky. It comes with a lot of additional cost, things to consider (can this glass break under some weather conditions), and having a door that is so new that customers can’t figure out how to notice, open or go through! The fact is, humans have figured out how to use doors a little after they discovered caves (which I suspect was really long ago) and have expectations on how it works.
Same goes for your online business (took a lot of turns for me to get there but thank you for sticking with me). You have a choice to custom build your sign-up/sign-in forms and social login (with the backend, storage, security, etc. that goes with it) or to use a vendor that has already pre-built it for you like Okta or Auth0.
To make a good decision around which way to go, you need to understand what goes to building your own parts. While it appears cheaper at first, it is easy to overlook the standard features you need at first e.g. password recovery, account verification, account suspension, etc. and technical aspects e.g. security (is the data encrypted over the wire, is the data encrypted on desk, etc.).
The fact is, building your own parts is guaranteed to ALWAYS be more expensive. When you are starting up, this option is straight out unpragmatic. It is always better to build a door quickly, maybe spending some time on the front-end design and User Experience and put the time and effort to your product itself.
We at Funnelll decided to take this one step further and make it even easier and faster to build. Once you have designed your frontend and added your secret UX sauce, you can head to Funnelll, link your Okta or Auth0 accounts (which you can get for free), and visually setup your forms and social buttons to work with your provider. It takes minutes to have your user management working on your website. No coding needed (unless you want to be that guy). As a matter of fact, our own registration and sign in forms on https://www.funnelll.com have been setup with our own service!
Disclaimer: I am the founder of Funnelll; a platform that helps companies build better and more successful online businesses and SaaS products.
