User account: preferable over third party cookies

Thanks to the technological development of tools such as Google Analytics and Leadfeeder, you can learn a lot about your visitors in a relatively short amount of time — without having to invest significantly in it.

First party cookies

You can get all this information by installing a small, simple script. However, nobody can tell how long these types of third party cookies will still be allowed. Fortunately, you can also obtain information yourself.

If you use so-called first party cookies, you are the one who collects, processes, and (securely) stores data from users with an account — not from regular visitors.

Although you don’t have any information about behavior beyond your website, you can collect and use data in a much smarter way — by linking internal services or products to user profiles (and that’s a major advantage).

To meet these users’ needs, it’s essential to adopt their perspective and tailor your approach to it.

Adopt users’ perspective and tailor your approach to it

Every organization has ERP or workflow management software. That’s sales, registration, management, invoicing, and reporting software. But in nearly all cases, these are internally oriented systems. They don’t ‘do’ anything with your website visitors and — in most cases — customers (except facilitating digital quotations, signing, and invoicing).

Based on the first party cookie philosophy, it’s crucial to convert website visitors to users with an account (important: a user is not necessarily a customer (yet)). A user account helps you take major steps — from ‘website visits’ to ‘transactions’ and from ‘bounce rate’ to ‘return rate.’

You can use it to build a profile — for example, by including website pages visited, likes, news articles read, responses to information sent, etc. In fact, it’s even possible to collect data from ‘visitors’ that are not yet registered, save it, and make it accessible as soon as they become ‘users’ or, preferably, ‘customers/users.’

Better performance through standardization

If you consider your business operations from the perspective of user accounts, your services will improve by definition. That’s because you are forced to structure and standardize all your services, information, and reports.

By making all delivery processes accessible to users, you greatly clarify the following things:

• Your deliverables
• Your way of working
• The people involved
• Rates and invoicing

By working with user accounts, you will standardize and automate processes — which will significantly benefit your organization and the customer. ‘Bring the back office to the front’ will be your motto, providing clarity and convenience and saving you a lot of work.

If you need an example of how this process is completely streamlined, have a look at hosting companies or telecom providers. You have insight into your account, invoices, and usage, and you can order or cancel additional services — it’s all automated in such a way that you, the customer, can handle it yourself.

Of course, it’s relatively simple to adjust your smartphone plan, expand a hosting plan, or request an SSL certificate. But why not use the same approach for more complex services, such as an application assessment or a GAP analysis? We’d like to tell you more about that in our next post.

Briefly put, a user account will greatly benefit the quality of your services and your market position. Do you want to implement this change? We know how to go about it!