Development of personal accounts

Today, retaining existing customers is as important as finding new ones. After all, they not only bring regular income, but also form a positive brand reputation. In addition, working to retain an audience is much cheaper for a business, since it does not require large expenses for a marketer and advertising budgets – often, implementing a personal account on a website may be quite enough.

In this article, we will talk in more detail about the user’s personal account, analyze exactly how it works, and how it helps companies earn more.

A personal account on a website is an automation tool. It helps the company establish individual interaction with each client, with minimal expenditure of time and resources.

For example, thanks to the introduction of a personal account, users have the opportunity to:

• Place a new order in a few clicks.
• Conveniently track the status of your order.
• View your purchase history.

• Manage subscription to paid services.
• Add products and services to “Favorites”.
• Use promotional codes.
• Receive personalized offers according to the terms of service.

From a technical point of view, the possibilities of your personal account are practically unlimited – it all depends on the company’s business strategy and the type of goods/services it provides.

Of course, a personal account is convenient and beneficial for the company’s clients. But what does a business owner get other than audience loyalty? Let’s dwell on this issue in more detail and look at everything point by point:

• Automation. The more clients a company serves, the more difficult it is to provide personalized service. The introduction of a personal account will allow you to automate some routine processes.
• Collection of client base. During the registration process, the user provides personal data – name, phone number, residential address, e-mail and other important information. As a result, the business receives a systematic customer base that can be used for marketing purposes and increasing sales.
• Launch of a loyalty program. Using your personal account, a company can encourage regular customers by providing them with various bonuses, discounts and promotional codes. This will minimize audience churn and encourage new customers to build long-term relationships with your business.

• Demand analysis. Using a personal account, a company can easily determine which product or service is in greatest demand by tracking customer preferences. This data will be much more accurate than conventional web analytics, since you will be able to rely not on data on page visits, but on information about actual orders.
• Forecasting and development. Thanks to the use of the most accurate data in analytics, a business owner will be able to build more effective development strategies and, as a result, increase the profitability of his company.

In addition to commercial benefits, the introduction of a personal account allows companies to solve many marketing problems, such as preparing individual offers based on the preferences of each client, establishing communication with the audience, receiving feedback, etc.

On websites, a personal account can be used for different purposes. In the E-commerce segment, it is needed to simplify work with orders and distribute the loyalty program. In online services such as YouTube, Twitch or Canva, it is used to store user content and sell paid subscriptions, and on corporate websites to limit employee access to content.

Accordingly, depending on the tasks performed, the functionality of your personal account will also differ. Therefore, we propose to consider the main components that should be considered in the process of developing such a product.

Registration

The registration process should be as fast and convenient as possible – optimally, it should take no longer than 1-2 minutes. It would also be useful to add integration of social networks and Google via API, which will reduce the time of creating an account to one click.

To increase the number of registrations, it is important to provide the person with additional motivation. These could be various discounts or bonuses that he will receive immediately after creating an account.

Repeat orders

Customers of online stores often make repeated purchases of the same goods, especially when it comes to different consumables – food, cosmetics, hygiene items, etc. The point of this functionality is that the user can repeat his previous order in a couple of clicks, without filling out forms and searching in the catalog.

Purchase/transaction history

A special section that displays all the client’s previous financial transactions – purchase history, purchase of paid features and subscriptions.

“Favorites” section

Making purchasing decisions is not always spontaneous. Sometimes the client is looking around, looking through options, or simply waiting for a paycheck. The functionality of selected products/services will allow the user to save the offers they like in order to return to them later, which will significantly increase the chances of successfully concluding a transaction.

Loyalty program

A loyalty program is an important element of motivation that can push a user to make a particular purchase. It can be implemented in the format of personal discounts, promotions, a bonus system or cashback – there can be quite a lot of options here. For example, it would be advisable to offer a customer a price reduction on an item that he has added to his “Favorites”.

Personalization

Thanks to personalization tools, companies can offer their customers the most relevant products and services, which improves the user experience and positively affects conversion.

For example, if a user specifies his measurements and preferred style in the personal account of an online clothing store, the system will be able to automatically select and offer him the most suitable products from stock, which increases the chance of a sale. Streaming services such as Netflix work in a similar way. After registering an account, the user is asked to select several films or TV series that he likes, and then, based on this data, algorithms select an individual list of recommendations for him.

For the technical implementation of a personal account, the same stack is often used as when developing the company’s main website:

• Backend – can be built on Python/PHP/Java/Node.js and Django/Flask/Yii2/Laravel frameworks.
• Frontend – developed using static HTML/CSS/JavaScript technologies, or using the Vue.js/React.js frameworks.

Each programming language and framework has its own characteristics, advantages and disadvantages. For example, Python is inferior to Java in performance, but is very popular in computing with large amounts of data, and PHP does not require large hardware resources and is practically indispensable when implementing web systems.

In other words, at the stack selection stage, developers need to create an optimal set of technologies that will solve the individual needs of the project as efficiently as possible.

The success and effectiveness of your personal account always depends on the right approach to its development. In our team, the implementation of such projects consists of six main stages:

• Collection of information. Specialists dive into the analysis of the client’s business, study his needs and collect all the information necessary for the work.
• Design. At this stage, a prototype of a personal account is created, which includes: interface warframes, navigation logic, description and flowcharts of the planned functionality. Such a mockup allows you to understand exactly how the finished product will work and determines the entire course of further implementation.
• UX/UI design. Next, designers are involved in the project. Their task is to create the appearance of a personal account that will harmoniously fit into the overall style of the main resource and, at the same time, be convenient for the company’s clients.

• Technical development. This is the most extensive part of development, during which programmers create the client part of the personal account – Frontend, and the server part – Backend. The frontend works on the browser side and ensures comfortable user interaction with the system. In turn, the backend is responsible for data storage, processing and all “internal” processes.
• Testing. When development is completed, the personal account is thoroughly tested by QA engineers. This allows you to identify and eliminate most technical errors before the project is released.
• Technical support and development. After deployment, we can provide qualified technical support and continuous development of the project. Thanks to this, your website’s personal account will always meet the current requirements and requests of clients.

Your personal account helps make your business more client-oriented and profitable. But the quality of technical performance plays a very important role here – an inconvenient office with frequent freezes and errors will most likely not bring the expected results, and may even repel the user.

Therefore, if you are planning to introduce a personal account into your project, we recommend that you contact the specialists of AVADA MEDIA. We will help you design and develop an effective tool, as well as provide its further technical support. To get in touch, leave a request on our website.