How to Use Passkeys as Growth Hack

There are many important factors in authentication that boost conversion rates. With passkeys, a new super tool has emerged that not only improves security but also can be one of the greatest growth hacks for any website or app.

Just ask yourself: how often has this happened to you? You wanted to access your favorite e-commerce retailer or access a project management tool but couldnt remember your password. Resetting the password and managing the new one also didnt seem like a viable option, so you just did not log in. This shows how crucial easy authentication is for user retention for e-commerce and SaaS providers.

One of the goals of customer identity and access management (CIAM) is to streamline the user experience. However, it is not just about signing up users initially but also to keep users returning and engaged to fully realize their potential lifetime value (LTV). As customer acquisition costs (CAC) are continuously rising, its even more important to retain your existing customer base and provide them the best authentication experience. Passkeys are just the perfect tool to achieve this not only for new but also for existing users.

Kayak, the online travelling company and of the first big B2C brands that rolled out passkeys, serves as a brilliant example. They recently published first data which just undermines the potential and impact of passkeys for conversion optimization. As soon as iOS 16 was released, passkeys were introduced as their default option when creating a new account on Apple devices. Also, existing users were able to add passkeys to their accounts. Within just three weeks, thousands of users created passkeys. Astonishingly, almost 20% of existing users manually opted into passkeys. The overall feedback was absolutely positive (which is not often the case when new security features are rolled out). Consumers who could not create a passkey were provided with email magic links as passwordless fallback. It is expected that the share of non-passkey logins will decline over time until passkeys are the dominant login method.

Let's analyze the growth hacks that are enabled by passkeys.

User experience, effort and security are crucial aspects in authentication that have a major impact on sign-up and conversion rates. Taking care of all simultaneously is an important task for every digital- and privacy-first company.

Passwordless authentication in general has proved to be a huge lever for conversion optimization. This way, users can access the system without creating another password, increasing security while improving the user experience, and reducing login effort. Making use of biometric data for authentication, passkeys are the most user friendly and most secure passwordless authentication solution today. Due to the easiness of creating new accounts with passkeys, the number of successful login attempts in e-commerce shops providing them can be increased by up to 33%. More customers will create accounts and stop shopping as guest shoppers; this can further boost the general revenue as the average order value of registered users is 10% higher than the one of guest shoppers.

Most of the times, users do not actually want to reset their password they just want to get back in. A passwordless option perfectly ensures they never encounter a forgotten password again. You can increase user retention by reducing both customer attrition and cart abandonment: In one recent study, nearly 20% of customers who forgot their passwords abandoned their account rather than endure the password reset process. Further, a survey of 1,000 consumers found that one in four online shoppers were willing to abandon a cart of $100 or more if they had to reset their password to check out.

Offering a login option with passkeys, you can retain more than 75% of shoppers who would stop the purchase process after starting a password reset.

Resetting a password may seem like an insignificant task but the compound effect of thousands of resets can make a companys IT costs skyrocket. Larger businesses allocate nearly 50% of IT help desk costs to password reset and range from 2-30 minutes to fix. On average, it costs an enterprise $70 for a single password reset. Since users no longer need to remember a password for each application, simply enabling passkeys will cut down on password reset requests. Organizations can benefit significantly from this by reducing the cost of account lockouts and password.

Passkeys are the super tool that can enable some of the biggest growth hacks for any website or app. The best UX by offering biometric logins, synchronization within a cloud account and cross-platform support just speak for themselves. It also saves your customers from the hassle of managing passwords. Together, with high-end security that is resistant to phishing attacks they are not without reason the new standard for logins. Enabling a passwordless authentication via passkeys will increase the conversion rate and user retention as well as reduce IT costs.

This way, organizations will be able to increase their revenue significantly. VTEX in North America, for example, could increase their revenue by 28% when they introduced passwordless checkout.