Using Social signup only for email verification

Question

On our PAAS platform, users have to verify their email address through the email we send to them. We have noticed that we miss many leads as user enter their email address on our site but never click the verification link on their email. The obvious solution would be to use social login but this will give a very casual look to our app which is not good for apps which store sensitive user data.

The intermediate approach would be that at the time of signup we allow user to verify email using the social feature but user has to set the password on our app to actually start using it.

From a UX perspective, does this intermediate approach seem fine? Are there any other providers using this approach?

Answer 1

I think you can make use of Google Identity Toolkit. It enables app and website makers to easily support multiple authentication options for their end user. You can exclude social logins. It will enable a user to sign up on your site in 1-click by choosing one of the email addresses. In this way, you can skip the email verification part.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Another option would to be alter your authorization/boarding process and add the verification step to it yourself without using a third party library.

1. Provide e-mail address and other data
2. Send an authorization token/pin code to the provided e-mail address.
3. Let the user enter the token/pin code to proceed.
4. Redirect the user to the profile page or whatever page your would like to redirect to.

The above can be achieved with little code and can be extended to whatever level is suitable depending on your needs.