Progressive profiling is often thought of as a website form. However, it does so much more. It will not only improve your conversion rates for gated content, but it will also enhance your customer’s journey. Because it is an integral part of your content engagement strategy, it has a greater impact.
Progressive profiling improves sales by providing qualified leads, better content distribution, and personalized prospect interaction. It also accelerates customer buying decisions. This allows marketers to ask specific questions of prospects to help them make better sales decisions. This allows for more qualified leads, which ultimately improves the Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI).
What is Progressive Profiling in Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation can use progressive profiling at any stage of the buyer’s life cycle. All this is possible thanks to dynamic Web forms within marketing automation solutions. It asks for information in iterations. For returning visitors, the dynamic form can detect what information has been asked before asking the next level.
The following explains how progressive profiling works during the buyer’s journey.
- Awareness Stage. In exchange for filling out a form with basic information, such as his/her email address and name, a new visitor visits your website. You shouldn’t ask the visitor for their phone number at this stage. Let’s nurture this lead.
- Interest Stage – A visitor might return to your site and request another piece of content. To get more content, the lead might click a call-to-action (CTA), where he can request additional information, such as white papers.
- Consideration Stage – If the lead comes back to ask for more content or access, he is now in the ‘consideration phase’. You can also inquire about his/her company’s size and the number of employees.
- The Decision Stage. The decision Stage is when the prospect returns to request more information such as a product demo or a video demonstration.
You can now ask for additional information or hand it over to sales for follow-up. This lead, which has all the intelligence and information collected over time, is now ready for sales.
Progressive profiling has many benefits
Proactive profiling allows for equal value exchange between prospects and businesses. The prospect gets the information they want, while the company receives the data that will allow them to create more successful marketing campaigns.
- Qualifying leads. You can determine the stage of your prospect by collecting information. This will allow you to better plan the next steps. You can then only pass sales-ready leads on to your sales team.
- Learn more about your buyer personas. Progressive profiling is based on specific information about personas. This allows you to create targeted nurture campaigns. Personas are an integral part of your lead engagement strategy.
- This speeds up the buyer’s journey. You can feel more confident in your lead nurturing strategy if you have higher engagement during the first stages of the buyer’s journey. A strong nurture path can be mapped beyond initial engagement to accelerate leads’ journeys and reduce sales cycles.
- Improve conversion rates. Progression profiling has proven to increase conversion rates, not only at the top but also at the middle and bottom of the funnel.
- Improves customers’ experience. It can make a huge difference to your web experience design. People don’t like to read too much or answer the same questions repeatedly. They prefer to feel a sense of personal interaction when they return the favor and ask for more information.
Progressive profiling is a key component of improving your marketing automation tools.
