If you’re like me, you’ve got some serious abandonment issues. In other words you want get the most from your online lead generation and lead nurturing tactics. You don’t want to scare prospects away with long, complicated forms. But you need to gather a significant amount of data in order to help understand the unique business problems of prospects and customers. I feel your pain. Let’s talk a little about progressive profiling.
In conjunction with lead scoring, progressive profiling automates lead qualification and provides an effective way to identify milestones in the prospect’s buying (or investment) process and increase marketing ROI. Face it, prospects are very busy people. They don’t have a whole lot of time when it comes to engaging with content and offers. They will quickly abandon a tedious form, considering it a drain on their valuable time. Additionally, people have become wary about how much personal information they give out and who they give it to. Certainly, they can smell a traditional marketing ploy a mile away. This is where progressive profiling can help increase prospect engagement.
Progressive profiling, as part of a marketing automation application, employs intelligent landing page forms that collect small chunks of valuable data over time. The visitor is presented with a brief form requesting minimal information. Initially, basic information fields are presented such as name, email, phone number, company and a couple strategic marketing questions (such as “are you looking to utilize a brokerage service in the next six months?”). Once the form is submitted, the visitor goes from being an “anonymous visitor” to a “known visitor.” A web cookie is placed on the lead’s hard drive that enables the marketing automation platform to recognize them when they return to your site. Then the form can be pre-populated with their name and email address. This way, visitors won’t have to re-enter information they have already provided.
Upon each subsequent visit to a landing page, you present the prospect with a couple of new questions, slowly building a profile while maintaining a friendly, low-pressure environment. Through a strategic succession of marketing campaigns, marketing can collect enough data to engage each lead more intelligently. From there, your company can nurture the prospect with relevant content that helps them along in their buying (or investment) process. Marketing can also provide sales with better insight and intelligence on a given prospect’s business needs and online behavior, as well as present the hottest leads in real time.
Personal information is a form of currency. People are more and more cautious about how much of that currency they give out. Progressive profiling helps to expedite that process, building an atmosphere of trust because you’re not asking for too much, too soon.
There’s more to say on progressive profiling, so let’s continue in our next post in this series.
