5 Steps to Perfect Progressive Profiling

Formfilling is known to be a very powerful and tactical marketing tool as they enable a company to learn more about their leads and prospects, ultimately being able to optimise their customer journey with you.

However, the method that is adopted for form fills is what shapes its true effectiveness. You can’t require your website visitors to fill out a 50-question-long form to grab all your desired details from them. You need to find a good balance to collect your required information gradually and seamlessly from these visitors through a GDPR-friendly strategy where the visitors also rest assured and satisfied with your process.

What is Progressive Profiling?

Well, progressive profiling is the answer to all your questions.

You wanna get to know your leads better?

You also don’t wanna give them grief filling out tedious forms?

This powerful lead nurturing strategy allows you to naturally and gradually construct a portfolio of your leads including their demographics, whilst also building an insight on their buying and browsing behaviour on your website. You can then utilise this acquired information by tailoring your content towards the interests of that particular lead. But to succeed, being tactical about this is crucial because you don’t want to end up scaring those leads away.

Why Adopt Progressive Profiling?

The last thing a company could hope for is for visitors to come onto their website, only to leave immediately after feeling frustrated at the bulk of questions that lay before them. But we can’t have them leaving, especially without sharing at least their email address.

Therefore, the purpose to progressive profile remains simple – to acquire information from leads using such methodology where excessive friction is not posed upon them.

Progressive profile form fills are aimed to be kept short and sweet, to diffuse an authentic aroma.

It’s quite a win-win situation. Your website visitors remain satisfied with the service they are receiving, and you receive your desired details too, enabling marketers like yourself to personalise the customer journey for these visitors through website and email by presenting relevant content to them based on their customer profile that you have gathered.

How do I Progressive Profile?

We must be mindful about the information we request from our website visitors. Try to keep it as minimal as you can, only asking for what’s really needed, rather than only asking for the sake of asking. Ask for information that you truly require to uplift your marketing for that visitor. This enhances the trust value amongst you, and your website visitors.

The easiest and most-effective strategy for adopting progressive profiling is by having relatively short forms in several different places on your website, asking for different yet relevant and appropriate information at the right time.

As you begin to naturally collect that information with the consent of your website visitors, you can expand their portfolio on your CRM, then adding them into automated email workflows that may be of interest to them according to their likes and behaviour, ultimately customising their experience.

Where do I use Progressive Profiling?

It is crucial that you stick to authentic purposes of such information requests, and respect the Data Protection Act 2018, ensuring to abide by all rules and regulations.

Offer an exclusive discount code that will be revealed upon email registration where you can request for the visitors’ name and email address if they want to receive regular offers and promotions.

On the next form, information can be collected when a customer is viewing a particular item that appears to be out of stock. They can opt in to be notified via email or SMS when the product is back in stock. Some people prefer to be contacted via SMS over emails, therefore you may include an SMS option where you would require a phone number.

For delivery purposes you would require a home address of the customer, under which you can have a tick box where they either opt in or out of receiving newsletters via post.

As the cherry on top, you can ask your website visitors to stay hooked with your content by following your social media channels such as TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and anything else that you may have. By asking your website visitors to connect with your company on these social media platforms will share their profiles with you, allowing you to then present tailored content onto their social media pages as they scroll through.

Perfecting Progressive Profiling

Optimising your form filling strategy will enhance your customer journeys and experiences for your website visitors, and in return, optimise your marketing process with a seamless yet powerful approach.

Asking questions at the right time gives the visitor a smooth experience every time that they visit your website as they will not feel imposed to share information, but rather share it with their own free will. The square root of this tactic is its timing.

It’s all about timing. Get your timing right, and you hit the jackpot.