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What Is Progressive Profiling and Why Is It Important?

Mar 30th, 2021 | Vijay Gurnani

Better quality leads are what organizations look for to increase their customer base, isn’t it? Marketers have been using countless ways to gather customer information to qualify the leads they generate.

One of the ways which are being commonly used by marketing professionals to capture the information of their customers is Progressive Profiling. It is a useful way to tactically construct your form to gather information about the visitor on your website.



What Is Progressive Profiling?

Progressive profiling is a technique of sequentially gathering the information of the visitors visiting your website. This technique lightens the entire process of gathering visitor data by triggering questions progressively. With the help of dynamic web forms, the right information can be captured at the right time to enhance the user experience. The process allows you to get the data you need and keep your visitor engaged over time



Why Is Progressive Profiling Important?

Visitors don’t like to waste their time on marketing campaigns or filling out long forms. To identify whether a visitor is a qualified prospect, you require substantial information from the visitor that visits your website. This helps you come up with better marketing campaigns and share relevant product or service information to the right audience. The most effective way to gather the information is to ask, but sometimes asking too many questions can overwhelm your visitor. To overcome this, Progressive Profiling can help to generate leads while gathering smaller pieces of information along the way to increase the conversion rate.

Here is a close look at the top 4 benefits of Progressive Profiling:

  • Short forms increase the conversions

    Using a short form increases the form’s conversion rate by more than 100%! Visitors tend to provide information when the forms are kept short. Short forms look less demanding and it enables you to slowly build trust with your visitors. Building shorter forms is a way of demonstrating progressive profiling. It is recommended to keep the number of fields to 5 or less at one time.

  • Reduces the number of forms

    A great advantage of progressive profiling is that you don’t need to create a new form for every different lead generation process, since you only need to collect the name and contact information of a visitor to qualify a lead. Hence, multiple teams can use the same progressive profiling form. This will help you to segment the leads based on the visitor’s data rather than repetitively asking them to fill the forms with the same questions.

  • It provides better User Experience

    Consumers tend to spend more when their experience is personalized. You can personalize the interaction with your visitor and avoid asking repetitive questions by using the information you already have. With progressive profiling, you can hide the questions that the visitor has answered already and ask them the questions that are useful to the next step in the sales process.

  • Improve Your Marketing Campaigns

    You can personalize your marketing campaigns and gain the trust of your visitors to boost your sales. With progressive profiling, you can get more detailed data of your visitors and create personalized marketing messages that will enhance each buyer’s journey. As you get detailed data of your visitor, it helps you learn the persona of your buyer with real data and not just with some educated guesses.



    How does Progressive Profiling work?

    Marketing automation tools play a vital role in enhancing the buyer’s journey. Progressive profiling allows you to set up forms at any stage of the journey when a visitor comes to your website. A progressive field will only be displayed when the data is unknown for that field. In other words, if you already have the information from a visitor for a specific field, then that field will be replaced with the one that has not been filled yet.

    For example, when a visitor first visits your website, they fill in their name and email address. Then they start to get their first couple of newsletters and feel comfortable with your brand. Moving ahead in the journey they’ll be asked to answer different required questions to consume further content. This works as a barter system where the visitors receive their resources and in return, you get more information about them.

    Now with each visit the visitor makes to your website, you are collecting new information rather than collecting the same information time and time again. Step by step, you will be collecting additional information of that visitor which will ultimately lead to complete buyer data.



    Progressive Profiling Example

    Progressive profiling is made possible through the functionality of forms within several marketing automation tools. The visitor is required to complete a few form fields on their first visit to a landing page. On their next visit, with the help of cookie tracking, you could replace any of the form fields you’ve collected from the visitor with new form fields. The below image displays a progressive profiling framework example.


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    Step A, Form 1:

    On a user’s very first visit, you just ask for an email address. There are a couple of marketing tools that can help you derive their name from the email address if you have their work email.

    Step A, Form 2:

    On the second visit, you ask for fundamental information to know a bit more about the visitor. This information is more than enough for organizations to send the user a compelling introduction email.

    Step B, Form 1:

    On the next visit and the completion of the second form, you can request additional information for qualifying the lead. The visitor just needs to complete these new fields as the previous data is already stored in your marketing automation platform.

    Step C, Form 1:

    With progressive profiling forms, you don’t need to keep on asking for the same information. Instead, you can deliver a much better experience and more value with each form submission.

    Progressive profiling is a great tool to qualify your leads and boost your conversion rate. This helps you to use specific questions that are truly important and saves your visitor’s time. Always think of Progressive Profiling to better your user experience. Contact us to get started with your progressive profiling today!