What is Progressive Profiling and How it Works?

We live in an age driven by information, where consumers expect you to provide value-filled personalized offers.

To generate such offers, you need a comprehensive understanding of various factors such as geographic, demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and past purchasing patterns of your clientele.

A collection of such data points helps build unique consumer personas that allow brainstorming effective selling strategies.

But the main problem is that consumers hesitate to share personal information on websites.

Progressive profiling can help in this regard. It is a systematic way of collecting critical information through smart forms that ask questions intended to guide prospective consumers across the sales funnel.

This article will detail what progressive profiling is, how it works and shed light on the various benefits you will receive after implementing it.

What is Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling is the method of collecting personal information about the client in a step-by-step manner. It helps the digital marketing team to streamline the lead nurturing process by gathering increasingly specific client data.

The best thing about progressive profiling is that the same question won't repeat twice. For example, if the lead has already provided their email address, name, and phone number, they won't be asked for it again. Instead, when the lead arrives on the landing page for the second time, they will be asked different questions like their company name, home address, and much more.

In this way, digital marketing teams obtain several data points about a lead without annoying or overwhelming them with long forms in the first interaction itself.

How Does Progressive Profiling Work

Progressive profiling is implemented using marketing automation tools that offer smart form fields. This smart form is linked with the consumer's cookie that helps provide information about their previous behavior.

Each consumer who lands on the website landing page is assigned a cookie. The cookie tracks all the consumer's activity on the landing page and monitors the questions they have already answered.

For example, if the consumer has already provided their name, an unanswered question will replace this field, say residential address, the next time they visit the landing page.

Different marketing automation tools use varying ways of setting up progressive profiling. But all of them have the following three things in common:

• Defining a list of questions that helps with lead generation.
• Adding them strategically to the progressive profiling queue
• Establishing a particular order in which those questions should appear on the consumer's screen.

The following example will explain this better. A company's marketing team prepares a list of questions they want to ask, such as:

• Email address
• First name
• Last name
• Company name
• Permanent address
• Job position

Then they add these questions to the marketing automation tool. After that, they decide what questions will be asked on the consumer's first visit and what can be left for the second one. Consequently, the marketing automation tool attaches cookies to each site visitor, ensuring a coherent flow of questions.

What Are the Benefits of Progressive Profiling

The three most significant benefits of progressive profiling are:

• Shorter forms that the visitor can fill within a few seconds.
• Smart forms ask only unanswered questions that save time and effort otherwise spent on creating multiple forms.
• Smart forms collect critical consumer information that reveals hidden insights.

There are other advantages of progressive profiling as well. The following points explain them in detail:

1. Qualifying leads

Progressive profiling allows marketers to collect critical information about their clientele and build unique consumer personas. It helps determine where a particular consumer is in the buying journey and decide the best course of action to move them towards the final purchasing stage.

2. Fine-tune buyer personas

Your marketing team will be able to craft effective marketing strategies that connect with the consumer. They will streamline the lead nurturing process based on the actual data points such as company size, job role, industry, location, etc., instead of making educated guesses.

3. Accelerates the buying journey

Lead profiling provides hidden insights about consumers that help to personalize marketing efforts and build trust. You will be able to craft messages that motivate consumers to move ahead in the sales funnel.

4. Increase conversion rate

By developing unique consumer personas, you will significantly increase your chance of finalizing the deal. But thorough signup forms can scare away the consumer. Also, your conversion rate will substantially increase with a decrease in the number of fields in the smart form.

5. Optimize sales time

The marketing team can significantly decrease sales time by asking more relevant questions to their consumers as they move forward in their buying journey. Progressive profiling allows sending qualified leads to the sales team that ultimately impacts the company's bottom line.

Create Consumer Profiles Using The LoginRadius' CIAM platform

LoginRadius' CIAM platform provides an automated way of collecting consumer-specific data gradually, without annoying or overwhelming them. It will help you build rich consumer profiles and earn the consumer's trust. The following list explains the features in detail:

1. Work seamlessly with registration services

The progressive profiling feature of LoginRadius is integrated with the registration service, allowing you to make detailed consumer profiles, regardless of whether your consumers log in using social login, standard login, or phone registration.

2. Create native profile-building workflows

You can select the most critical information you expect to receive from consumers across the buying journey. LoginRadius' progressive profiling allows you to design custom workflows that enable consumers to interact with your brand across various touchpoints. In short, you can set your own rules and win the consumer's trust conveniently.

3. Link social accounts

Build rich consumer personas by tracing the client's digital footprints. You can link multiple social profiles of a particular consumer to significantly increase your understanding and create better offers.

Conclusion

Progressive profiling allows companies to collect critical consumer information by asking a new question every time they visit the website. It helps create rich and unique consumer personas by building on the information that has already been collected in the past.

As we saw, there are numerous ways of collecting data, including questionnaires, social media profiles, and tracking the consumer's digital footprints. Progressive profiling is emerging as an effective way of cementing the trust gap between the company and its consumers and forming robust and evergreen client relationships.