Most people think progressive profiling is just a website form thing- Yes it is in a way but it is way more than that. Besides improving your initial conversion rates for gated content it must compliment your customer's journey. It has a much wider impact because it is an integral part of your content engagement strategy. 

Progressive profiling helps in optimizing sales by providing more qualified leads, better content distribution, customized prospect interaction, and accelerates the customer buying decision. It allows marketers to ask detailed questions to prospects as they move closer to sales decisions. This provides more qualified leads to the salespeople, which, ultimately, improves the Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).

Source: Triggerbee

How Does Progressive Profiling work in Marketing Automation?

As far marketing automation is concerned; progressive profiling can work on every stage of the buyer’s journey. It’s all enabled by dynamic web forms in marketing automation solutions. It asks for information in iterations and for returning visitors, the dynamic web form can detect which information has already been asked and ask the next level of information from him. 

Check out the following on how the progressive profiling process works throughout the buyer’s journey:

1. Awareness Stage. A new visitor comes to your website and downloads any piece of content, in exchange for a filling a web form having fields of basic information including his/her name and email address. At this stage, you shouldn’t ask for the phone number, this lead is at the top of the funnel and let’s nurture it.  
2. Interest Stage –  The visitor may return back and ask to download another piece of content from your website. The lead may click a call to action (CTA) to get more content i.e., some white paper, here you can ask for next-level information including his job role and job title.
3. Consideration Stage – If the lead again comes back and asks for another content or access to more information that means he is in the ‘consideration stage’ now. Here you can ask about further details such as his company name, size, and the number of employees in his/her team.
4. Decision Stage. The moment this prospect returns and requesting more advanced information, such as a product video demo, that means he has reached to decision stage. 

At this stage, you can ask for more information and/or hand it off to sales for active followup. Having all the information and intelligence collected over time this lead is now sales-ready.

Benefits of Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling provides equal value exchange in the relationship between businesses and their prospects. One hand where the prospects get the desired information, on the other hand, the companies get the relevant data that allows them to create more effective marketing campaigns. Here is a list of some direct and prominent benefits that you can; as a marketer gets from progressive profiling.

• Qualifying leads. By collecting information from the prospect, you can better decide at what stage your prospect is in and can better decide the next course of action to move him or her. This way you can pass only sales-ready leads to your sales team. 

• Brush up on your buyer personas. Progressive profiling is built around specific information about personas that allows you to create effective nurture campaigns. Personas become an important part of your lead engagement strategy.

• Speeds up the buyer’s journey. Having higher engagement at the initial stages of the journey and more accurate information you can be more confident about your lead nurture strategy. Plotting a strong nurture path beyond initial engagement accelerates the leads’ journeys leading to shorter sales cycles.

• Increase conversion rates. It has been proved time and again that progressive profiling leads to higher conversion rates not just at the top of the funnel but also at the Middle and the bottom of the funnel.

• Improves customers’ experience. Designing your web experiences strategically can do wonders. People hate to provide large amounts of information in one go and/or answer the same question again and again. Rather they feel personal interaction when you recognize them on their return visit and ask for further information.

If you are looking to improve your marketing automation suite; you can’t by-pass the thing called progressive profiling. Allows us to partner with you in these efforts, write an email to us at [email protected]