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Almost every organization in the world has a website and uses forms on it. Those forms are used to sign up for newsletters, booking tickets or hotels, or download content offers. Normally, those forms provide you with useful data and concrete qualitative leads.
You probably already feel it coming: unfortunately, many organizations don’t get enough results from the forms they publish on their landing pages and website.
That’s because they:
In the first case, you disccourage your visitors by asking them too much information in your form. Most will likely drop out, and you will get very few completed forms.
In the second case, you are spending a lot of valuable time in creating new forms. More people may fill out your form, but your workload increases significantly.
You can solve those problems easily with progressive profiling. What exactly is progressive profiling? Does it help you generate better leads, and get more data from your target audience?
Progressive profiling is a marketing tactic that helps you collect relevant information in several steps about your target audience. That way, your contact person never has to answer a lot of questions at once, making it much more likely they will fill out the form. Every time they fill in different fields, adding more data to your database. For example, you ask for an email address when they download your white paper. The next time you ask for their date of birth, a job title or other things that are relevant to you.
Instead of building a complete profile of your target audience based on a single interaction or tons of different forms, use marketing automation and dynamic web forms. You use those in several steps, asking only for information you don’t already have.
An example of how progressive profiling could work:
1 – A potential client visits your website and downloads your whitepaper. Your visitor fills in his their email address, their first and last name in the form.
2 – You send a few emails after they downloaded the whitepaper, and they register for a workshop you organize. With a dynamic web form, you ask what company they work for, how many employees they have and what industry they are in.
3 – Soon after the workshop, your contact person requests a demo on your website. You could now ask them for mobile phone number, or the budget they want to spend.
Thanks to progressive profiling you get to know your target audience better. Collecting more data allows you to better target them. And the better you can target, the easier it becomes to increase your conversion rate.
Your contact person will appreciate not needing to fill in the same information over and over. Asking only a few fields at a time will keep your forms short and gives them a better customer experience than overly long forms.
Working with progressive profiling will help you collect data you can fine-tune your buyer personas with. This way you can optimally adjust your campaigns to your target audience.
By collecting data, you get relevant information about every lead you bring in. Based on that data, you can determine where someone is in the buyer’s journey. You can also determine what actions you need to do to help someone get to the next stage. Find out more about sales and marketing alignment in this blogpost.
I guess by now it should be crystal clear: progressive profiling means you get more data from your target audience. As a result, your sales team gets better leads and can send out more targeted offers at the right moment. We guarantee your sales will improve significantly.
Progressive profiling is a tactic that can bring many benefits to your organization. Tools like Marketo, Hubspot or Eloqua can do this for you. Of course, these are not cheap, but it’s absolutely worth the every cent you put into it. Don’t start without thinking through your goals and make sure to choose the right tool for the job. Do you want to know more about progressive profiling? Book a meeting with our team.
Download our free B2B lead generation guide and apply all the tips & tricks we share. Start generating more leads today!
