What is progressive profiling?
Progressive profiling is a form strategy designed to gradually build up a profile of your prospects each time they interact with your product or service.
Progressive profiling allows you to keep forms short and to the point, starting with the most basic information like name and email address, but gradually leading towards much more in depth questions that can help you better understand where your prospect is in the buying cycle.
As the prospect’s interaction with your product; service or content continues you’ll build brand trust, enabling you to ask for more information, tailored to the intelligence you’ve already gathered, building up an accurate profile of your prospects over time.
How does progressive profiling generate more leads?
At a basic level, reducing the number of fields required on a form can increase your form conversion rate by x%. This simple change can increase the number of leads you’re able to generate through your website. Multi-step forms lower the threshold for completion, making it feel less like a chore to complete a form.
Progressive profiling not only allows you to increase the number of leads you’re generating, but it improves the quality of the data you hold on that prospect, enabling smarter segmentation and as a result, an improved user experience which is likely to have a positive effect on your brand perception with your audience and increase the likelihood of converting a lead into a paying customer.
The top 5 benefits
- Reduce the number of forms you need to create – By using progressive profiling you’re able to ask the right questions regardless of which landing page the prospect is filling out their details on which reduces the need to create new forms for every single landing page. However, you should be careful to create separate forms for content where more specific questions are required.
- Streamline the prospect journey – Using tools and strategies like progressive profiling to streamline your prospect journey is a good idea. The user experience will be easier, they’ll feel more comfortable with your brand as you’re not requesting in appropriate information and they’re more likely to convert.
- Qualifying leads – By gaining additional information each time a prospect converts on a page, you can ask further qualification questions which will help identify relevant leads more quickly.
- Allow for more targeted lead nurturing – By increasing the depth of the profile you’re building for your prospects, you can use this information to target the prospect with more relevant follow up information based on their data as opposed to simply segmentation by the subject of the lead magnet.
- Speed up the buyer journey – With more information on a prospect, you’ll be able to target them with more relevant offers, products or services which will result in a shorter buyer journey.
How to use progressive profiling with the 4 biggest marketing automation platforms
All the major marketing automation platforms allow you to set up progressive profiling. For ease, we’ve identified the instructions to implement it on the four biggest marketing automation providers.
Progressive profiling is a powerful form strategy, which when used with the right marketing automation software can increase conversion and speed up your prospect’s buyer journey. Progressive profiling is just one of a number of form strategies you should be testing. For more ideas see our blog on Maximizing Web Conversion from Organic Traffic.
How much you could improve your web conversion by?
By analyzing your current web conversion rates and optimization practices, we can estimate the projected uplift in leads you can expect from working with GatedContent.com.