Generating quality leads is essential for any business to grow in today’s ever-growing digital technology landscape. However, most companies fail to understand their customers or potential leads due to insufficient information or knowledge about the client. Today, we will learn about Progressive Profiling: Basics and Importance in 2024 and how this can be an effective solution in personalising user experience, reducing client retention, and customising a buyer’s journey to divert them toward your sales funnel.
When you visit a website that asks for your information, such as your name, username, password, address, date of birth, etc., it feels like a never-ending task of questions being bullied at you the first time you sign up for a website or application.
This can be the same if you are running a business and want to attract customers to have a deep analysis in building a people-centric enterprise. Every business requires user information, but asking numerous questions concurrently can be a foul strategy for an organisation that generates leads
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What is Progressive Profiling?
Progressive profiling is a strategy for incrementally gathering user data at different stages following the user’s completion of the onboarding process for your web-based application services. This method allows you to collect comprehensive information about potential leads over time, avoiding overwhelming them with too many questions at once.
Progressive profiling can be significant for those leads that have frequently visited your website or application to understand your services. Moreover, such profiling method helps you to collect additional data about these website visitors and convert them into customers by analyzing their behavior and information for better client approach.
Progressive profiling allows you to focus on your audiences and ask for their information, increasing your lead nurturing process by asking subsequent questions like specific key points which includes company name, goals, product-led target audience, etc.
Moreover, this process allows you to classify and build client insight by documenting data in a classified manner which helps you understand the type of product and services preferred by each user. Leveraging user data can be illegal if it is done without the user’s permission and progressive profiling assures that the data is generated only after the user’s consent.
Progressive Profiling: Basics and Importance in 2024
Progressive profiling works on the principle of collecting first-party data provided by your website visitor after they feel your services can impact their buying process. It can help you abide by the rules and regulations and protect you from overseeing them which includes authority compliance like the EU General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) Act.
The data provided to a company by a user can be authenticated and received from multiple sources like IdP providers, Auth0 actions, FullContact and Clearbit API calls, and other attributes managed within an application or a web-based service industry.
There are various requirements of an industry to integrate progressive user profiling in their business outsourcing practices where data is essential in each step of the buyer’s journey of the organisation’s sales funnel.
Below are some instances where progressive profiling works best as a solution to understand your user and deliver accurate responses based on the information received from the buyer.
1.User Acceptance to Information Gathering
Before a website visitor shows interest in your business application activities, it is important to understand whether they are willing to leverage information for random browsing. Users must provide zero-party data such as insights and basic information like name, birth year, etc so that the organisation can leverage the data for the future buyer’s journey of the potential lead.
Moreover, it can also include other information like ‘service preferences’ so that your organisation can act in real-time according to the information gathered. Zero-party data or first-party data is very crucial for companies when a user shows interest in their application.
However, they must not be bombarded with numerous forms and signup links to share personal information unless they prefer to view something premium or have a restricted-access gateway on your service outsourcing platform.
2. Form-Building Using Progressive Profiling
Traditional forms included a large number of questions and subfields for users to fill out before they could access the services of an organization. However, progressive profiling prefers subsequent and gradual information gathering from the user based on their activities on your website or application.
For example, when a website visitor crawls through different sections of your website for the first time, you can allow them to download a services catalog list in exchange for their name and email address. This process allows you to build information forms when the user visits your website or services-based application multiple times for more valuable content.
However, if a user is well-aware of your services and wants to understand the procedure of your services and its benefits, you can provide demo guides, illustrations, design activities and other information that allows you strategically convert the lead into a potential client.
In return for such information, you can prompt the user via your website or application to fill out various forms during different sales funnel stages, site visit purpose and preferred service choice.
Dynamic forms are significant for industries because they allow you to create different questions for information gathering at varying stages of a buyer’s journey. Once the lead shows interest in your services, you can ask for a credit card or payment information to offer them a final push to purchase a service or product.
3. Maintaining Potential Leads Using Progressive Profiling
Progressive profiling helps you stay updated with the latest information about any visitors to your website and application. This methodology offers your to stay ahead of the curve and understand your different stages of a potential client.
You can segment your customers and leads into those who need nurturing to arrive at your organisation’s sales funnel and those who are ready to make a purchase from your services. Leveraging user information to understand such differences can be ideal for a B2B enterprise to uplift business revenue and interact with the leads more effectively.
4. Understanding Your Lead
It is crucial for an organisation to understand their potential customer and their sentimental value so that you can craft the appropriate services as per the need. However, most businesses’ fail to understand their lead because of either insufficient user data or little access to their needs, desires, and pain points.
If you use progressive profiling in your business outsourcing strategies, you might be able to gather enough information at gradual intervals using the collected first-party data when a lead visits your website multiple times.
This process allows you to create numerous questions to ask them in various smart-logic and dynamic form fields based on the user’s behavior once they are ready to streamline the buyer’s journey process.
5. Enhanced Lead Assurance and Low Client Retention
The more compelling your approach to gathering lead information through progressive profiling, the greater the likelihood of securing sales, website traffic, and referrals from both existing customers and their networks of friends and family.
Furthermore, informing consumers consistently enhances lead generation. Establishing trust is crucial for any successful business or brand, regardless of the market it serves. Progressive user profiling assures consumers that their data is secure and that you are using only the information they have authorized for marketing or internal purposes.
Conclusion
Progressive profiling is strictly based on the logic process of “when” to ask “what” from the potential lead and different logical experimentations to identify the user’s pain points and work accordingly to craft services operations.
You can use progressive user profiling to understand your target audiences by asking frequent questions like name, location, age, income level, purpose of visit, use of data, hobbies and interests, etc. Thus, progressive profiling is your go-to option to manage various objectives of your organisation requirements to work diligently with a customer.
