What is progressive profiling and why is it important to my business?

Progressive profiling? Lead nurturing? Customer lead development? What is it and how does it apply to my business? Let's explore in an example scenario what progressive profiling is and why it's imperative you're constantly engaging with your customer and learning from them.

First, progressive profiling is just as much a feature in that it requires a certain level of technology and data architecture, as it is a strategy.

"I love filling out forms!" - said no one ever. In fact, long forms can be a deterrent in many cases to customer engagement. Who wants to fill out a long form just to get something simple in return? A single question maybe, but no more than that. How do you combat that? Ask all the questions you want, just do it smarter and more effectively.

Here's a scenario:

1. Let's assume you have a customers email address.
2. You send a customer an email with an extra special, one-of-a-kind offer. In order to get this offer, you direct the customer to a special landing page to download the coupon or get the offer.

Here's where the fun part comes in. Let's say your long term strategy is to build a profile for each of your customers that have their email address, name, twitter handle, city, state and what their favorite product or services are. You don't want to ask the user that many questions at once, nor do you want to ask them all those questions each time they visit your site or landing page to get a special offer.

Since you already know the customers email address, they got to the landing page from an email blast, we can pass along the users email address in a hidden field from the users experience so that the user is answering only 1 question. So the workflow looks something like this:

1. The user is directed to a branded landing page from an email broadcast with a special offer to download a coupon or get a special code.
2. The user's email address is passed to a form that asks them to tell you what their favorite product or service is. "Hey tell us your favorite thing on the menu, or event we do, or product we make and we'll give you a 10% off coupon for that product or service!"
3. The customer/user tells you the additional information from an easy pull-down menu and then you give them the coupon for that service or product.

You engaged with the user via email, drove them to a landing page and dropped a cookie on their computer that matches them with their profile with you. We then asked them a single simple question, learned more about them, appended that data to their profile and gave them a perk to further engage with your business.

Rinse and repeat. Next month you ask the customer another question to get another perk. Over time as you build your desired customer database you'll be able to do highly targeted marketing services to specific customers that like specific products, with a highly tailored promotion to drive engagement.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us and we'd be happy to give you a free advisory session to help you with a targeted marketing services strategy.