Driving Customer Loyalty with Progressive Profiling

Marketers can get high-volume, high-quality data from users through progressive Profiling instead of pushing them away with forms and surveys. With Progressive Profiling, businesses can gather just the right information from their users at just the right moment.

When it comes to gathering customer data, marketers often have a difficult time navigating the process. People are wary about disclosing personal information, especially ongoing consumer privacy concerns, and data protection rules. Brands must collect first-party data to create efficient buyer profiles and marketing campaigns. Businesses should employ progressive Profiling to build customer interactions while collecting the user insights they seek.

Here are a few progressive Profiling best practices that companies can adopt:

Creating Customer Personas and Segments

Before creating sign-up forms or implementing first-party cookies, marketers should define fundamental customer segments and buyer personas. As a result, the data they collect helps them gain deeper insights into each predetermined category. Brands can then use their data to deliver personalized messages and content relevant to their interests over time. They can also utilize this information to discover and target new consumer segments. Progressive Profiling could introduce them to new audiences and leads they weren’t aware of before.

Also Read: Progressive Profiling: The Secret to Enhanced Customer Relationships

Outlining the Consumer Buying Journey

Understanding and enhancing a customer’s potential user experience from start to end is a big part of progressive Profiling. Marketers must first describe the steps they want people to follow through the stages of awareness, purchase, advocacy, and loyalty and then figure out what information they’ll need to help them progress to the next stage.

Businesses should collect data on what customers search for in a brand, then showcase their best traits to develop trust and transparency, for example, while encouraging leads to go from the awareness stage to the purchase stage.

They can decide how to collect the data, such as through in-store promotion, a survey landing page, or social media poll, once they’ve identified the kind of data they require. Companies should consider all scenarios and customer touchpoints to develop the best possible user experience for everyone, consider fine-tuning their social media material, investigating industry trends, and enhancing their retail displays, among other ideas. It might also mean incorporating omnichannel marketing methods such as SMS and push notifications into their campaigns to make data collection operations flow more smoothly.

Making Usability and Relevance the Top Priorities

The key risks of progressive Profiling include obtaining information at the incorrect moment, obtaining more information than is required, and obtaining information through convoluted techniques. Marketers must evaluate how people interact with their brand at each stage of the data collection process.

For instance, if they find customers connecting with them primarily on social media, they should try publishing polls and surveys to gather first-party data about their purchase habits in a frictionless manner. If several customers aren’t finishing their account registrations, they should figure out which form fields are causing them to lose interest or become confused. Instead of aiming to collect as much data as possible quickly, marketers should use progressive Profiling to prioritize the user’s experience.

Building a Collated and Unified Customer View

The data collected from progressive Profiling is useful since it is tidy, first-party data. However, this is not the only first-party data that businesses gather. Progressive profiling data must intend to become a part of a vast, unified customer profile that encompasses browsing data, purchase history information, cross-channel interactions, feedback, and subscription data.

A robust customer engagement platform allows businesses to map all the data to a single source of truth, making it easier for marketers to offer personalized customer experiences. Integrating all the data gathered into a single and unified customer profile makes marketing efforts more effective in driving customer loyalty.

Ensure Adequate Momentum in Questions

It is a common instinct of marketers to ask for full customer information right away. Therefore, asking too many questions can fend off the customers towards the competitors. Businesses must initially collect required information with a decent number of fields like name and general contact information, limiting the forms to 1-3. A single question is enough if it is contextually relevant.

Users get underwhelmed due to the constant friction of questions every time they land on a different page on the website. On the contrary, they will barely notice if questions are asked only once. Therefore, businesses must spread out the question evenly over various engagements.

Also Read: Top Ways Marketers Can Maximize Customer Engagements in 2023

Trust and Respect the Relationship Foundation and Common Interests

Marketers must carefully build trust and respect by procuring crucial insights slowly and steadily. They must-

• Ask only crucial questions- Users are careful about sharing their personal information. Therefore, marketers must ensure that the questions asked to the customers are essential and need to explain why these insights are required. At the same time, before including supplementary fields in the form, marketers must consider how they would utilize this data in the future.
• Apply adequate logic behind the questions- Businesses must initiate communication with more basic and straightforward questions. Once the leads’ buyer journey and sales funnel stage is determined, businesses can make the required changes. It is important to offer users the right value in exchange for their personal data.
• Integrate progressive profiling techniques into email strategy- Greeting new users with a solid onboarding email series is a great way to encourage them to complete the form. Businesses must actively explain to subscribers the benefits they would acquire if they shared their details with the company.
• Store all the data in a CRM system- Businesses must ensure that data records are collated in a CRM system. This allows them to build a card for each lead, store all the information about the users at a single location, assess the interaction history, and communicate with leads via channels when required. A robust CRM allows marketers to access valuable data at any time.