In an increasingly digital and customer-centric world, your ability to collect and use customer data to shape and personalize customer interactions is becoming more important than ever.

Personalization, when done right, can deliver incredible value for both your business and your customers. 

In fact, over 74% of your customers expect a personalized online experience.

Yet, most businesses are still only scraping the tip of the iceberg when it comes to delivering these experiences. There are a lot of challenges standing in the way for smaller companies, and large companies are still trying to figure out how to do personalization effectively at scale. 

However, there are 3 main challenges that companies of all sizes will face at the beginning of their journey to better customer experiences: 

1. Data and technology

Challenge: Customer data is siloed and spread across multiple tools – giving you a fragmented view of your customer

Solution 1: Implement a customer data platform
Solution 2: Collect first-party data with a data activation platform.

According to a survey conducted by Evergage, 55% of marketers don’t feel they have enough customer data to implement effective personalization. 

This is easily solved. How? By collecting first-party data. 

First-party data is collected directly from your customers: 

• Contact information
• browsing behavior
• website actions (clicks, downloads, purchases)
• channel-specific engagement
• purchase history
• survey information
• etc

The best part? You own it to 100% and can use it however you like (assuming you have properly collected marketing consent from each customer). 

When this data is combined it becomes a customer profile, which you can then use to deliver personalized, individual messages.

The only problem?

In most organizations, customer data is fragmented and spread out across different tools. 

Your CRM contains a whole bunch of contact information, your email marketing service contains data about your subscribers, and your analytics software stores anonymous browsing data.  

However, unless these tools are connected in a way that lets you use the data from all of these sources, it’s impossible for you to even separate a returning customer from a new visitor on your website.

This type of insight is fundamental to your personalization strategy.

Traditionally, companies have outsourced much of their data collection to an agency or IT-department. And as a result, that data is trapped and left unavailable to the team that needs it the most: the marketing team.

This data needs to be accessible to everyone who plays a part in building the personalization strategy. And as such, it’s important that you have the right technology in place. 

So start by finding software that collects first-party data, and creates customer profiles. 

This allows you to activate your data, meaning you can use it to target individual customers with offers on your website, or with ads. 

Data-activation software is installed on your website and collects both contact information and behavioral data about your customers and prospects. It then puts these two data sources together to create unique customer profiles containing interests, browsing behavior, and important milestones (eg. Downloaded Whitepaper or Added Product to Cart). 

With this data available, you can create personalized campaigns that are tailored to individuals with certain online behavior.

Data activation software can also help you break free from marketing to segments and lists, and instead start delivering personalized content and promotions to individual users. 

2. Balancing privacy and personalization

Challenge: Appearing trustworthy while at the same time personalizing the experience

Solution: Take a privacy-first mindset into your marketing strategy

The nature of data privacy has become a concern for both businesses and consumers. 

Companies that use frequent or advanced personalization methods are more likely to trigger privacy concerns among their customer base – it’s in these situations that proactive, and sometimes manual, privacy management plays an important part.

When building your personalization strategy, you should start by identifying situations where it feels appropriate to use personalization and think about the situational impact.

For example, a recommendation module showing “People who bought this also bought these” might not need an explanation about how the data was collected. However, greeting website visitors with their first name on your homepage can feel really creepy  – unless you explicitly state that the section or banner is specifically personalized for them.

You need to make it clear for your customers that you take data privacy seriously, and build trust by explaining how their data is used and processed.

3. Invisibility 

Challenge: Delivering personalized experiences without being too obvious and intrusive

Solution: Carefully select opportunities

To avoid creeping out your customers, you need to make sure that your personalization is more or less invisible and seamless across channels.

For example, having a homepage section only for returning visitors, showing any items they left in the shopping cart from a previous visit, adds value because you’re highlighting and “remembering” their previous actions for them.

Clothing giant Zalando is a more concrete example of a company who is using personalization effectively. When you log into their app, you can customize the items shown on the front page by selecting a number of influencers that wears the style of clothes you like. 

The more influencers you choose, the more your front page is filled with items you probably would buy. 

This approach is effective because you, their customer, have complete control. You can choose to unfollow anyone you have followed, and as a result removing your personalized feed.

Effective personalization is not intrusive or obvious, it’s “just there” when you need it.

Summary

The hardest part of personalization is often just getting started. In our experience, most companies already have more than enough data and people to get value from day 1 – even if the first step is something as small as not showing a newsletter popup to website visitors who are already in your email database. 

Start by determining which use cases to focus on and find a technology provider that can help you reach your initial goals quickly, and iterate on your personalization strategy as you become more advanced.

Personalization is the heartbeat of modern digital marketing. By having the right data at hand and the right technology in place to use the data you collect, the possibilities are endless.

But, don’t do everything at once or you’ll most likely become overwhelmed with all your options. 

If you’ve looked into tools that you can use to arm your sales teams for success, there is a good chance that you have heard about intent data. It’s a hot topic in data-driven marketing and for good reason — it’s an extremely powerful tool for both sales and marketing teams.

Put simply, intent data is data collected on a prospect’s content consumption and behavior that provides insight into their interests.

However, despite its recent popularity and usefulness in sales processes, intent data is only used by 25% of B2B companies today, although 35% of companies state that they are planning to begin using intent data within the next 12 months.

Even if you haven’t pursued capturing and using intent data, you are already collecting it. First-party intent data from your website is more commonly known as engagement data, and any business with a basic Google Analytics setup is already collecting it at its most basic level. Most of the time that data is anonymous, meaning you don’t have data about who the individual visitors are until they fill out a form and can only identify individual users by IP address.

However, that just scratches the tip of the iceberg for what is possible with intent data and how it can be integrated into your sales processes.

What Is Intent Data?

So, what is intent data? To accurately speak about how intent data can be used, we have to know what kind of intent data we are talking about and there are multiple classifications based on where the data came from and how it was collected.

Intent data is behavioral data that is collected about a single individual’s activities. Intent data includes information about topics and context to provide a clearer picture of what individual leads are interested in.

The different classifications for intent data are:

• Anonymous 1st Party Intent Data. These are people who visit your website and are typically only identifiable by their IP address. That IP address is then mapped to a company name if possible. Companies may use other solutions to help turn anonymous intent data into known intent data.
• Known 1st Party Intent Data. People that visit your website and are known by name. Maybe they filled out a form or provided their contact information in another way. Once they have provided their information, you can then track their actions on your website and map that information to their company.
• Anonymous 3rd Party Intent Data. People that have visited another website that you do not own. There must be an indication that the data is relevant to your own products for it to be useful. Only contains IP information. Data typically acquired through direct partnerships or vendors.
• Known 3rd Party Intent Data. People that have visited other websites and have also provided their information through a contact form. The website owner knows who they are, and you can acquire their data through a number of vendors.

At Triggerbee, our solution helps companies to collect and utilize their anonymous and known 1st party intent data from visitors to their own website. Our solution makes it easy to track the actions that your visitors take on your website.

How Can Sales Reps Use Intent Data?

Intent data is an excellent tool for aligning sales and marketing teams. With more information about your key accounts at their fingertips, your sales reps can more aptly speak to the needs and concerns of the hot leads that are already visiting your website. Marketers can connect intent data to the accounts that they are already building relationships with for improved personalization, and sales teams are able to integrate what they learn directly into the sales process.

Let’s take a look at some examples of how sales reps can integrate intent data into their sales processes to improve conversion rates and speed up sales cycles.

Map Discussions to a Customer’s Actions

Intent data tells you a lot about what a customer is thinking. The content that they engage with tells you a lot about what means the most to them and their company. It helps sales reps identify which product features will be the most important to cover, and which points the most important to drive home during the sales process. Salespeople can use the actions that a customer takes on your website to outline future discussions and follow-ups with prospects.

Deliver Personalized Content Based on Actions

Content personalization is becoming increasingly important during the sales process. Prospects want to know that you fully understand their business and concerns when buying into an expensive product and putting their reputation on the line. 79% of consumers say that they are only likely to engage with an offer that has been personalized to reflect previous interactions with the brand. Seeing the content that they engage with gives you the opportunity to custom tailor future content that you send. Intent data gives you an inside look into their biggest concerns. To not utilize that data would hamstring your sales reps.

Accurate Led Scoring Leads to Better Prioritization

Intent data is extremely useful in the lead scoring process. In fact, the most effective sales reps and marketers give a lot of credit to lead scoring. 68% of “highly effective” marketers pointed to lead scoring as their top revenue contributor in a 2013 study.

To accurately score leads, you have to have accurate information. Triggerbee’s intent data simply gives you more information to work with and increases the accuracy of your lead scoring. Then, your sales reps can better prioritize the leads that they interact with, focusing on the accounts that are most likely to convert. This ensures that your sales reps waste less time talking to prospects that ultimately don’t pan out and provide a better and faster experience to leads with high scores.

Engage New Leads Quickly and Effectively

Being quick to engage with prospects is absolutely critical to the sales process.  Research shows that 35%-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Intent data gives you that chance. Using intent data to identify new accounts and prospects that are actively searching for a solution like your product allows your sales reps to be quick to open a dialog with them before your competitors are able to do the same.

Further, you’ll have more information about what individual prospects are looking for based on the intent data that you have available on them. If you want your sales reps to be quick to reach out, intent data will not only help them to do so but will more them more effective while doing it.

New Data for Existing Accounts

Intent data isn’t just useful for engaging with new accounts, it’s also incredibly valuable for informing your interactions with current accounts as well. Keeping a close eye on what your prospects are engaging with throughout the sales process will help you to tailor conversations toward their biggest concerns and position your product as a true solution to their needs. Intent data allows you to flesh out existing accounts and provide the big picture to your sales reps.

Engage with Complete Buying Teams

In B2B sales, buying teams are huge. 61% of buying teams include five or more people. You need to make sure that you are able to speak to the concerns of each member of a buying team in order to close the deal. This often means competing viewpoints and conflicting opinions. Intent data allows you to see which pieces of content each individual stakeholder interacts with and use that data to inform your interactions with them as a group and ask individuals.

Intent Data is a Valuable Tool

Intent data is an extremely valuable tool for any sales team. The more insight that you can arm your reps with, the more effective they will be. All companies are already in a position to collect and utilize intent data on their websites, most simply don’t have the tools that would allow them to do so. Triggerbee makes it easy for companies to start collecting anonymous and known 1st party intent data and integrate that data into their sales and marketing processes.

If you’ve looked into tools that you can use to arm your sales teams for success, there is a good chance that you have heard about intent data. It’s been a hot topic in the digital marketing industry recently and for good reason — it’s an extremely powerful tool for both sales and marketing teams.

Automated sales — it’s the dream, right? Where all your sales processes are put on auto-pilot and you can put all of your focus on your product. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite possible — yet. No sales cycle can be completely automated, but a natural place for companies to start is in the automation of individual sales processes.

At Triggerbee, our system plays a key role in the sales automation operations of our customers. The data, customization options, and reliability of our system helps businesses automate key steps in their sales process and shrink the workloads of their sales reps.

Still, automating sales isn’t something that is going to happen overnight. It takes time to ensure that you have the right tools, processes, and strategies in place to make automation an effective alternative to more conventional by-hand strategies. But once you do have those in place, the sky’s the limit.

The Right Tools and Strategies

It can’t be understated how important having the right tools, processes, and strategies in place is when you begin your journey into sales automation. Without a clear idea of where you are heading, it’s too easy to get lost on the way. You need clear goals. What will you be automating? What tools will you be using to accomplish that automation? How will this change processes for your current sales team? These are important questions.

Start by determining which sales processes you would like to automate. Where do your sales reps take the most time? What types of automation would help you the most? Work closely with your sales reps to identify key processes that are both able to be handled by publicly available automation tools and can realistically be installed into your current sales processes.

Every company has different processes, and no one tool can completely automate everything that your sales teams do. Instead, focus on automating singular processes and combine those to work closer toward your larger automation goals.

Automated Prospecting and Lead Generation

One area where most companies would like to inject some automation into is in the prospecting and lead generation department. Sales reps and marketing teams spend a lot of time and energy on generating new leads and identifying targets. In fact, the average salesperson spends 15% of their time engaging with existing customers. Luckily, it also happens to be one of the sales processes that are ripe for automation.

There are many types of automation that you can use to improve the prospecting process. Companies like Close.io offer several features to improve automation including cold calling automation, SMS, emailing, and in-depth reporting to help you measure your effectiveness.

Here at Triggerbee, we make prospecting and lead generation automation simple. Every single day you have people that come to your website and leave, never to be heard from again. They might even be interested in your product but just don’t have the time to seek out a customer service rep and get their questions answered.

Triggerbee allows you setup custom automations based on “If this then that” logic, similar to segmentation options in popular email marketing software like MailChimp or Sendgrid.

Because Triggerbee is able to automatically identify company names of website visitors and then tracks their activity and engagement, you can create warm lead lists of prospects that have expressed interest in your product through their on-site actions. Our system tracks who visits your website, where they come from, and what they do when they are there.

You can then have these lists automatically delivered to your sales reps every one, seven, or fourteen days. This ensures that your sales reps have a constant supply of fresh leads that they can begin building relationships with.

In another example, Triggerbee will send a notification to a salesperson when the prospect visits the website following the delivery of a proposal. If the prospect is currently in Pipedrive (a CRM solution, which we’ll touch on in a second) Triggerbee can also add a note that shows what that prospect did during their visit to your website.

Intent Data and Lead Scoring

Intent data is data that indicates the level of interest from a particular prospect or account and is typically used in the lead scoring process. Internal intent data refers to data detailing the actions your customers take on your website.

By identifying parties that are further along in the buying cycle or more interested in your solution, your sales reps can close more deals quickly. 79% of all leads are never converted into sales, and intent data can help any company to hone in on interested parties and improve that number.  

In many companies lead scoring is done by hand. Sales reps (or marketers, before marketing the lead as sales qualified) have to analyze interactions that they have tracked and actions the lead has taken to gauge their interest. It’s often a very time-consuming process.

Luckily, Triggerbee tracks detailed intent data by analyzing the actions that your visitors take on your website, giving your team all of the information that they need to accurately score leads. If the visitor is identified, their email is synced into the system, which enables your sales reps to score the lead and stay in continuous contact with them through email as they traverse the buyer’s journey.

CRM Usage and Automation

A customer relationship management tool is a must-have solution for modern sales teams and one that plays a critical role in sales automation. CRM adoption increases sales by up to 29%. Today, the customer experience and a brand’s relationship with their customers is more important than ever before. In a recent survey by SalesForce, they found that 51% of sales leaders are placing their focus on improving customer retention through building deeper relationships.

To automate sales, you have to have a central location where you store information about your target accounts. Your automation tools then must interact with your CRM solution to add, edit, and update it with relevant data. Our favorite solution is Pipedrive, but there are many CRM software suites out there.

Triggerbee connects directly to your CRM solution and updates information based on the data that is collected when people visit your website. While we are expanding our CRM integrations, our integration with Pipedrive is currently the deepest. Our system will create new deals in Pipedrive when a website visitor performs a specific action.

One example might be when a website visitor downloads a resource or visits a specific page on your website (even when the visitor is still anonymous). If our system can identify the visitor from a previous interaction like a form submission, it will. Then, it will use that information to create the contact card in Pipedrive and keep your CRM up to date.

Automating Sales Relies on Data

Your ability to automate sales comes down to your ability to collect and use vital data. Automating sales requires that you have the right tools and strategies in place to make effective use of that data. Start by determining specific sales processes that you would like to automate and build from there. By taking specific tasks off of your rep’s plates (or simplifying them), you free up their time to focus on more important tasks. Sales automation won’t take care of the entire sales process for you, but it will put your sales reps in a position to close high-value deals more quickly.

Interested in seeing how Triggerbee can help you get started with sales automation? Start your free trial today!

Automated sales — it’s the dream, right? Where all your sales processes are put on auto-pilot and you can put all of your focus on your product. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite possible — yet. No sales cycle can be completely automated, but a natural place for companies to start is in the automation of individual sales processes.

In this article, you’ll read about 8 amazing examples of data-driven marketing from the real world. 

Data-driven marketing has been a top priority for over a decade. But with the rise of AI and machine learning, the possibilities for using data have expanded rapidly. Especially for consumer-facing brands.

Most brands have more data at their fingertips than ever before, and the ability to act on that data in real time is already a major competitive advantage.

Today 64% of marketing executives strongly agree that data-driven marketing is crucial to success in the modern global economy.

Data-driven strategies like personalization, progressive profiling, predictive targeting, and even gamification are critical for long-term profitable growth.

They help marketers optimize campaigns, improve customer experiences, and create content that resonates with the right audience at the right time.

It can be used to track and optimize your campaigns, evaluate the health of your brand overall, and inform new content and marketing collateral that connects with your audience.

What holds most companies back is not a lack of data, but a lack of clear, effective ways to use it. These data-driven marketing examples highlight how leading brands are closing that gap and how you can do the same.

Example 1: How KICKS Sells Makeup for Millions Using CRM and Behavioral Data

KICKS is a leading beauty chain in Scandinavia, selling makeup, fragrances, and skincare to haircare. They have a loyalty club (“KICKS Club”) where over 1.5 million active members are rewarded with bonuses and exclusive offers.

They use Triggerbee to drive signups to their loyalty program and collect first-party data about their audience which they can use in all of their marketing. Instead of sending out the same offer to every single customer, they use behavioral data collected from their website with customer data from their loyalty program (purchase history, average spend, membership level) to target specific segments with personalized offers and reminders. 

KICKS are not using unique coupon codes in their campaigns. If you are looking to use a similar tactic, consider generating unique coupon codes for an added layer of security and to stop coupon hacking.  

Being able to create a personalized shopping experience for their customers has been key to the success of their loyalty program. For example, they use customer data to hide membership signup campaigns from existing members and display bonus points reminders to members with unused points. 

The message in each campaign is targeted at different member levels, and the results are mind-blowing:

• 4,8x higher CTR than average with the help of targeted Onsite campaigns
• Increased the number of used bonus checks for members
• Increased engagement among members
• Over 1,000% growth in email subscribers

This is a huge win for a brand like KICKS, especially considering each member is worth a lot when they redeem their points. 

Example #2: GreenPal Uses Demographic Data in Campaign Planning

This example of data-driven marketing goes to show that not all data usage has to come from data collected internally. Let’s assume that you would like to upsell a new product to your most valuable customer segment. You’ll probably have some data for that segment that has been collected in-house, but there are always going to be a few missing details. You may not fully understand that segment’s spending habits or local weather patterns in their region.

This is exactly the type of problem that GreenPal, a lawn care services provider, ran into when marketing a new product to their customers. After running a successful AdWords campaign in the metro Nashville area, the company sought to optimize and improve their conversion rate by adding more contextual information.

Using publicly available data, they discovered that homeowners in East Nashville, which was a relatively new and upstart lower-middle class community, was more price-sensitive than other demographics in the area. They targeted zip codes for those neighborhoods and ran specific ads that touted them as the “cheapest lawn care solution in Nashville” and saw a more than 200% lift in click-through rate and a 30 percent lift in on-page conversion rates.

There are some really excellent free sources of publicly available data online. Data.gov offers more than 300,000 government-provided datasets that could be useful in marketing campaigns. Similarly, the European Union publishes a lot of their available data as well. States, counties, and cities are also known to publisher data that may be more relevant to smaller marketing campaigns as it focuses on specific communities.

Example #3: DirecTV Partners With USPS to Target New Movers

Another great example of data-driven marketing comes from DirecTV. While looking for new ways to connect with consumers that were not signed up for a television plan, the company honed in on one specific market — people who had recently moved to a new location and therefore had not yet signed up for a television plan.

Source: Monetate

By striking a partnership with USPS, the company was able to directly target consumers that had recently filed for a change of address. Using that data, they sent advertisements that led consumers to a personalized homepage that spoke directly to the “mover” segment. Their campaigns were delivered through direct mail, PPC, and email.

This serves as an excellent example of using third-party data to run effective lead generation campaigns. There are no sources with higher quality data about recent movers than USPS, and gaining access to that data through a partnership gave DirecTV access to their most crucial customer segment. Can you think of any organizations that might collect important data on your most crucial customer segments?

Example #4: OKCupid Uses Dating Data to Create Intriguing Content

As one of the largest dating sites in the world, OKCupid has a wealth of demographic information from their users. They aren’t shy about it, either. The company regularly publishes insightful user data on their blog, attracting a lot of attention. The attraction to their data and relationship-related data isn’t just for their users either, the company has gained a lot of traction with non-users as well.

They provide a great example of using your internal data to create content that your target demographic will find interesting. In one recent post, they examined how using a flash when taking pictures seemed to make their users appear older, based on their internal data:

It’s easy to see why this kind of content wouldn’t just appeal to their own users, but to anyone that uses social media. Finding interesting opportunities to leverage your internal data to create content is a great example of thinking outside the box when it comes to data-driven marketing.

Example #5: GrubHub Correlates Food Data With Political Leanings

GrubHub is a food ordering app that collects a ton of data about what its users eat. The food delivery app follows in OKCupid’s footsteps by creating interesting content using its internal data. A big part of their revenue comes from partnerships that they have with a variety of publishers who use their data to create native advertising that feels natural.

In an effort to expand their partnerships with political publishers, GrubHub sought to learn what they could about how the food choices of their users correlated with their political leanings. As a result, they sent out a survey as part of a profiling campaign that asked their users what foods they would prefer and connected those users to congressional districts around the U.S.

As you can see above, their results were pretty interesting and potentially made it easier for the company to translate their data to secure new partnerships with political publishers. Done right, this is essentially a form of gamification marketing and it’s easy to see how this same technique could be applied to other industries, allowing them to expand their native advertising base and grow their revenue.

Example #6: Activia Uses Self Esteem Data to Fuel Campaigns

In February 2017, Activia, a probiotic yogurt company, launched their new “It Starts Inside” marketing campaign. The campaign was designed to spark conversations around helping women to reach their full potential, rising above detracting thoughts and self-esteem issues.

The campaign was based on a study with a partnered research firm, GlobalWebIndex. The study revealed that 80% of women in the US between the ages of 25 and 55 view themselves as their own worst critic. The marketing campaign featured interviews with women talking about their experiences with self-doubt.

The campaign was a huge success for the company, speaking to real problems that their customers faced every day. Appealing to customers’ emotions helped them to build empathy and shift the perception of their company among their target demographic. This campaign is proof that data-backed campaigns can have a substantial effect.

Example #7: Olay and #killerskin

Olay is one of the world’s biggest skincare brands, and for the 2019 Super Bowl they had decided to debut with a massive new campaign.

To maximize their chances of success, the team working on the new campaign looked at data from various sources to learn more about their audience’s interests outside of skincare. 

This is pretty unusual considering Olay is a skincare brand. It later turned out to be a pretty smart move. 

By looking at Google and Youtube data to see what their audience searched for and what videos they preferred to watch, the team found two areas of interest that stood out from the rest: 

1. Horror movies
2. Football

This led to Olay creating the #killerskin campaign, which became a massive success for the brand and generating tens of millions of views and a huge uptick in search interest.

 

Example #8: How Abreva reaches teenagers with celebrities and makeup

Abreva wanted to reach a younger audience with their cold-sore medication. Traditionally, Abreva advertises to audiences over 35-years and older through TV. Eventually they discovered that most people get their first cold-sore as teenagers – an insight that made them rethink their marketing strategy moving forward.

The marketing team at Abreva knew that teenagers watch less TV than the audience they’re used to advertise to. So, they decided to focus on YouTube. 

Knowing that cold-sores are an uncomfortable topic for teenagers, they knew they had to create videos that connected with their audience’s interests.

Abreva’s marketing team leveraged machine learning to identify and reach their target audiences. They then created 119 versions of one base ad, customizing the copy to match what a YouTube viewer was watching.

Teenagers watching celebrity gossip saw this ad:

And someone about to watch a makeup tutorial might instead have seen this:

But what about the results?

In the end, the campaign drove a 41% lift in overall ad recall and a 342% lift in search interest among its target audience across Google and YouTube. 

One could say Abreva hit a real home-run with their data-driven marketing strategy.

Summary: Data-Driven Marketing and Creativity

Data-driven marketing won’t change your business overnight on its own. It has to be used in conjunction with the right technology and powerful, creative campaigns that connect your data to real-world issues that connect with your audience. The data-driven marketing examples in this article might help to get the gears turning and give you some ideas for harnessing the data that you collect and using it to influence your next marketing campaign.

In this post, you’ll learn 15 actionable and timeless lead generation strategies that are simple enough for anyone to implement TODAY.

Update: If you really want to generate leads as a B2B business in today’s business climate, you need to focus on personalization. Too much of what worked in the past has been commoditized, and personalization is one of the few strategies that hasn’t yet been widely deployed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. THE ONE-CLICK LEAD CAPTURE
2. USING THE OPF-TECHNIQUE TO GENERATE 22% MORE LEADS
3. USING YOUTUBE OR VIMEO AS “ENGAGEMENT MAGNETS”
4. TURNING “OUT OF STOCK” INTO AN OPPORTUNITY
5. USE THE “GODFATHER STRATEGY” TO BUILD YOUR EMAIL LIST
6. USING FOMO TO INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION RATE
7. HACKING SCROLL-DEPTH TO GET UP TO 80% MORE CLICKS ON YOUR CTA’S
8. USE EXIT-INTENT POPUPS ON KEY PAGES
9. USING PRE-FILL TO MAKE FORMS EASIER TO COMPLETE
10. USING 404 PAGES TO GENERATE LEADS
11. USING CHALLENGES TO ENGAGE AND CONVERT
12. HOST OR VISIT PHYSICAL SEMINARS
13. ASKING QUESTIONS TO GET A 50% CONVERSION RATE
14. USING CONTENT UPGRADE TO CONVERT 38.9% OF VISITORS
15. LEVERAGING THE POWER OF COMMUNITY WITH THIS POPULAR APP

1 The One-Click Lead Capture

Email marketing is about to get dethroned because there’s a new sheriff in town…

Say hello to Facebook Messenger marketing.

Facebook Messenger has over 2 billion active users, and it has the potential to change the way you look at digital marketing forever.

E-mail has been the king of marketing channels since the early days of the internet, and the reason is largely due to the ability to personalize the content inside of the emails.

In other words, E-mail has always been at the foundation of all lead generation strategies.

But here’s the kicker:

If you want to use someone’s name, company name or website URL in your email, you first have to actively collect that information from your prospect.

In other words, you can only use data you’ve actively collected from your subscribers.

And here’s the worst part:

Email open rates are declining every day.

This is not the case when it comes to Facebook Messenger…

First of all, Facebook already knows everything about your audience (because they most likely have a Facebook account).

If you want someone to sign up for your messenger list all you have to do is place a button on your website that says “Send to Messenger” or “Continue as [Name]”.

If you want your conversion rates to stay high, it’s important to reduce friction. And clicking a button is about as frictionless as it gets.

Getting started with Messenger marketing is super easy. This article from MobileMonkey explains how to do it in 3 easy steps. 

Facebook Messenger has higher open rates than almost any other channel:

With reports of open rates well above 80%, you can expect your message to be seen by almost everyone you send it to.

Pro tip:
You need a Facebook page to be able to send messages to your prospects. BUT…

…instead of using your company’s page, create a page for yourself, in your own name and with your own profile picture.

That way it looks like you are sending out the message personally, instead of the messages from a company.

2 Using the “OPF-Technique” to Generate 22% More Leads

Imagine if you could double your reach or conversion rate just by adding 3 words to any thank-you page, order confirmation page, or thank-you text?

You don’t even need a marketing budget for this to work, or any connections.

It just works right out of the box.

You just need to tap into the power of “OPF” – Other People’s Friends. 

Here are the three words I’m talking about:

“Invite a friend”

Add these 3 words to any popup, landing page, or thank you page and you will instantly see a lift in conversions.

We tried it on triggerbee.com recently when inviting prospects to one of our physical events.

The result?

Over 135 entries in just 2 days.

41% Invited a friend (or colleague).

22% of those invited by their friends, signed up for the seminar.

And it’s all thanks to a regular HTML link.

It’s super simple to add, and you can literally just copy-paste a small HTML-snippet to your website.

Just copy this code and paste it on any page:

<a style="font-weight: 600; text-decoration: none;" href="mailto:?subject=?body=?utm_campaign=”invite-a-friend">Invite a friend</a>

Pro tip: Use E-mailer Link Maker if you want to have a pre-filled subject line and some content.

If the person who is inviting a friend doesn’t have to write a message, the chances of them actually sending their invite increases dramatically.

3 Using YouTube or Vimeo as “Engagement Magnets”

Video is one of the most engaging types of content on the internet.

The numbers speak for themselves…

Including video on landing pages can increase conversion rates by up to 80% (Unbounce)
Visitors spend up to 2.6x more time on pages with video than without (Wistia).

I think you’ll agree with me on this:

Video is awesome!

But, having a video on your website just because you want to have a video won’t do you any good…

You have to use it strategically if you want to use it as one of your lead generation strategies!

Normally when you finish watching a video, YouTube just shows you a bunch of other related videos.

Not good.

Instead, you can use Triggerbee to create a widget that pops up right after the visitor finished watching the video.

Like this:

That way you can capture their information while they’re already engaged.

Pretty smart right?

Pro tip: Offer your visitors a powerful lead magnet related to the content in the video, or ask them to participate in a contest.

One of our customers ran a contest this way, and they had click-through rates of over 72.6%!

Very impressive.

4 Turning “Out of Stock” Into an Opportunity

When products are out of stock, you’re losing customers.

But lucky for you, there is a way to turn that into an opportunity.

Instead of just displaying a red text, like most online retailers do…

Add a form below your “OUT OF STOCK”-text with the message:

“Enter your email to get a notification when this product is back in stock”.

Pro tip: If you know when your item is back in stock, add a timer that counts down to the expected date of arrival for your product.

5 Use the Godfather-Strategy to Build Your Email List

What sounds more appealing to you:

“Sign up for the newsletter”

Or…

“Join our tribe of 2500+ world-class marketers and salespeople”

I think you’ll agree with me that the second sentence sounds way more appealing.

It’s basically the same offer, but with some added social proof.

Old pitches like “Sign up for our newsletter” just don’t work anymore because the truth is that nobody reads newsletters anymore…

They want content personalized to them. Lazer focused, point-solving, specific content that meets their interests and needs.

We manually analyzed over 50 000 conversions from our users to find out what type of message converts best.

Here are the results:

Turns out, using an offer instead of “Sign up for our newsletter”, increases your conversion rate by almost 80x!

Pretty amazing.

As the legendary Gary Halbert once said:

“You should think more about how to “sweeten” your offer than any other aspect of writing copy.”

And that certainly proves to be true even to this day.

Pro tip: If you already have an email sequence going out, you could rewrite it slightly and turn it into a 3-day, 5-day, or 10-day course!

6 Using FOMO to increase your conversion rate

Applying scarcity, or FOMO, is one of the few tactics that almost instantly can improve your lead generation efforts.

Here’s a real-life example:

Jessica Parker and Melissa Burkley conducted a study where they showed women a photograph of their potential dream man.

Half of the women were told the guy was single and the other half were told he was in a relationship.

The results might surprise you…

59% said they would be interested in pursuing a single guy when they thought he was single.

But, that number jumped to 90% when they thought the guy was taken!

We want what we can’t have, and it’s just the way we’re wired.

But, you should think twice before just throwing up a countdown for every offer you have.

Your visitors are not stupid. They will spot false offers pretty quickly, and those who don’t will just feel deceived if they find out your offer continues to run after they have purchased.

Here are a few situations where you can use it:

• When you actually have a limited offer
• When there are only a few seats left for your webinar
• When a product is running out of stock

7. Hacking Scroll-Depth to Get up to 80% More Clicks on Your CTA’s

Only about 20% of your visitors reach the bottom of your website.

It’s not your fault though — it’s like this for almost every website.

This means if you have a call to action anywhere near the bottom of your page, 80% of your visitors will never see it!

But, to solve it you need to dive into the world of data-driven marketing:

Get yourself a tool that shows you how far down people are scrolling on your website. We use Hotjar for this.

Let at least 500 – 1000 people visit your website, and then…

…check out your shiny new scroll map.

Here’s an example of how we could use the scroll-hack on our own website:

58% of visitors don’t scroll the full page.

Not good.

So what we can do here is two things:

• Move the testimonials at the top, to the bottom of the page.
• Add a scroll-popup at 5% – 10% above the 58% mark to hopefully get a few leads.

After we’ve modified the page, we can create a new heat map and see if anything has changed.

If not, we might have to restructure the whole landing page to improve the user experience.

8 Use Exit-Intent Popups on Key Pages

People either love em’ or hate em’.

And whether you like it or not, popups work.

Especially Exit-intent popups.

But first, some words of caution:

Exit intent popups are your BACKUP to your web pages.

If your exit intent popup has a higher conversion rate than your website, you probably should think about redesigning your website first.

But if you use it as a hail mary on your most important pages, they can work pretty well. 

That way you don’t need to ask for all the information at once.

9 Using Pre-fill to Make Forms Easier to Complete

Over 70% of your visitors expect you to recognize them when they return to your website.

And if you have several forms on your website, there’s no bigger turn-off than letting your visitors fill out the same information…

…again…

…and again…

…and again.

One of the best ways of saying “Welcome back” is by pre-filling forms for visitors that are already identified. 

Pre-fill means that you automatically add information like email address, name, phone number or company name in your forms.

So, instead of showing empty forms every time…

The prospect can just review their information already there, and hit submit. 

Pretty smart.

If you want to know more about pre-filling forms and why it’s a smarter way of generating leads, you can read The Definitive Guide to Progressive Profiling.

10 Using 404 Pages to Generate Leads

When someone clicks on the link to your website in Google, they expect to land on a specific page or post.

But what happens if that page doesn’t exist?

Most 404-pages just tell you what you already know – that the page no longer exists.

And research shows that over 73% of your users leave your website when they reach a 404-page. 

Lost visitors = lost customers.

Not very useful advice.

What you can do instead is giving away an E-book or a report.

That way you’ll turn something bad – a broken page – into an opportunity to generate a lead.

Unbounce, a leading landing page provider, lets people choose between two options on their 404-page.

11 Using Challenges to Engage and Convert

Let’s take a look towards the fitness industry to apply one of their most effective lead generation strategies in B2B and B2C companies…

The 30-day challenge.

Challenges can be applied to almost any industry, and any product or service.

For example:

Not only does this create a community around your actual product or service, but it’s also a lead generation strategy that engages your subscribers/prospects.

When you’re searching for new lead generation strategies, always find out what the smallest players in the biggest niches are doing.

The reason is that big corporations rarely engage customers and prospects like small companies do.

12. Host or visit physical seminars

One of the best lead generation strategies is to host physical events.

Whether you’re attending or arranging meetups, seminars, or educational classes – meeting with your prospects face-to-face is one of the best things you can do.

Besides, most people would love to get out of their office every once in a while.

At Triggerbee we try to arrange one or two physical events every year, and we never have any problem getting around 150 – 200 signups each time.

In 2016, we held a seminar together with Pipedrive with over 250 attendees and it was very appreciated. 

Not only did we get a chance to speak directly to both customers and prospects, but we also get a chance to keep communicating with most of the attendees after the seminar. 

13 Asking Questions to Get a 50% Conversion Rate

Except for Facebook Messenger, quizzes are the latest fad in lead generation strategies.

And the best part is that it’s not a mainstream strategy – yet.

Neil Patel and Eric Siu discussed quizzes in episode 135 of their podcast, and said: “we just don’t talk about it much because we don’t want everybody copying us”.

I don’t know about you, but when the guy that runs one of the world’s biggest marketing blogs shy’s away from talking about a specific marketing strategy they use…

…it’s probably working pretty well.

Quizzes can also help you collect some intent data, which is crucial for your salespeople.

14. Using Content Upgrades to Convert 38.9% of Visitors

The popup we use to build our email list converts at an impressive 8.8%.

But, we’ve been playing around with a new tactic called the Content Upgrade.

So far, the results are great!

Last February we wrote a blog post about GDPR for businesses, and instead of using a popup to capture emails…

…we created a content upgrade in the form of a checklist that our visitors could download.

The results?

Almost 40% of the visitors downloaded the GDPR Checklist!

Instead of using an annoying popup that interrupts the reading, the checklist is just there – available to anyone who wants to download it.

One of the biggest marketing trends in 2018 and 2019 is definitely the focus on creating better experiences…

…and with almost every website on the web using popups, content upgrades can be a good way to stand out from the crowd.

15. Leveraging the Power of Community With This Popular App

Communities are HUGE moneymakers and one of the best lead generation strategies.

You’ve probably heard about the “1000 true fans-theory”.

Kevin Kelly, co-founder of online magazine Wired, came up with this theory during his 25 years as the executive editor.

If you haven’t heard of it, here’s an explanation:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author—in other words, anyone producing works of art—needs to acquire only 1,000 true fans to make a living.

Unless you’re Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, it’s hard creating true fans unless you’ve built a community.

But it doesn’t come for free.

It takes both dedication and effort.

One way is to hire a web development agency, build a custom community website and try making them replace Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter in favor of your website.

Or…

You could start a Slack channel which already has everything done for you.

Using Slack as a lead generation strategy is still relatively overlooked, so by starting one now you are definitely getting in early.

There are for example over 4 million groups on LinkedIn, but only 200 active groups on Slack.

Another reason for creating your own Slack group is that it’s a real-time chat platform, and users tend to check Slack more often than other social networks.

There’s also way LESS competition for attention compared to Facebook or LinkedIn, and it’s completely free.

Visit this link to create your own channel and start building a thriving community!

But wait!

How do you get people to join your newly founded community?

Here’s a quick strategy to get you started:

1 Create a new page on your website. This will be used as a landing page where your audience can sign up to join.

2 Write some copy about why people should join your channel and add one of two options…

• A button that opens an overlay
• A form right on the page

3 Promote your slack group through ads, social networks, on your website, and in your email footer.

The key here is to receive a notification when someone signs up so you can invite them to your Slack channel, and if you have them request an invitation it feels more exclusive.

Summary

These lead generation strategies are simple enough for anyone to use.

But keep this in mind:

Stuff that works like crazy for one business might fall completely on its face in another business.

The key is finding a strategy that works for you, and in most cases, the foundation of effective lead generation is some form of content.

It all comes down to knowing your audience and how they interact with your business.

In this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about progressive profiling, what it means and how you can get started.

And let me be clear about something:

This is NOT a lame post about old school lead nurturing or lead generation.

Instead, you’re going to see tested strategies that are working right now in 2018…and will work even better in 2019, 2020 and beyond.

So if you’re looking to up your lead generation game this year, you’ll love this guide.

Let’s dive right in.

Chapter 1: What is Progressive Profiling?

Progressive profiling is a data-driven lead generation and nurturing strategy that uses website behavior, activity, and interest as the main indicator of whether a prospect is hot or cold. As a result, your visitors don’t need to leave as much personal information, because progressive profiling often uses methods like email enrichment and IP-tracking to figure out e.g. company details.

For example, if you have more than one lead magnet, you only ask the visitor to leave their email address to download the first one.

When they want to download the second one, you only ask for their role or perhaps phone number because you already know what company they’re from. 

This means you can keep your forms short and only ask for the information you lack as you build up a relationship.

Not only is it less intimidating for your prospects, but you’ll also avoid asking for the same information over and over again.

Here’s an example of how a sales funnel based on progressive profiling might look:

Many of the large marketing automation suites like Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, and Eloqua use manual lead scoring to decide whether the prospect is hot or cold.

This means the user has to manually give points for each event. This usually means that the lead scoring is based on personal opinion rather than actual behavior.

Marketing software with progressive profiling can recognize a visitor when they revisit a website, knowing what information you already have and what additional information you need.

In one way, progressive profiling takes you closer to how relationships in real-life are built.

I mean…

Imagine you own a small local store.

Image: Eco Camp UK

Your success as a local business owner relies almost entirely on making every customer happy because it’s often hard to compete with the big guys on price and variety.

This makes it even more important to become creative when it comes to winning loyal customers…

You have to build up a relationship with regular customers so they have a reason to come back.

You get to know each customer better each time they visit. 

Eventually, you’ll greet them by name, know the name of their kids, get to know their wife/husband, and most importantly…

You learn about their preferences and habits.

But as with any relationship, it’s not something that happens the first time you meet. Relationships are built up gradually, over time.

As you get to know your customers better, maybe you’ll even go so far as to save or prepare certain items just for them, because you know what they like and what time they usually stop by.

You start personalizing the experience based on their behavior – and this is exactly what progressive profiling enables you to do.

Now imagine another scenario:

You see a new customer walking in. It’s the first time you see her face.

She’s walking towards the cold section – it seems like she’s looking for milk, or perhaps some cheese…

You think to yourself:

“This is a perfect time for a cross-interrogation! She’s in MY store after all…”

You start walking towards her. She looks at you, she’s smiling, she thinks you just want to help her find what she’s looking for.

You smile back, and before she even has the chance to say “Hello”, you ask for her name, her e-mail address, where she works, company role, phone number and monthly food budget…

Would that be a pleasant experience? Probably not.

It would wipe the smile off her face faster than a toupé in a hurricane.

Yet this is how most businesses treat visitors and prospects. It’s basically the exact opposite of how real-world relationships are built.

Here’s the truth:

Most successful marketing strategies are digitized versions of their physical equivalent.

Even though we use digital tools to nurture relationships with friends and family, we have still built up the relationship in the real world, and we can’t forget that our brains are still left in the analog world.

Chapter 2: Why traditional lead generation is broken – and how to fix it

Trying to run a business without generating leads is like trying to fly a kite just by blowing at it – ain’t gonna happen.

For years marketers and salespeople have treated incoming leads like just another number with the sole purpose of moving them from point A (first interaction/visit) to point B (customer), and in a best-case scenario – point C (repeat customer).

This is usually executed using a 3-step cookie-cutter formula:

The cookie-cutter formula for lead generation and lead nurturing

1. Capture an email address
2. “Give value” and send some automated emails
3. Convert lead into a customer

Sounds familiar?

While it might be the easiest way to kickstart your lead generation programme and bring in some business, the problem is that most businesses never go beyond that point and think about how to build a relationship with their prospects before trying to sell them something.

If you’re stuck in this cookie-cutter phase, you’ll most likely focus your efforts on getting as many leads as possible into the top of your funnel – without paying attention to the middle and bottom of your funnel.

That’s the first part of the problem.

But guess what?

Just generating leads is not enough

You need a qualification process as well.

Unfortunately, the standard qualification process usually means having prospects fill out a long form with dropdowns and checkboxes (or worse, only text-fields) to access an E-book or report you have available.

And if you have more than one resource available, prospects usually have to fill out their information again, in the same or a similar form to get access to it.

If your prospect has taken all the steps you want them to take, you let your sales team screen the list of prospects and contact ones that meet the right profile.

Not only is it ineffective, but having users fill out their information over and over again can result in a lot of duplicate contact records as well.

Studies show that the average marketing database contains 33% duplicate records.

Far from all businesses are using marketing software sophisticated enough to merge contact records as they move between lists and tags.

If you’re trying to nurture a database full of duplicate records… you’re in for a real treat.

Another problem with this type of lead generation is that every lead you capture has to go through the same steps – steps that you have plotted out for them.

Take a look at this image below:

This is an image of the subway network in Stockholm.

It has 101 stations.

Depending on where you live and where you want to go, you need to ride along between 2 – 30 stations.

Not everyone needs to go exactly 3 stations, or 5 stations.

It has 101 stations because people have different needs.

It’s the same thing with lead nurturing, often it’s not enough just having 3 or 5 steps for your leads to take – especially not when you have decided what those steps are.

This is exactly why lead nurturing is one of the biggest challenges companies have.

So, how can we fix this?

The first thing you should consider is…

Taking a multi-step approach to lead generation

If you wanted to download a resource and had the choice between filling out 7 fields or only 2 fields – given that both forms gave you access to the same resource – which one would you choose?

Probably the form with fewer fields, right?

There are countless studies showing that reducing the number of fields in a form will generally increase the conversion rate, but this is not always the case.

Longer forms are generally more accepted when signing up for an account, but when it comes to downloading a resource (e.g. E-books or reports), shorter forms are generally more preferred.

Marcus Taylor, CEO of Venture Harbor says the following in one of his recent blog posts:

“Over the past five years, I’ve tested multi-step forms across a lot of industries and site types. For lead generation specifically, I’ve yet to see a traditional one-step form that converts better than a multi-step version with the same questions.”

Venture Harbor ran a test for brokernotes.com where they replaced a regular form with 7 inputs, against a multi-step form.

The result?

Conversion rate went up over 4x – from 11% to 46%!

Image: Venture Harbour

Most people in your target audience have a lot of things to do, and filling out your form is probably not even in their top 10 or top 100 tasks for the day.

Multi-steps forms lower the threshold and make it feel less like a chore to complete a form.

Besides, progressive profiling helps you collect data about your prospect in the backround, eliminating the need for using a lot of form fields.

Chapter 3: How to win friends and customers

Here’s how a typical nurturing funnel looks:

Many businesses have a few downloadable resources which they offer to visitors at different stages of the customer journey.

But, as you can see in the image, they are all locked behind forms asking you to fill in the same information over and over again.

Like we discussed before, this is not optimal. This is not how relationships are built.

This is how it would look if you used progressive profiling:

Instead of asking your lead for the same information several times, you only ask them to basically fill in the blanks.

You really need to ask yourself:

Which information do I need to close a deal?

In most cases, you would only need one or two pieces of information to actually be able to introduce yourself, make contact and start building a relationship:

• Email
• Phone

For some companies, this information along with some “soft data” can be more than enough for a sales rep to send a compelling introduction.

What is soft data and how do you use it?

There are two types of data you need to take into account when nurturing leads – Hard data and soft data.

Hard data is the type of data that is static, like:

• E-mail
• Phone number
• Company
• Role
• Budget
• etc…

Soft data is data that is constantly changing and evolving, like:

• Interest
• Website activity
• Behavior
• Habits
• Referring sites
• Etc, etc

Hard data is data that sits in your database that you use to segment or send out marketing material, it’s crucial that this information is correct.

Soft data is behavioral data used to get to know your prospect better without having to ask them to leave any information. You just track them when they visit your website or open your emails and generate a profile based on their behavior.

You can use soft data to segment lists, trigger emails, offer coupons, and personalize your communication.

Many (if not most) of the large all-in-one marketing automation systems use lead scoring as a signal for when a prospect is ready to buy.

But the problem is that it’s mostly done manually – you give points to specific actions you want your leads to perform, and when they have reached a certain score they get flagged as “hot”.

Guy Marion, CMO at Autopilot says the following in one of his blog posts about lead scoring:

“Traditional lead scoring typically only uses data the marketer can capture. It misses out on many other predictive signals of buying behavior, like current technology usage, VC funding, or management team maturity.”

He also states that most B2B decisions are made on a group basis.

So even if person A form Company A has been scored as a hot lead, most systems won’t take into consideration if Person B or C from Company A also visited your website and looked at your pricing.

This is where progressive profiling can help you.

Going all-in with progressive profiling

Let’s circle back to the local store owner in the beginning.

When building relationships with prospects, you have to take things slow. Progressively.

Sure, you still need to plot out a plan for how you’re going to get your prospect from A to B, but progressive profiling helps you do it a bit smoother.

Here’s how you get started:

Preparations:

Find a service that tracks soft data from individual website visitors and prospects.

I’m guessing you already have a service that helps you capture all the hard data like email addresses (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this would you).

Of course, we’re biased, but Triggerbee will help you track soft data like company name, behavior, activity, referral data, page visits and interest with minimal setup.

Step 1: Map out your customer journey

Instead of creating three different e-books or reports in beforehand, think about what your customer needs to know before they are a customer – and to become a customer.

What information do other companies offer, and what do they miss?

How much does your prospect need to know about your product or service before they become a customer? Are they mostly novices or experts?

What can you give them that others can’t, and more importantly… how can you give it to them?

Ask yourself what information you need to both qualify and deliver content that takes them to the next step.

Like we said before, customer journeys are almost never linear. Prospects almost never go through a fixed amount of logical steps before they are hot or ready to be sold to.

Image: Kissmetrics

More often than not, they look like this:

The larger the deal, the more human touches are required.

You can still automate this to some extent – sometimes it’s enough just to send out a stripped email that looks like someone from your team have sent it out.

As long as you’re there to reply, it’s nothing wrong with automating your outreach.

Step 2: Figure out what information you need at each step

By now you know who your prospect is, and they have probably visited your website more than once.

But do you really need to know your prospects monthly budget to send out a report or have them download your next e-book?

Probably not, unless you have an extremely sophisticated and personalized nurturing process.

Especially with GDPR now in force, it’s important you figure out what type of information you need to get the ball rolling, and that you are clear on how you are using any contact info you collect.

For the first step – Awareness:

What do you actually need to send out the first email? An email address, and perhaps a name.

If you really do need some company info, think about if you can use an enrichment service like Clearbit or Triggerbee (just make sure you collect consent for that as well).

Enrichment services help you extract company info from your prospect’s IP-address without them having to type anything, minimize the fields in your forms, and automatically send it to your CRM or email system.

Collected information:

• Email

Potentially company data extracted from email enrichment

For the second step – Consideration:

I think I read the following quote in one of advertising legend David Ogilvy’s books, I can’t really remember, but it goes something like this:

“Your product or service doesn’t necessarily need to be the best, as long as your customer perceives it as better than the competition”.

What questions does your prospect ask themselves at this stage? What makes them nervous?

…and what information do you need from them to give them a credible answer?

Maybe, you don’t need one even one more piece of information.

I know what you’re thinking…

“What?”

Just like the subway analogy, not everyone needs to go through the exact same steps.

Imagine this:

You have a SaaS app you’re trying to get more users for.

[email protected] downloads one of your e-books. She opens your welcome email and clicks one of the links you have in your footer.

She reads two of your blog posts, and a few days go by… Radio silence.

You send out your second email offering her a webinar training.

She clicks it, signs up for it, and watches 5 minutes.

Sara leaves your webinar and visits your pricing page instead. 10 minutes later, someone else from her company also visits your pricing page.

A few days later, you can see that [email protected] and someone else from her company visit your website AGAIN…

Now that’s some serious buying intent, and it’s probably time to ask for her phone number, be a little more aggressive on offering her a free trial, or simply have one of your reps reach out to her.

Thanks to progressive profiling you can see all of her activity from her first visit to now,  and any sales rep can prepare an outreach email with a few testimonials and some mind-blowing customer results.

Collected information:

• Email
• Company info (from enrichment)
• Soft data – website activity

For the third step: Decision

This is the step where you give your prospects an offer or more information that emotionally puts them at ease – and makes them perceive your brand/product/service as superior against your competitors.

If they haven’t responded to your outreach or registering a free trial, now is the time to knock their socks off.

Send out customer testimonials, different types of social proof and perhaps even offers – do anything you can to get them to take action (but don’t be too pushy).

Selling is fine, and there’s nothing wrong with being a little pushy. Just don’t try too much to the point where it becomes annoying.

Send out 2 – 3 emails in a week, and then wait 4 – 6 weeks before you follow up the next time.

Make sure your follow-up is based on your prospects soft data like previous interest and behavior.

This is the step where you want to try as hard as possible to get any last piece of information you really need to qualify them as a prospect.

Collected information:

• Email
• Company information (from enrichment)
• Website activity (soft data)
• Telephone number

Summary

Progressive profiling is a new way of qualifying prospects before trying to sell to them.

Instead of deciding what path to choose, you look at the behavior of your prospects and take into account the behavior of their colleagues.

Instead of making your prospects fill out all their information in one go, you focus on only collecting information you need, when you need it.

It helps you mimic how real-world relationships are built.

Progressive profiling is not a be-all and end-all to the discussion on how to nurture or generate leads but it’s a new way to do it without changing too much in your strategy.

All businesses need to evolve and adapt to new strategies and that usually means closing the gap between the physical world and the digital world.

Thanks to Mirko from Vectorarte/Freepik for providing resources for the header image.