“Hi, how are you? What’s your name? Where are you from? Where do you work? What industry is that? What brings you here? What products are you interested in? Are you satisfied with your current product? My industry is such-and-such; what about that are you most interested in? What’s your email address? Do you have a Facebook account? Would you like us on Facebook?”
That’s a bit much, right? If you encountered that in real life it would likely result in the one consistent final question “Hey, where are you going?” So in asking the question “What is progressive profiling?” this example is part of the answer; it’s keeping your website from asking too many questions at once. This, in turn, helps increase leads and arms your sales force with more effective information.
While you do want the most information you can get on your customers at any given time, the problem is that having them fill out long forms online is more likely to increase the abandon rate on your website or landing page. In fact, according to some statistics from Eloqua, mean conversion drops significantly with more than 6 fields are on a form. But you still want to capture critical information from prospects and customers – as evident by the fact that many marketers Eloqua surveyed actually used forms with 15+ fields on them. That’s where progressive profiling and inbound marketing (see Deep Dive: Linking Inbound Marketing to Sales Results) tactics can help not only capture more information, but accurate information.
