Today we’re returning to our customer experience blog series to take a closer look at Progressive Profiling. This clever little feature allows you to gradually engage prospects more deeply with your website campaign by incrementally asking for new information on forms and registrations, rather than all at once.

In a nutshell, Progressive Profiling allows you to set up display rules for surveying and generating registrations based on the presence or absence of particular prospect details. It automatically changes the questions on forms as a customer answers them. For example, if your prospect visited your Web site last week and filled in a form to get access to a white paper, providing only their name and company to do so, the next time they visit they would be asked for a job title or area of industry instead. Each new interaction with your Web site allows you to glean more information from the prospect and build their profile, without bombarding them with onerous account registrations.

The most important element in Progressive Profiling is creating an accessible form that prospects respond well to and ensures they continue to explore your Web site. To achieve this, marketers must think about how to avoid basic sign-up forms in favor of gradual engagement. By opting for a gradual engagement solution, like Progressive Profiling, your prospects will learn how to use your Web service to get the information they need, and you can avoid slowing the process by requiring unnecessary data. Progressive Profiling allows you to shape the relationship and walk people through an expected level of task completion — essentially asking for less first, to gain more information further down the pipeline.