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The Ultimate Progressive Profiling Guide
What is progressive profiling?
A technical definition of Progressive Profiling is the process of incrementally gaining additional data on a contact through subsequent form submissions. This usually occurs in exchange for value, passing through a form to access some gated content.
Put simply, prospects give you more information about themselves the more they visit your site and access content.
Marketing Automation platforms have long had this functionality. However the actual execution can vary significantly, which has led to confusion as to what progressive profiling is and how it works.
This article will give you a comprehensive overview, dispel some common misconceptions and hopefully set you on the path to enhancing your content gating experience and conversion rates.
A progressive profiling example
Why is progressive profiling useful?
Progressive profiling should be seen primarily as a benefit to the user.
By lowering the volume of data required in the early stages of engagement, you create a better value exchange, which not only builds trust with your audience but also improves your future engagement opportunities.
Each additional field on a form effectively creates a higher barrier to completion thus increasing the form abandonment rate. The upshot is that users do not access the desired content (which is bad for the user) and you do not capture the contact to enable future engagement (which is bad for your business).
The question could be posed “why gate at all, or why not always use short forms?”. For transactional sales models a “no-gate” content strategy can work, but where buyer journeys are complex and sales processes are longer, B2B businesses need to build contact profiles to enable segmentation and targeting by industry, persona or company type.
Who defines the progressive profiling strategy?
Strategically, progressive profiling initiatives should always be led by marketing rather than technology.
Whilst technology is fundamental in implementing progressive profiling, and it is clearly important to be aware of any technical limitations, the strategy must be driven by a marketing requirement. For this reason, this guide largely focuses on strategy, the benefits and the different methodologies, rather than platforms that enable progressive profiling.
Common progressive profiling deployments
The most common deployments adopted are:
All of these methods have benefits and potential drawbacks for you as a business; there is no single best-practice approach. Indeed in some instances it may be that a combination of the above methods is strategically appropriate.
Note that progressive profiling usually sits outside the ‘Contact Us’ form structure where there is a minimum data requirement for effective follow-up.
Deployment method 1: Content value
A common misconception of this deployment type is that it is in fact not progressive profiling. The progression is created through different levels of gating (eg. Low, Medium and High) and whenever you gate an asset you assign an appropriate level to it.
An example may be...
A high gate on an analyst whitepaper or a low gate for a subject matter expert interview video. The high gate may ask for full contact details (name, phone, email, company, address, sector etc.) whereas the low gate will only have basic details for subsequent future communications (name and email).
Reasons to use this method
- Understanding of the methodology is straight-forward and easy to explain across a business
- Content creators and campaign planners maintain ‘control’ over the gate value of their asset (this is especially useful in large, diverse organisations
- Assets that have a high utility (analyst papers, legislation guides etc.) can be controlled to always have a gate aligned to this value
- Easy to align to the buyer journey and user lifecycles
- Easy to build and deploy
Considerations against this method
- May also be seen as not putting the user first because you are aligning the gate level with the businesses perception of the content value
- Does not factor how familiar the user is with your business
- Challenging to build up deeper/niche fields as the form becomes too long to be functional or to convert well
Quick start steps
- Define overall form requirements (usually easiest to start with a high gate and determining what is required for sales to follow-up)
- Rationalise how many levels of forms you require and what fields would be appropriate at each level
- Build ‘standard’ forms, communicate your standards to the business
- Determine a governance process to reduce the risk of deviation from your standards
Overall, this is a great place to start progressive profiling because implementation is often straight-forward and the method allows a high level of control over the fields required for high value assets.
Deployment method 2: User engagement/profile
This method works by presenting the user with additional/different fields based on the number of times they have submitted forms.
In effect, there is a series of pre-defined sequential forms presented to the user each time they wish to access content. The fields can be added incrementally (usually at the end of the previous form fields) or can replace fields to keep the length of the form shorter.
An example may be...
The user provides an email and name on the first form submission when downloading a guide. The second form then asks for company and phone number and the third asks for industry and company size. The fourth submission may require job title. For platforms such as Eloqua, Marketo and Hubspot this is commonly how progressive profiling works.
Three variants in how this can be deployed:
A: Progression by user profile
This method of defining the progression is based on how much data you already hold for a contact. If the required data is already held in your data platform, fields can be pre-populated or the next level of form progressive can be presented.
This is probably the most robust and integrated way of deploying progression and also delivers a great user experience because steps can be skipped for mature user profiles.
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B: Progression by lead score
This is similar to method A but is based on a lookup of the contact’s lead score. This works well in understanding the user’s current level of engagement but may not always align to the existing profile data held on record.
Users may be asked for information that isn’t needed because it is already known, or conversely a field isn’t presented but the data is critically required for subsequent engagement or sales follow-up.
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C: Progression by submission volume
This method simply progresses people for each subsequent form submission regardless of data collected.
This can be simpler to map out and potentially build, but provides a very defined linear user journey through forms which may not accelerate them if data is already known on a contact.
The method of progression possible will also depend on the scale of the planned roll-out, maturity of the website infrastructure, the marketing automation platform and the level of technical skills available.
Customisation
With some additional development the engagement/data method also lends itself to a degree of customisation.
Some examples may be that after a submission all gating forms are removed (or “opened”) for 24 hours or, only applying progressive steps across specific pages or content assets. These customisations can optimise the user experience and improve conversion performance.
Reasons to use the engagement/data method
- New users are presented with low gates which improves conversion rates
- Good at widening top of funnel engagement, especially if nurturing programs are in place to then drive repeat visits
- Nice user experience with low level gates that allow you to build trust and data over time
- Allows data fields to get very specific at later levels of progression
Considerations against this method
- More complex to explain across a business
- Content creators and campaign planners lose ‘control’ over the gate value of their asset
- Assets that have a high utility (analyst papers, legislation guides etc.) can be accessed at a lower level which does not align to the perceived business value
- Management of sales expectations is critical as contacts will commonly need to complete multiple forms in order to have all required data fields for follow-up
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Quick start steps
- Identify all desirable data fields at the highest possible level
- Break down the data fields into form steps where questions can be incrementally asked in a logical, sequential order
- Gain business alignment on the approach
- Create a specification - this method will likely involve the web development team
- Implementation – ensure the functionality is available across all or many forms; scaling across the site is necessary for the profiling to work
A great method for building up user data in a way that is aligned to the user. A common deployment is combining this method with the content value method for key high-value assets to ensure they are not accessed through a low gate.
Deployment method 3: Dynamic profiling
Dynamic profiling is the process of refining questions (and data fields) based on your increased understanding of an individual contact.
To be effective it requires integration with a contact data record lookup in Marketing Automation, CRM or CDP.
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An example may be...
When a user encounters a form for the first time they are asked if they are an existing customer, partner or interested party. Subsequent questions could then be tailored to each audience type.
An alternative use case could be on the first submission you ask a user for their job function, on their return visit you could ask an HR professional how many people are on their payroll whereas someone in IT is asked about the number of devices they manage.
Currently, Marketing Automation platforms do not natively have this level of functionality. This kind of profiling would require bespoke development or a third party solution.
Reasons to use this method
- Provides a comprehensive data strategy including required/desirables fields across the business
- Hugely user centric by tailoring the relevancy of questions asked
- Builds out the most appropriate data for different audiences faster than other methods
- Allows capture of very niche and specific data points
Considerations against this method
- Needs significant investment of time, planning and resources to implement
- Needs deployment globally at scale across the business to be effective
- Content creators and campaign planners lose ‘control’ over the gate value of their asset
- Assets that have a high utility can be accessed at a lower level
This is technically the most complex method to deploy and may only be suitable for some sales models e.g. an enterprise selling many different products to different personas.
Planning and executing progressive profiling
- Identify all data fields required across the business
- Work with stakeholders to determine the importance of each data point and how they align to the sales and marketing process
- Determine the scale of roll-out and if a global approach can be adopted
- Audit your content and determine the different levels of value to the user
- Determine the technical capabilities of your infrastructure and team
- Gain business alignment on the chosen progression approach
- Develop and document your progression strategy
- Build and implement the progression leveraging native functionality, bespoke development or a third party solution (e.g. Formulayt)
How progressive profiling works in Marketo
Marketo handles progressive profiling at form level, not field level. You enable it on the form, set how many fields a visitor sees per submission, and place the fields you want rationed into the progressive block. Marketo then shows only the fields it doesn't already hold for that person, up to your limit. Anything left outside the block appears every time; so keep the fields you can't proceed without, usually email and company, as standard fields and ration the rest.
The catch teams underestimate: it's only as good as the data already on the record. A form set to three fields shows three different fields to an anonymous visitor and to a known contact, and both experiences have to make sense. Keeping that record consistent across every form is a form data consolidation problem as much as a form settings one.
Building progressive profiling in a Marketo form
Decide the question sequence before you touch the form, because the order you place fields in the progressive block is the order people are asked. Start from what sales actually uses to route and prioritise a lead, rank by how much each field changes that decision, and put the highest-value question first. Reporting-only fields go last, or come out altogether.
Two to three progressive fields per submission is the range most teams settle on. Above four it stops reading as progressive and starts reading as long.
Then test as three people: an anonymous visitor, a partially known contact, and a fully profiled one. The third is where it breaks. A fully profiled contact should see the standard fields and nothing else, not an empty block or a stray label. Adobe's Marketo Engage documentation is the reference for the current form settings.
What to watch for with Marketo progressive profiling
That is the honest reason to look beyond native form settings once you are past a handful of forms, and what Formulayt solves by running one set of logic across every form that feeds your Marketo integration.Three failure modes account for most of the disappointment, and all three are avoidable.
Pre-fill working against you. Pre-fill populates known values into visible fields, while progressive profiling hides fields that are already known. Used together without a plan, a returning contact sees a near-empty form, or one where the only remaining question is your most sensitive. Decide per field which mechanism owns it.
Questions in the wrong order. Progressive profiling makes it painless to keep asking, so it is easy to accumulate fields nobody uses. If a field has not informed a routing or scoring decision this quarter, it should not be in the sequence.
Form fragmentation. The setting is per form, so twenty forms means twenty sets of logic that drift apart. Someone changes a field limit here, a new landing page ships with an empty block there, and the profile you thought you were building has holes in it. That is the honest reason to look beyond native form settings once you are past a handful of forms, and what Formulayt solves by running one set of logic across every form that feeds your Marketo integration.
Conclusion
Progressive profiling can seem like a complex technical project to deploy but it need not be. Start with the marketing needs of the business and the desired user experience and work backwards from there. Always consider the maturity of your business and the available technical resources.
The most challenging area will be achieving stakeholder alignment across your business. Once you achieve this, determining the best technical deployment will be more straight-forward.
Be sure to work within the natural capabilities of your infrastructure. A bespoke development may seem appealing, however it will likely take longer to get to market, result in more maintenance and may not provide a solution as robust as something more native.
For advanced off-the-shelf progressive profiling consider a form management platform (such as Formulayt).
Frequently Asked Questions
A form setting that shows a visitor only the fields Marketo does not already hold, up to a limit you set, so the profile builds over several visits instead of one long form.
Enable it on the form, set the fields-per-submission limit, then place the fields you want rationed into the progressive block in the order you want them asked. Fields outside the block show every time. Test before publishing.
Two to three per submission. Enough to make progress, short enough to complete. Above four it stops feeling progressive.
Both work but they overlap. Pre-fill fills known values in, progressive profiling hides known fields. Decide per field which one owns it, or a returning contact gets a near-empty form.
Where one submission has to capture everything, such as a demo request routing straight to sales, or a compliance form where a partial record is useless. It also adds little to a three-field form.
Not natively. Marketo applies it per form, so the logic drifts as a site grows. Running it centrally across every form is what a form management platform adds on top.
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