What is Progressive Profiling?

I recently had a planning meeting with a client and brought up progressive profiling. They nodded their heads in agreement as I talked about how I wanted to use progressive profiling to help them build their relationship with their customers who come through their digital properties as opposed to in-person. After a brief discussion, I moved on to a number of other items and the rest of on my plan. It became clear after a that progressive profiling was just a keyword to them and that they didn’t really know what it meant.

So, what is Progressive Profiling?

Progressive Profiling is a marketing tactic that builds a user profile over time. Think of it like dating, people typically don’t open up to each other on the first date, but the more interactions you have with someone the better you get to know them. The better you get to know them the more you grow to trust them (or not).

We’ve all seen forms that are 2, 3, or 4 (or more) pages long. These can be daunting and often have an elevated drop off rate, especially when this is the first (or one of the first) interaction a user has with an organization/brand. Progressive Profiling helps combat this. It takes all of the information you want to know from a user and breaks it down into small related chunks. This allows organizations/brands to collect some information and then provide a bit of value before collecting more information. While it takes more time to get all of the information about a user, it ultimately leads to a better engagement and trust with users.

With the client I mentioned above, my plan to bring them more users includes collecting the bare minimum information at first – Name, email, city, and state. Once this information has been collected an email would be triggered telling them a little more about the organization and what they offer their members. If the user opened the first email (and better yet clicked one on a piece of content) another email would be triggered that provided more information after a short period of time and asked the user more about themselves. This would continue for a series of interactions.

Now, your first thought might be, that’s a sneaky way to get little bits of information. What’s the value to the user of progressive profiling (if there is an added value for them)? That’s a great question, there are actually a few benefits to the user:

1. Each interaction allows the organization/brand the chance to offer the user something. This could be a discount, a sample, more information, etc. Think about it, do you know all of the benefits to every membership you have? There are blogs and news articles every year about the number of benefits Amazon Prime members have access to and do not take advantage of because they didn’t know about them (Here’s a recent post from Gizmodo as an example). Do your users know about all of your benefits?
2. The interactions help users receive more valuable messaging down the road as well. By taking note of all of the choices a user makes, the organization/brand can start to build a profile that tells them about user ‘s interests. This means in the future the most relevant types of information can be presented to users in the most effective ways. Let’s face it, ads aren’t going anywhere, so isn’t it better to get the best, most relevant ads from the organizations/brands we actually like?

Progressive Profiling has benefits for both organizations/brands and users. Collecting more information allows digital properties to become more efficient. Efficiency means that users can have a more open and honest relationship with organizations/brands and more quickly get what they want from in return.