How to profile users with dynamic and smart forms? In our blog articles, we have often analyzed how proper user profiling is one of the key steps to be able to implement a strategy of marketing personalization successful. Let’s see how to do this with dynamic forms.
Implicit and explicit information
To profile our users, we can use different types of information to help us define their profile and interests, which can be divided into two macro-categories:
- implicit information
- explicit information
Implicit will include, for example, all the “traces” left by the person who browses our site or interacts with us: the pages they visit, the device they use, the city from which they do so, the ADV campaigns from which they may have come, etc…
Explicit, on the other hand, includes all the information that the user voluntarily communicates to us for the purpose of letting us know more about his or her intentions or requests, such as, for example, filling out a form in which he or she indicates his or her preferences, an explicit request he or she makes to our customer service, the information he or she leaves us in his or her private area, or the answers to a questionnaire we have submitted to him or her.
It is clear that, especially in this second type of information, we will have to pay close attention to how we use it since the user is increasingly sensitive to the fact that it is actually leveraged to make his or her experience with the brand better. Information does in fact have value to the user and it is important that it is collected for a corresponding value, be it a benefit or a better experience…or ideally both!
The importance of profiling forms
Let us now delve into the role of a very important and still underutilized tool for explicit data collection, namely dynamic forms: a new type of form that can respond more precisely to the marketing personalization needs of companies.
The most widely used types of forms to date are two: feedback polls and registration forms.
Feedback Polls
These are the forms used to collect information related to indicators of website satisfaction for the purpose of improving the user experience. Questions such as “did you not find what you were looking for?” or “what prevented you from proceeding with the purchase?” are in fact intended to collect feedback that can improve our site but which merely tell us whether or not a consumer is satisfied with their browsing experience.
Registration form
These forms typically have the function of collecting information from a potential lead and are, at a more or less in-depth level, demographic inquiries such as first name, last name, email, job position etc. Information that will initiate communications workflows with the goal of getting the user to convert.
This is a fairly archaic way of using forms, and one of the reasons they are only exploited in this way today is undoubtedly because of a technological limitation. Indeed, in order to request information of a different kind that is perceived as actually relevant, it is necessary to recognize the user, even an anonymous one, segment him and enrich his profile with the information he has just transferred to us.
So if we want to exploit the potential of this tool in one way and improve response rates, let’s give ourselves 3 basic rules:
- it is useless to show all our users the same form, let’s profile them and ask for the information only from users who are on target with our goal. We must always be relevant;
- the form must be fully integrated into the navigation;
- the results of the form should go to enrich our consumer’s profile, aggregating the results in an automated way for the purpose of creating more effective personalized experiences. The greater the perceived benefit to the consumer, the more information they will give us.
One thing to definitely keep in mind is that these forms can be very useful to us at different stages of the buying process and, more broadly, of the user lifecycle. With anonymous users coming into contact with our site for the first time, they could in fact serve us to accelerate the funnel, almost as if they were dynamic filters in order to smartly push the consumer toward conversion. A very interesting concrete example of a form used in this regard is the Ouai brand.
Browsing the Quiz section we interact with a series of forms that help us select the most suitable product for us. It is evident that every single click made becomes information to be stored within our system in order to learn more precisely characteristics and desires of our consumers and offer them, even in the future, suitable products and content.
A different kind of use could be made to collect information about consumers who are already our customers for the purpose of proposing effective cross-sell activities to them so that they can make suggestions for proposals that, in the absence of the information collected, our marketing would never have imagined.
Forms can thus become a key marketing tool, an extra weapon for creating a personalized relationship with one’s consumers.
