Improve Form Conversion Rates with Progressive Profiling

As part of our Doing More with Account Engagement Forms blog series, this post looks at how to use Account Engagement’s Progressive Profiling feature. Learn how to improve the quality of your prospect data without impacting conversion rates.

It is well-known that the number and type of fields you use can seriously impact your form conversion rates (see this article for more information). Keeping forms short and simple can help improve conversion rates measurably. However, you still want to capture a full profile of data for your prospects. Achieve the best of both with Progressive Profiling.

What is Progressive Profiling?

Progressive Profiling is the process of displaying new fields in a form based on what data is already stored for that prospect. In practice, this means that prospects see a small number of basic fields on their first visit. They are then shown different fields each time they complete a form. The Account Engagement Form Builder makes this really easy to set up with the following steps.

1. When setting up your fields in the form builder, identify the most important fields that you want to capture on the first form completion. For example, First Name, Last Name. Make sure “Always display” is unticked.
N.B. The ‘Email’ field must be set to ‘Always display’ for any form

2. Identify the next tier of fields to be collected, e.g. Job Title, Company. Ensure these are also not set to “Always Display”. In the ‘Progressive’ tab, select for these fields to only display when there is data for First Name and Last Name. This will grey the field in the field list and add a (c) to indicate a conditional field.

3. You can build out as many tiers as you like to capture new information on the third, fourth etc. visits. For example, you may want to display Phone, Country only when there are already values in the First Name, Last Name, Job Title, Company fields.

This type of form is particularly effective for scenarios where prospects are likely to complete a number of forms on your site, e.g. whitepaper downloads.

What Do I Do Next?

*Please note – this page has been updated to reflect Pardot’s name change to Account Engagement.