10 #Profiling Tips

Check out CANDDi’s top tips for succesful customer profiling

#Tip1: Care about data

The hype about ‘big data’ is more than hype. Why should you care about data? Because it’s data that will enable you to improve the way you sell online.

How do you show you care about data? Having lots of anonymous information floating around your database is no good to you. So organize it, segment it, and use it.

Building profiles on who is interested in your offerings can help you convert leads you never knew you had, as well as helping you improve your offerings, and SEO, to attract new prospects.

CANDDi Core creates an individual profile for each unique visitor to your website based on the data trail they leave. All their behaviour from every visit is recorded and a rich profile of who they are and what they want from you is ready for your sales team.

#Tip2: Get serious about your website

New research from the US suggests that as many as 63% of small businesses in the States are without a website. This figure is likely similar for Europe too, and should be worrying for SMEs trying to sell in the web era.

All businesses should be aware of the importance of selling and marketing themselves online. If prospects can’t find you, your losing out.

Get serious online; build an attractive and user friendly website and promote it with SEO and social media. Trust us, the investment is worth it for the leads an online presence will bring.

#Tip3: Drive, drive, drive traffic

If there’s no traffic hitting your site apart from your company staff, then you can’t unlock the value profiling can offer.

Making an effort to drive traffic to your website is something even small businesses need to be engaging in. Running optimised SEO campaigns and using Google Adwords, even with a small budget, is essential to putting profiling into action.

Marketing also plays a big part here. Email campaigns can be a great source of valuable traffic if you have quality subscriber lists, and using social media to drive people to interesting content on your website is free. Use as many avenues as possible to get traffic onto your site so you can start profiling!

#Tip4: Learn your web visitors

When you start profiling, it’s important to begin to understand what these visitors are doing - and crucially what they’re trying to do; what they’re looking for from your website and your business.

Doing this isn’t possible without help from analytics software - since you need to have the ability to see the entire journey of each web visitor and then begin segmenting these according to what’s important for your business.

But looking at and learning broad trends such as your website traffic and popular web pages simply isn’t enough to help you sell better online, and make your website live up to it’s potential.

Using CANDDi you will learn what type of behaviour is prospect behaviour on your site, and not only see the behaviour as abstract trends, but be able to classify it to individuals, helping you target sell through your website. We also send you automatic email updates when activity or people you’ve previously defined as ‘interesting’ occurs or arrives at your site.

#Tip5: Use segmented groups to streamline your selling

When your website visitors can be grouped by criteria that makes it easy to differentiate who is a prospect, and who is not, your sales process becomes more efficient straight away as resources are re-deployed to high value opportunities.

Defining what kind of prospect a web visitor is and grouping them accordingly is just as important as separating your prospects from non-prospects (staff, competitors, researchers, suppliers, partners etc).

CANDDi Core allows you to create customised streams for grouping prospects who look similar together, based on whatever behaviour or identity information is important to you.

For example you can group and filter prospects by which product pages they’ve viewed or how many times they’ve returned to your site, which gives you a much better way of identifying and targeting prospects further down your sales funnel.

#Tip6: Make profiles your first point of call

Every day, before your sales team start targeting any potential prospects, make sure they check the profiles of prospects, and groups they have segmented, who are hitting your site.

Repeat visits from prospects you may have thought were dead may actually reveal interesting activity that warrants a phone call or email, or they may see a hot new prospect they can interact with on real time on your site, for example.

CANDDi makes this kind of sales prioritisation easy by sending summary emails of the day’s activity to your sales people, and notifying them immediately if interesting prospect behaviour is happening on the website, so your sales team can interact with that individual in real time, and maximise the possibility of a conversion from the start of their journey with you.

#Tip7: Act on what profiles tell you

If you’ve used CANDDi to group and label some interesting profiles as prospects for product A, but a large number of profiles in this group are leaving your site or failing to convert, make changes to improve the web experience for the whole group.

For example, you might find that profiles who all visit product page A are leaving the site after this page. This either tells you that your PPC adds for this product are misleading, or that this page needs to be improved to keep prospects going through the funnel online.

Consider using CANDDi to pop-up a particular question such as ‘what exactly are you looking for?’ or re-writing the whole page for this prospect group. using CANDDi dynamic content.

#Tip8: Keep profiling after the sale

Profiling website visitors is not only useful for identifying prospects and targeting sales resources effectively.

Your prospect visitor profiles should be moved to customer profile groups after the sale takes place, and these should then be monitored for the long-term.

The aim is to use the information profiling shows you not only to sell your product once, but also to check if your customers are still engaging with you online and if there is potential for cross-selling and re-selling partnerships.

Using customer profiles to see what gets the most attention on your site is another reason to keep profiles active.

#Tip9: Use profiles imaginatively

All the rich information that profiling website visitors using CANDDi software provides is multi-functional and should be used to it’s full potential.

CANDDi can send automatic emails to website visitors that demonstrate prospect behaviour or complete certain actions like an enquiry, but you could also use profile information to target your marketing campaigns to people who are specifically interested in a particular type of content (you’ve seen them looking at it before).

Profiling has the potential to make so many of your sales and marketing processes more effective, so use the activity and identity data they collect on each individual creatively.

#Tip10: Target feedback, not just sales

Using individual web visitor profiles, you can target feedback questions that help your business understand the experience of interesting individuals on your website.

This can be done using CANDDi Questions popping up a half page, intuitively designed question box asking specific queries to visitors that help you understand what they think of your website experience, or whatever specifics you want feedback on!