In today’s digital era, clients interact with businesses through lots of channels; they browse sites; chat with bots in Viber; post in social media; call your support line; get targeted with email messages and push notifications to their smartphones.
Do you know the entire customer journey for a client?
Do you know which of the interactions matters the most?
Sitefinity and Sitefinity Insight can help you become a marketing hero by utilizing its Customer Profiling features to easily answer those questions.
Planning your customer profiling is a very important step in your digital marketing as it is the foundation for successful optimizations in the next phases. Let’s have a look how 360-degree contact profiling can be implemented with the Sitefinity platform and go through different sources of information.
Web Channel
Building a website is one of the easiest ways to start your digital presence. By building a site with Sitefinity you get tracking and profiling for your contacts out of the box. How does it work?
Each visit of your site is tracked regardless of whether the user has identified himself of remained anonymous. The visitor might interact for days and weeks with your site, and all of his interactions are accumulated in an anonymous profile until he/she submits a form with any demographic information like email, first name, last name, job title, etc. In case the visitor is using multiple devices and submits the same email address from each of them, those anonymous sessions are merged. Should the visitor register and login to the site in different anonymous browsing sessions, they are merged as well.
All of the out-of-the-box Sitefinity widgets report their interactions to Sitefinity Insight, but as Sitefinity provides you with great extensibility, maybe you’ve decided to build your own custom widgets. If that is the case do not forget to track them in Sitefinity Insight to have a complete customer journey. Here is how.
Forms are usually very good source of contact profile information. Plan carefully. What are the most interesting resources of your site? These are good candidates to be gated with a form that targets contact data collection, but of course don’t overdo it. Short or progressive forms usually have better conversion rates in terms of form submission. Bear in mind that more contacts doesn’t necessary mean more dollars—analyze the different stages in your business and collect just the needed data to move the contact down in the funnel, where the probability to engage is higher.
Mobile Applications
Mobile applications usually mean deeper interest in your product. The website has done its job, it has convinced the visitor that your services or products are valuable and he/she has decided to keep a closer eye on your offerings through the mobile app. That is a brilliant option for you to track his/her interest and interactions. Sitefinity Insight offers the NativeScript SDK that makes it easy to report data to your customer journey database. If you’re interested in how to utilize the already collected data for personalization in your mobile app, you can check out our “Omni-channel Personalization for Your Mobile App and Web Site” post.
If you have decided to go native with your mobile applications you can still submit data to Sitefinity Insight via its REST API.
CRM Systems
CRM systems store a lot of valuable information, information for purchases, phone calls, support cases, contact details, etc. The purchases are usually the end goal for businesses, so all marketing initiatives and optimizations aim for an increase in the purchases. How do you measure the success of marketing effort if you don’t have this data? By importing the CRM data to Sitefinity Insight you make it possible to define Conversion Tracking reports and grasp which things work well and what you should optimize. Sitefinity Insight offers out-of-the-box data integration capabilities with popular systems like SalesForce and Eloqua, CSV uploads and an easy to use .NET SDK and REST API that allow you to integrate CRM data.
Marketing Automation Systems
Sitefinity along with Sitefinity Insight can help you in your marketing automation efforts in the following ways:
- You can filter contact profiles based on lots of criteria and export them to CSV, which later can be used in the Sitefinity Email Marketing module or other marketing automation systems for an email shot. The list of contacts that has been emailed can be imported to Sitefinity Insight to keep their journey complete.
- Should the client land on a page of your Sitefinity site, Sitefinity Insight will automatically recognize that the client is coming from a mail campaign due to the utm parameter left in the URL address.
- The detailed statistics for a given campaign (Delivered, Bounced, Opened, etc.) can be uploaded to Sitefinity Insight to allow you to better plan your next campaigns.
Webinars
How do you know which Webinar attendee has engaged further with your Business? It is as simple as uploading a CSV containing the list of attendees in Sitefinity Insight to easily cross-reference webinar attendance with your global conversion rates.
Contact Profiling is Not Only for Marketers!
A fun story about Sitefinity Insight's profiling is how it helped us hire a new member for our Engineering team 😊. After a number of interviews with candidates we got an email notification from Sitefinity Insight's Lead Scoring stating that we have a new very hot lead showing deep interest in Sitefinity Insight, he actually read every single article about the product. As all visitor’s interactions were aggregated, we could see his complete journey and track, in real time, which articles he was reading at each moment. Even though there was other team content available, he read information only for our product, and this showed us his dedication and enthusiasm to join the team. Guess what? We hired him! 😊