Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms

progressive profiling for gravity forms

Some questions you may have...

Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin which enables progressive profiling functionality on nominated forms and also the prefilling of form fields.

Progressive profiling is the process of collecting more information from a user from consecutive completions of the form. So for example the first time the user completes the form you might ask for their name, email, phone number and a custom message, but then the second time they complete the form you might ask for their email, job title, size of their company and the custom message.

See what we did? Why bother asking for the name, phone number and other boiler plate information if we already know it! All we need is a unique way of identifying the user (which is primarily done via the email field) and this enables us to ask for additional information about the user the next time they complete the form. This is great for users because it saves them completing forms which will equate to a higher conversion rate of your forms, but it also can benefit you as it enables you to collect new information from additional completions of the form. It is a win-win situation and there’s no reason why progressive profiling shouldn’t be implemented on pretty much all of your forms.

We believe in the relationship between your customer/client and your company, it should be respected and natural. If you are getting to know someone for the first time you don’t ask them for their most personal details, you save this after you have gotten to know them a bit more. You don’t want to chase away a customer by asking them more questions than on a tax return! With the power of progressive profiling, marketers and website owners can over time gather more lead intelligence whilst increasing lead conversions. Progressive profiling can help nurture lead workflows and can assist marketers by helping to identify leads at various stages of the buying cycle. This makes Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms a great plugin to work with existing CRM or email marketing systems you may use.

progressive profiling form example

Progressive Profiling can be used to:

  • Make your consecutive form submissions pack a bigger punch. Re-convert and re-nurture dead or flailing leads with new offers.
  • Better nurture leads by retrieving more information which can be used to better segment and identify leads in the purchasing process.
  • Because new and old website visitors will see different versions of your form you can increase conversions for both of these audiences. This is particularly valuable for referral traffic from paid advertising, search engine traffic or from social media.
  • Make surveys and other typically long-winded forms more bearable for visitors. What if you just asked one survey question instead of 20? Imagine how many people would complete that form!

Here are some of our hot tips:

  • Ask the most important questions first
  • Start with easy non-obtrusive questions and then get into more detailed and pertinent questions to establish a rapport
  • If producing a progressive profiling form for a lead, link your questions to the sales cycle you have defined in your CRM system

Good question!Progressive profiling requires some method for the form to know if the form has been previously submitted or not. Progressive profiling utilises browser cookies to store information on previous form submissions to your site and utilising this information the plugin performs its smart logic to conditionally hide and show fields. What this does mean is if a user clears their browser cookies the gravity form will be reset to the starting position again.

Don’t like cookies? Well in the plugin settings we have another way you can use our Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms plugin which is storing the users IP address in your database. This can be set in the main plugin settings (Forms > Settings > Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms). The advantage of using cookies is that it saves a bit of space in your database because the data doesn’t need to be stored in the database and it also makes it easier to test the progressive profiling feature yourself because you can just clear the cookies to reset the form to its starting position. The advantage of storing this data in the database is that it doesn’t use cookies so it might make EU regulatory compliance easier for you (although pretty much every website uses cookies one way or another), and it means if a user clears their cookies the form will still have their previous information. However because the database option uses an IP address to identify the user it does mean if the user is using a proxy server or if they simply change location/wifi access points the form will reset to the starting position. Because of this it is generally recommended to use the cookie method (which is the default method).

Step 1 – In your form settings activate progressive profiling for your form. Progressive profiling can be activated on a per a form basis.

enable progressive profiling for gravity forms

Step 2 – Go to your form editor and go to the advanced tab. You will see a new section with the heading ‘Progressive Profiling’. There are 2 parts to these options. The first is what should happen once the field has been previously submitted and you are presented with 4 options:

  1. Show the field again with no value – this is good if you want the user to edit the field again with a new value
  2. Show the field again prefilled with previously entered value – this is good if you want to enable the user to edit their previous entry value
  3. Do not show the field, show on entries and notifications – this is good in a typical progressive profiling environment where you want to hide the field after it has been submitted, and with this option enabled the previous value is shown on the form entry and email notification
  4. Do not show the field, hide on entries and notifications – this is good in a typical progressive profiling environment where you want to hide the field after it has been submitted, and with this option enabled this field won’t be shown on entries and notifications

The other option is a conditional logic section which will only show the field if all/any of the nominated fields have been previously completed. You can create as many field conditions as you would like. Please note the fields you can select from here are only from the form you are editing – you can’t choose fields from another form as the progressive profiling is form specific.

progressive profiling field options

Step 3 – After a form has been submitted you will receive your typical Gravity Forms notifications and on the form entry page you will see an additional ‘Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms’ meta box which contains the date a field has been last changed and if it has been seen by the user or not.

custom meta field history gravity forms

The short answer is yes absolutely! In fact we designed this plugin to work with our very own Pardot to Gravity Forms Connector plugin which can connect Gravity Forms to the popular marketing automation software Pardot. But providing the plugin uses a pretty typical integration setup with Gravity Forms it should work fine on other plugins which may integrate with email marketing and CRM packages.

Awesome functionality at an affordable price!

The Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms plugin provides a powerful WordPress Plugin that can increase form conversions by making them more digestible whilst enabling you to collect new information from form recipients.

Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms includes free updates for 1 year and the plugin can be renewed for continual updates if necessary.

Note
Gravity Forms and WordPress are separate products and not owned or managed by Northern Beaches Websites.

Terms and Conditions
Important: Please read the terms and conditions for Progressive Profiling for Gravity Forms here.

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