How identifying our web visitors helped us make their lives easier and our business stronger.
With every passing day, it seems like a new platform or technology is redefining how marketers reach audiences and influence action. This is perhaps most evident in the sheer size of the MarTech landscape, with a 40% increase to 5,381 companies over the past year.
Our Sales & Marketing Solutions are part of this ever-evolving landscape, which requires us to constantly evaluate new technologies to provide our customers with the best possible experiences. In fact, we’ve recently been experimenting with D&B Visitor Intelligence to make it easier for our web visitors to find what they want on our site and feed more intelligence to our marketing team in order to make data-inspired decisions. D&B Visitor Intelligence unmasks anonymous visitors by matching digital identifiers to the D-U-N-S® Number.
So, what did we do and what did we learn?
Test One: Pre-Fill Web Forms
Result: Increased Conversion Rates
We started fairly small. Using D&B Visitor Intelligence, we pre-populated firmographic and persona fields on a contact form for a D&B Credit Free Trial offer.
The solution identified approximately one-third of our web visitors, pre-filling three of the nine fields with attributes like company name, address, and zip right when visitors landed on the page.
Our hypothesis was that any initial shock of “How did they know that?” would be outweighed by a feeling of “Hey, that was easy!” when visitors realized they would only need to complete half of the fields manually. And that’s exactly what happened.
When we weren’t able to pre-fill the form, nearly 31% of visitors to the page sent us their information. But like-for-like, the partially pre-filled form was completed 37% of the time. That’s a 19% increase in conversion rate. During the time in which we ran the test, it generated 130 leads from that one page alone. Needless to say, we were pleased with the results.
Test Two: Identify Anonymous Website Traffic
Result: Attributed $133M in Pipeline
With the majority of the buyer journey taking place online, it’s imperative that we as marketers better understand how customers are interacting across our digital properties. In an effort to connect web visitor activity with current pipeline, we took a two-week sample of web traffic and attempted to tie it to current opportunities in our pipeline.
We saw 150,000 anonymous visits to our website and able to identify 50,000 of them. Of those identified visitors, we were able to tie 5,800 to a Domestic Ultimate D-U-N-S Number – the unique identifier for the headquarter location of those visitors. We found that those 5,800 represented 1,500 current customers and 4,300 prospects. At the opportunity level, this translated into a total of 615 active opportunities worth $133M in pipeline.
We’re now exploring how we can best communicate this information to our sales teams so they can engage in more relevant conversations based on the pages and products our customers are browsing through on our site. This will empower sellers to accelerate and simplify the buyer journey for these prospects.
Test Three: Personalize Content by Persona
Result: Double the Response
The D-U-N-S Number is powerful because it enables us to track a web visitor’s location and industry – as well as where they fit within any larger, global parent organization.
But D&B Visitor Intelligence can often go even further and provide us with useful information about the individual, too. A visitor’s identity is always anonymized, but we can still get a decent understanding of their job function and level of seniority within the organization.
This helped us tailor our website content in real-time, ensuring customers found what they wanted quickly – which is when we started to see conversion figures start to accelerate.
When we had information on a visitor’s role, we matched them to a buyer persona segment that we created in Adobe Target. For example, CFOs or credit analysts saw our offerings for finance professionals. Sales and marketing directors saw something completely different and more relevant to their needs.
And although the numbers vary by persona, the result was an almost two-fold likelihood that a web visitor would contact us. On average, around 0.9% of visitors to our website filled in a form and 1.3% used our online chat facility for a combined figure of 2.2%. But when we personalized our web content – adjusting for display traffic – this figure leapt to 5.2%.
That’s an average increase of 136% – more than doubling the response rate – and for some personas, the figure’s higher still.
How Are We Planning on Using Web Visitor Information in the Future?
While we’re already offering D&B Visitor Intelligence to our customers right now, the exciting part is that we’re continually experimenting both in-house and with our customers to uncover new, innovative ways to provide value.
- Lead Mining and Sales Follow Up
Our customers have utilized D&B Workbench Data Optimizer to find net new contact email addresses at companies identified by D&B Visitor Intelligence. These contacts are then sent to the inside sales teams to proactively advance opportunities with in-market audiences that are actively browsing digital properties. By matching web traffic to company sites, we can gain a clearer idea of what our clients are interested in and where there might be needs that we can help satisfy.
- Better Attribution by Connecting Online and Offline Data
Identifying a web visitor’s D-U-N-S Number allows us to tie online and offline interactions together in our CRM. We’ve discovered digital, or in-person interactions, as much as six months earlier can impact when an opportunity arises. This allows us to attribute success to digital ad campaigns and event sponsorships we’ve invested in.
- Smarter Retargeting
In addition to identifying potential prospects, D&B Visitor Intelligence can tell us which visitors are unlikely to become customers. By having visibility into audience profiles, we can direct ad retargeting to focus solely on the audiences that matter – and save precious retargeting dollars. For example, the less media budget we waste retargeting students, competitors and job applicants, the more we have to spend in areas that can generate a return.
- Improving Lead Routing Accuracy
Until now, all phone numbers on our website led to a Small & Medium Business Sales Advisor. Soon, we’ll be using D&B Visitor Intelligence and Adobe’s Audience Manager DMP to identify site visitors from companies in our Enterprise tier, as well. When we do, we’ll swap out the phone number for one that rings directly to our Enterprise sales team.
Like many of our D&B Visitor Intelligence customers, we’re in the early stages of the journey. We’re still in the process of exploring all the ways we can use the information at our disposal to streamline the buyer journey and delight our customers with better experiences.
Once, we only knew two thousand out of every million web visitors. Now, that figure is somewhere over three hundred thousand. And the potential value of that to our business – and to our customers – is practically limitless.
Learn how you can leverage D&B Visitor Intelligence to better understand your web traffic, improve experiences on your website, and ultimately – generate more revenue for your business.