A Primer on Website Visitor ID and Smart Form Technology for Lead Generation

There’s a technology available that identifies company and prospect visitors to your websites, landing pages, and forms. Long available within marketing automation, these programs complement sales and lead scoring efforts, by allowing you to capture intelligence and follow-up with firms visiting your digital destinations.

There are two classifications of this type of technology:

1. Website ID: Tracking which firms or IP addresses visit your site
2. Smart Form: Tracking which firms or IP addresses fill out your web submit forms.

How it Works:

When someone visits your site, a javascript tracking code shoots a cookie to the user’s computer. Analytics packages do this all the time to measure website performance. Taking it to the next level, tools and platforms exist that cross-reference the IP visitor with company ID if known, and in the case of a web form, prospect ID. Many of the visitors may come from general ISPs which are not useful, but when the firms are identified, that’s when it’s advisable to strike when “the irons are hot”

Because of how cookie’s work, among the additional intelligence that can be gathered are what keywords visitors used to find your site, what location (so you can assign sales reps), time zone, how many pages visited, what pages were visited, etc. Because of that’s gathered, this technology can be a powerful tool for engaging prospects, although one could say it’s a fine line between capturing prospect behavior and privacy concerns. But again, this information is tied to a company visit; not a user visit. The tools make it easier to ID companies and prospects who work at those companies, by combining those IP lookups and visiting companies with data from various online contact databases and LinkedIn, therefore making it easier to contact the “who” rather than the “what.”

Here are some screen shots of the kinds of information you can track from various platforms:

This is VisitorTrack, a program developed by netFactor Corporation. Here, you can see the types of information gathered purely from a site visit, and what additional intelligence can be gathered. I like the search engine and search phrase features. You can capture contact info from Jigsaw and LinkedIn, and then easily contact those visitors or potential prospects. Sales people can be alerted immediately when activity occurs. JumpLead, Leadlander, LeadsExplorer and ProspectVision have similar functionality.

Here’s an example of Loopfuse Marketing Automation. Here I can see how people from CDW Computer Centers navigated my website or clicked on email links via my lead nurturing efforts. Additional intelligence is available via integrations with Hoovers and Jigsaw. Plus you can research trigger events with Google.

Here’s ReachForce. The issue here is improving conversion rates while capturing intelligence. By limiting form fields, conversions increase. The downside of limiting for fields is the lack of prospect intelligence gathered. That’s where ReachForce and DemandBase (below) fill in the missing “fields” by matching the company name of the visitor via form field with much more information on that visitor, compiled through numerous online sources and databases.

DemandBase has a similar structure. By only asking for just a few required fields, additional intelligence is gathered via IP addresses.

DemandBase integrates with Analytics packages and Salesforce as well, allowing you to track website activity of classifications of companies. This data allows you to make recommendations on the kinds of companies that are most engaged with your website or landing pages.

So What Can You Do With This?

Well, a number of things.

• Identify the types of firms visiting your websites, landing pages, and blogs via search marketing and social media, and focus on the industries or company sizes most engaged with your site and content.
• For straight visitor ID opportunities, if you reach out to a prospect, you do have to be careful. Although these audiences visited your pages, they may not be ready for engagement and thus could be in the research only phase of their solution search, otherwise they would have submitted their email address. How you structure your follow-up needs to be treated delicately. Be honest with the prospect. Mention you use a tool that tracks company visits, and you just wanted to learn about the intent. Feel free to offer these prospects a white paper, and if they accept, put them into a nurturing sequence. The search engine keyword identification can be a valuable tool to guide the conversion.
• For Webform ID opportunities, these audiences are a real inquiry, since they submitted an email address for a paper, demo, registration, or trial. The smart form technology allows you to specifically engage with the prospect, have better conversations, and allows an easier qualification or lead scoring process based on keyword, company size, industry type, and other information gathered without having to rely on web form fields.

The technologies described above are very useful tools for both marketing and sales. By gathering intelligence on visitors, the time saved in lead qualification is evident. I just touched on the tip of the iceberg, so please visit each solution for more information. I would be happy to discuss them in detail as a reseller, and represent you if there’s a technology you’d like to consider purchasing.