Progressive Profiling in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Using SSJS

What is Progressive Profiling?

In today's world is all about data. The more you get the data the more you get to know about your customers. Progressive profiling is a great way to gather data about your customers / prospects /leads. It helps you add information to your customer profile over the time without overwhelming them and turning them away. Here is a nice article from Salesforce on How to Use Progressive Profiling to Build Better Customer Experiences.

Progressive Profiling in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

It is an out of box feature when it comes to Pardot. But, unfortunately it isn't the same way for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The out of box smart capture form is a stone age feature. So, we would need to develop a custom solution in cloud pages.

Use case for Progressive Profile:

We have a landing page/cloud page,

• First time when a user visits our landing page, we will just display a simple form with First Name, Last Name & Email Address

• Second time when the same user visits in the same browser, we will display the same form but with a Welcome Back message.

• If a customer submits the form and visits next time, we will show a different form like company name & do you like our service.

Logic For Progressive Profile:

• When user visits first time to our landing page we will just set a cookie.

• Next time if the user visits the same landing page then we will check if any existing cookie is present. If yes, then we will show Welcome message with form.

• When a user submits the form we will add the values into a data extension including cookie.Next time, when the same user visits we will check if the cookie is present in data extension. If yes, then we will show up different form.

Create a data extension to store the form values:

Below is the code which accomplish our use case (view code snippet):

Demo:

Below is the demo video for the above progressive profile use case:

For demo purpose, I couldn't able to close the browser. But it works the same even if you close the browser and comes back after long time as well. You will see a new form only when you clear all your browser history / cookies or go to the same landing page with a different browser.

Considerations:

• Make sure you are aware of GDRP law. Always show up a consent and display to track the cookie. Also, check with your legal team if any other information is required.

• Check out Google Chrome Same Site Cookie change in terms of Marketing Cloud. You would just need to tweak the above code in SSJS according to Salesforce Doc. Else it will not work for Chrome version 76 or later.

• If you clear your cache or if you come from a different browser then it will generate a new cookie.

Hope you got some idea about how to implement Progressive Profiling in Marketing Cloud.

Happy Learning!