What is a connected profile?
A connected profile, meaning an Audience Profile for which Hum has both behavioral data and an email address, is one of the most important parts of your data asset.
Why are connected profiles valuable?
A connected profile enables you to know what a person in your audience is engaging with, what actions they’re taking, and provides you with a means of getting in touch with them directly.
At scale, a segment of connected profiles will provide your organization with a wider range of campaigns and activations that can directly drive revenue. While a segment of connected profiles can obviously be used for things like targeted email campaigns, it can also be expanded upon and used on digital advertising platforms as a custom or lookalike audience.
We call connected profiles “digital gold,” as they provide long term value and a lot of flexibility.
Successful Hum clients engage in ongoing efforts to build connected profiles, as these provide a solid foundation for launching a wide array of campaigns.
How does Hum create connected profiles?
- By looking for and recording email addresses on web forms – ie. an sso or login form, or one of Hum’s live engagement campaigns
- Through users clicking links from client marketing emails or newsletters that contain a special string. Talk to your Customer Success team about setting these up.
It’s important to prioritize getting Hum’s JavaScript beacon up and running on your site to start building connected profiles early and often. Similarly, your Customer Success team will work with you early on to set-up email links that can build connected profiles.
Why did my connected profile count drop off?
There tends to be an initial rush of connected profile growth that eventually tapers off to something of a trickle. There will be seasonal events that drive spikes here and there – a large annual meeting registration or membership renewal, for example.
It’s important to remember that every organization has an engaged audience of a certain size, and often we see connected profile growth slowing as a client connects a critical mass of their engaged audience. As such, it’s important to keep running campaigns and activations with the intention of building and growing your connected profile count.
Successful Tactics to Grow Connected Profiles
1. Leverage Your Email Newsletter
Most Hum customers have one, if not many, daily or weekly email newsletters sent to large segments of their audience. Most of these newsletters include the same template with the same standard links, or are assembled and built in an automated fashion.
Including Hum’s connected profile links on newsletter templates or updating the programmatic settings to include Hum’s connected profile link string typically requires relatively low investment, but can have a large impact.
Looking for inspiration?
Hum worked with the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) to automatically generate connected profile links for their daily newsletter, resulting in a 1,233% increase in connected profiles in 2 weeks.
2. Large Lists & High Click Emails
Take a look at your calendar of upcoming marketing sprints or high value digital initiatives for your organization and identify activities that are likely to have large email sends associated with them. These will be a valuable source of connected profiles.
There’s no wrong type of email to use, and it’s wise to consider which types of emails might have a large list and above average click through rate. Some examples of these types of messages are often transactional in nature, think: membership renewal campaigns, emails about promotional sales and deals, or annual meeting and event registration communications.
You can also launch a small email campaign that’s purpose-built to drive clicks. Thinking of launching a new product or looking for feedback on your latest special issue? You’d be amazed at how many in your audience are eager to click through and provide feedback or answer a short 3-5 question survey. (Especially if there’s a reward on the line for their input!)
Ensure that Hum’s connected profile string is included on all high-profile text, image, and button links pointing back to your digital properties.
https://website.com?utm_campaign=AnnualEvent24&utm_source=Email&nbd=*|EIUD|*&nbd_source=mc
3. Launch Live Engagement Campaigns
Every live engagement campaign with a lead generation form in Hum will help build connected profiles. Anonymous users that provide an email address become connected profiles.
But these live engagement campaigns can also be deployed for the express purpose of driving connected profile growth.
The most common tactic is to offer something of value to a segment of your anonymous audience in exchange for them providing their information. This could be a newsletter subscription, a discount code for an upcoming event or a product, or a “special collection” of content that’s been bundled together and packaged as a digital download.
You might also consider segmenting your anonymous a bit more granularly to offer a better chance of converting anonymous profiles to connected. Consider building a segment of your anonymous profiles with a high engagement score and using this as the target audience for a simple value exchange lead generation campaign.
Looking for inspiration?
The Cyber-Risk Alliance (CRA) used a live engagement campaign in Hum to retarget people who had accessed their content in the last 60 days, serving them a pop-up call to action the next time they visited the website. They generated 1,000 new newsletter sign-ups in three months, resulting in many connected profiles for previously unknown readers.