The data that allows you to target the appropriate audience with the right message at the right time is the key to a fantastic customer experience. And the more information you have about a potential buyer, the more you can tailor your messaging to their specific needs and interests.
However, 97 to 98% of the typical website’s visitors are anonymous, meaning they have never provided their email addresses. These may be first-time visitors to your website, as well as returning visitors who have not yet been added to your CRM.
As part of their customization plan to motivate these people to take action, firms with such a huge number of visitors must understand their purpose and preferences in real-time. While you may believe that just 2 % of your audience is recognizable, this does not necessarily imply that you know nothing about the other 98 % or that you cannot personalize your communication with them.
Through tactics like as cookie-matching, browser activity monitoring, reverse IP identification, data onboarding, contextual targeting, and user tracking analytics, marketers may fill in the gaps in their anonymous visitor profiles and decrease the number of really anonymous individuals.
Unknown Unknowns, Known Unknowns, and Known Knowns
The word “unknown users” suggests that you know nothing about such individuals, thus the term “unknown.” Sure, you don’t know their personal information until they provide it, but with the vast quantity of data that currently exists on each website visitor, can you honestly consider them to be anonymous?
I would argue that within the category we refer to as “unknown users,” there exists a subset of those who may be labelled known unknowns. These are individuals you do not know by name or email, but can recognize using implicit and contextual information.
In general, this data may be obtained from three sources:
- Self-reported through web forms, online surveys, etc.
- Based on browser habits, geolocation, etc., digitally depleted.
- Profiling by means of third-party data sources, cookie-matching technology, etc.
A browser’s local storage and DOM events can be used to register event handlers or listeners and constantly monitor online behaviour, cookies are commonly used for tracking users and learning about their browsing history, and reverse IP technology can be used to learn about the individual’s characteristics, and there are even ways to track user behaviour without cookies.
By gathering, aggregating, and analyzing data from many sources, context and purpose may be uncovered, and enterprises should learn how to use this data to provide better digital experiences.
Customer segmentation agency gleaned from anonymous visitors may be used to generate contextualized marketing communications. And with time, you learn more and more about your anonymous visitors based on their browsing activity, the frequency of their visits, their interests, etc. These hundreds of micro-actions should be used to create detailed client profiles, ascertain the purpose, and discover specific preferences.
To successfully utilize anonymous visitor data for online customization, three essential conditions must be satisfied:
- Comprehensiveness — Data should be exhaustive and of high quality, gathered from as many touchpoints as feasible.
- Instead of being compartmentalized, data sources from numerous channels should be harmonized and centralized.
- Actionability – The platform must enable the usage of all available data in real-time to affect message and targeting.
You can support more relevant and timely customization as you gather more data over the course of several visits and activities. By integrating, matching, and synchronizing the contextual data described above with anonymous visitor IDs, this vast bucket of “unknown unknowns” is gradually reduced over time.
Sum up
If you don’t have to, you shouldn’t ignore big segments of your users. The fact that a visitor is “anonymous” does not always imply that you have less information to work with on them.
In reality, anonymous visitors are always leaving traces for you to follow, and providing them with the identical experience is a major wasted chance to pleasure them.
