There is a natural trade-off that each of us makes everyday between convenience and privacy. You can drive through the toll booth and sit in line with everyone else waiting to deposit your anonymous quarters or you can drive through the SpeedPass lane at 80 MPH and have your wireless toll tag charge your credit card. For pragmatists, this decision is easy. But consider for a moment all of the information that has been generated about you and with whom that information may be shared.

Who (or more precisely which vehicle) was driving on which highway at what toll booth traveling in a given direction at an exact point in time. If the trip passes through multiple toll booths then a driver’s route, progress, and even his/her speed can be calculated. Applying analytical processes to all of the historical data for an individual allows us to generate a profile of the driver. For example, based on the time of day that the driver passes through certain tolls, educated guesses can be made about the location of his/her work. And remember, this data can be combined with the existing demographic data already on file to improve the accuracy of these guesses. For example, the driver’s home address is already on file for billing purposes. Using this home address services like Zillow.com can determine the cost of the home and therefore the driver’s likely household income. If that the driver goes through the airport toll road towards the airport on average twice a week and returns the next day and you might begin to suspect that this person works in sales or is an executive and travels extensively for short overnight trips to visit clients. With every data point collected this profile becomes more and more accurate; correcting false assumptions over time.

Of course, this kind of profiling can be used for many purposes, some mutually beneficial, some downright creepy. For example, the toll plaza could flash traffic warnings to you when you pass through based on your historical driving route. City planners could use the data to justify the installation of so-called “Lexus Lanes” based on segmentation of the income level of drivers on a particular highway. Or an unscrupulous individual could use this information to target homes for burglary when it appears the owner is out of town (remember the airport toll road). The possibilities are endless.

Online marketers are using a similar approach to profile their prospects in order to better measure level of interest and to segment and qualify prospects before handing them over to their sales department. Marketers who leverage this technology effectively can provide a more targeted and relevant evaluation and purchasing experience to prospects who truly show interest in their offerings and avoid annoying those who are “just browsing”.

Let’s review the kinds of information that marketers can collect online to build this profile:

Behavioral
The moment a visitor lands on my website, his/her browser is “tagged” with a unique ID that allows me to recognize him/her upon return visits to my site (or even across multiple websites depending on the situation). Now every click the visitor ever makes on my website(s) can be associated with his/her anonmyous profile.

Implicit
In addition to click stream data, the visitor’s web-browser shares certain information about his/her environment including his/her operating system, browser type, screen size (iPad anyone?), and IP-address.

Here is what YOUR browser is telling us about you:

We can also see what page a visitor was viewing just prior to this page (called a referrer).
For example, the web page you viewed just before this one was :

3rd Party Data Enrichment

This IP-address can be used to help identify (with varying degrees of accuracy) both location and company affiliation of the visitor. The company affiliation is based on who actually owns the IP address assigned to the visitor’s machine. Consumers surfing from home will just show their ISP, but companies who are researching potential solutions from their corporate network will likely expose their company name just by viewing a webpage.

For example, this is what we have just learned from YOUR IP address :

Once a marketer is armed with a company name there are dozens of popular tools that can be used to enrich the data associated with that company including Google, Jigsaw, Hoovers, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, etc. Also, location information can be used to personalize the web experience to highlight things that are geographically relevent to the visitor (relevant local events, locations near them, etc).

Demographic

Of course, the only way to get truly personal data is by trading something of value (whitepaper, free software, webinar, etc.) in exchange for unmasking the visitor’s anonymity. Every piece of data entered into a webform is linked to the prospect profile and is used in conjunction with the behavioral data and 3rd party data to construct a 360-degree view of that prospect that continually evolves as more data points are collected over time.

Email Interactions
Once the prospect is associated with an email address we send personalized email campaigns designed specifically for that prospect’s market segment and track every open, click, and forward of that email message by utilizing a combination of images and hyperlink rewriting.

The ease with which this data can be collected online and the power that marketing automation platforms like LoopFuse can provide to leverage this information creates an extremely compelling opportunity to move marketing from a “spray and pray” methodology to a highly targeted engagement model that treats each prospect as an individual. Of course, individual web surfers who are adamant about their anonymity must pay a “convenience tax” by disabling cookies in their browsers, disabling images in their email clients, using anonymous proxies for surfing, and using throw away email addresses when signing up for things. The same inconvenience tax that must be paid by sitting in line at a toll booth. Anonymity is not extinct online, but marketing automation technology has put it on the endangered species list.