Salespeople and marketers always look for ways to engage prospects and customers better digitally. They want to understand the effectiveness of that engagement.
Several applications are designed to track and measure engagement with text, video, audio, presentations, proposals, and more.
In some cases, engagement information can be visible to salespeople inside their CRM system.
By understanding how much time someone spent viewing a digital asset or seeing what specific pages or video segments someone focused on, a salesperson can decide whom to follow up with and where to steer conversations.
With certain platform combinations, marketers can use the same engagement data to automatically re-score leads or to assign leads to a specific list or campaign.
Of course, engagement level is not an exact science, as someone can scroll to a page in a tracked brochure and then walk away for coffee. The data will show they were “most interested” in that page.
Nevertheless, valuable insight can be gained by tracking prospect and customer engagement with your company’s assets.
1. Tracking Video Engagement
Wistia is an established video hosting application for business.
It is not a replacement for YouTube — marketers should continue to upload videos to YouTube, since it’s the world’s second largest search engine.
However, YouTube only provides some high-level, aggregate statistics that show how videos are generally performing:
Among the things that set Wistia apart from YouTube is that Wistia provides user-level engagement reports. It’s possible to see how much of a video each person watched and what parts they re-watched.
When Wistia is integrated with a marketing automation system, the email addresses of converted visitors can be linked to a viewing session.
This means individual engagement can be seen within marketing automation systems such as Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot. Salespeople can also view this information within a CRM system based on the combination of marketing automation and CRM systems.
Wistia offers several other features and benefits not provided by YouTube, such as creating a turnstile, which asks for an email address before playing the video. Here is a list of Wistia features.
2. Tracking Audio Engagement
Wistia filled a significant gap by announcing an audio engagement solution.
Tracking audio engagement, particularly for podcasts, has been elusive. Traditionally, a podcast has been a unidirectional RSS broadcast with little meaningful data returned.
However, with Wistia’s podcasting tool, listening stats for known customers and prospects are now available to marketers and salespeople.
If a salesperson sends a prospect a link to a Wistia-hosted podcast episode, the salesperson can find out whether the prospect listened to the episode at all—and if they did listen to it, what parts did they listen to.
3. Tracking Slide Deck and Document Engagement
Attach from Cirrus Insight is an application that applies some of the Wistia principles to documents and slide presentations.
A salesperson can send a document or a slideshow to a customer or prospect and see which pages or slides the recipient viewed and how much time they spent on each page or slide.
Files can be uploaded from a local drive, DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Box.
Once a file is uploaded, any number of links to the file can be created. Links can be specific to an individual email address. Alternatively, a Custom link can prompt anyone who wants to access a file — via a web page, email link, tweet, etc. — for contact information.
If an email address (and other contact information) is required, collected data can be synced to a CRM or marketing automation system via Zapier or using one of several native integrations offered by Attach. There are other available link options, including whether the file is downloadable and whether there’s a link expiration date.
Both aggregate and individual engagement can be viewed. The particular activity information is very granular. In the following example, you can see that this person looked at slides 1 – 8 and then stopped after viewing slide 8 for three seconds:
Attach does not offer the same native, bi-directional integration with Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot that Wistia offers.
Direct Salesforce integration is available, but sales users should be set up as users within Attach to view detailed engagement information.
