How to Understand Your Customer’s Digital Body Language

Digital trends are changing the way organisations market and sell. When potential customers are more likely to begin their research online, tools such as webinars offer an engaging and cost-effective way to educate people about a product or service.

They are also a great way to identify where customers are in their buying cycle and provide tailored support specific to each customer. The key, says Daniel Harrison, General Manager Customer Experience, Oracle Digital, is in bringing together marketing and sales to decipher the digital body language.

“Understanding what a prospect did at a webinar is very important to share actionable insights to your sales team,” Harrison says.

This is where what is often seen as the flaw of webinars transforms into a strength. It is not uncommon for some 40–60 per cent of registrants to not attend. Others may leave a few minutes in. The strength lies not only in the highly engaged audience who stay for the duration, but in how sales team engage with registrants after the event. Different ‘digital body language’ cues require different responses and levels of follow-up.

“A prospect who dropped off up early might respond well to an email proposing a different set of more appealing topics, while a highly engaged prospect who asked several questions shows high purchase intent — so a sales rep should follow-up quickly,” Harrison says.

In the non-digital world, the ‘one-size-fits-all’ process of gathering these insights is highly manual, open to misinterpretation and often not based on the needs of the customer. Oracle Digital has transformed this approach by developing an engagement methodology around the webinar and automating it to drive a personalised experience.

“By analysing digital body language from webinars, we aim to drive internal efficiency in making sure our sales reps are guided accordingly on the hot opportunities. By running webinars that nurture our audiences in a programmatic manner, we also looking to shorten sales cycles and improve win rates.”

For Harrison and his team, it is all about putting customers at the steering wheel.

“We see customers as the real innovators in the Experience Economy,” he says. “They force organisations to disrupt and rethink their product roadmap and go-to-market strategy.

With that in mind, Oracle Digital analyses clickstream data to shortlist webinar topics and uses the ON24 platform to ensure the audience is anything but a mere spectator.

“They can ask questions, and use live polls and surveys to provide real-time feedback. It’s particularly important for us to get the digital pulse of our customers so we can proactively connect with them at the right time in their buying cycle.”

The result is the alignment of sales and marketing that marries the quality outcomes of the former with the reach of the latter, creating a feedback loop that is better for everybody — especially the customer.

Daniel Harrison is presenting at Webinar World in Sydney on Thursday 2 May.

The best way to understand your audience’s digital body language? That’s through first-party data. Learn how you can collect, analyze and act on it in this on-demand webinar. [Watch Now]