I have a question for you: Have you ever participated in an Adwords campaign (or other form of paid search) for the purpose of on-line lead generation or to sell your products through a shopping cart? Were you really happy with the results? Did you come away saying, “I don’t think this really works?” What about an email campaign that you put a lot of time, effort and expense into, specifically designing a strong call-to-action and a link to your website only to be frustrated that the lead generation results were dismal at best?

I’ve run across many clients that have experienced these same frustrations. When they looked at their website analytics they found that many people simply abandoned after clicking through. You spent a lot of money getting people interested enough to make that click, but then sent them to a website page that simply didn’t offer them what they were looking for. And guess what, it is estimated that you have less than three seconds to make an impression, perhaps the first and only impression that the visitor will get of your company and what you have to offer. If they don’t see what they want, you’ve lost them.

An optimized landing page (sometimes referred to as an offer page) is one viable solution to this problem. If all you’re doing is sending the person that clicked on your link to the Home page of your website, you’re forcing them to find what they were initially interested in with lots of clicking and perhaps even some frustration. Of all the products and services you may offer, they were really only looking for the specific one you mentioned in your email/direct mail or what they typed into their search query and since they didn’t find it immediately, they abandoned your site.

A landing page on the other hand is very specific to what you are promoting in your email/direct mail piece or for what they were searching. Without the distractions of other offers or products, you make it easier for your customers to focus on what you want them to do: buy something, enroll in a class, download a whitepaper, request information etc. It’s all about making this process as easy as possible and giving them exactly what they want. The other great benefit to the landing page is the ability to track the success of specific campaigns. You can have one landing page for your email campaign; one for your direct mail piece and one for your pay-per-click campaign giving you the ability to monitor how each is performing, not only from the standpoint of click-throughs but also who actually did what you wanted them to do.

Now it’s not just about throwing any old landing page up and hoping for success. Spend some time in the design of this page. Most importantly, it should carry the same look and feel as all of your other marketing efforts, both online and offline. We generally like the email or direct mail we send to have the same exact look as the landing page that we will take them to. Be sure that your branding is consistent. BNET Editorial does a very good job of describing the attributes of a landing page and what to avoid. http://www.bnet.com/2410-13237_23-168347.html

Now, since we are all unique individuals, with different experiences, tastes, upbringings, ages, ethnicity, sex, does it really make since to present the same landing page to every individual that responds by clicking on your link? In my next post I’ll deal with the concept of multiple landing pages for individual campaigns. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Regards,

David Soxman

http://twitter.com/davidsoxman

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