Small Biz Tip: uber-simple landing pages

Do you want more from your email and social media marketing efforts? First look at your landing pages.

Most of what you do online - especially email and social media campaigns - include links back to your web site. You have most likely designed the best campaign you can to encourage people to respond - to click on that link! But have you spent as much time designing your landing page as you did designing the campaign?

A landing page is the web page people "land" on when they click your link.

But what happens next?

That's the key to effective online campaigns - making that 'next step' as interesting and as effortless as possible.

If the browser lands on your Home page, they still have work to do. They have to navigate through the site to find the offer / product / information that inspired them to click-through in the first place.

If you ask the browser to do more work to find what they're after, they most likely won't. So all your efforts to inspire them to click-through are wasted!

Design a landing page that points them directly to the topic of the originating link. If you're offering a 50% discount on wrapping paper, create a page with a huge image of wrapping paper, a huge confirmation of the 50% offer, and a huge "Buy now" button. All they have to do is click the button - no real effort required. If you directed them to your web site and made them find the gift-wrap section, you're asking them to do too much.

Here's an example from Staples. If you were so inclined to click the link on the email for a refurbished computer, optical mouse or printer paper, you're only one more click away from having the product in your shopping cart. Simple. Effective. Effortless.

That's how you increase your chances of online marketing success.

LESSON FOR SMALL BUSINESS:

• Every link you put out there through your marketing efforts should have a dedicated landing page.
• Those landing pages need to be simple, obvious and effortless.
• Don't forget to use web analytics to track campaign effectiveness (how many people land on the page; how many of them click to buy; how many of them actually buy and so on). Contact me for more information about web analytics tools and how to implement them (I don't sell them, so it's not a blatant pitch).

YOUR TURN:

• Any favourite landing pages... or bad ones?

Online ad fails - not enough bandwidth!?!

I may write a book about the relationship between Marketing and IT. It is so critical, yet so often adversarial or even non-existent.

Marketing is the engine that drives business. Since the role of marketing is to identify possible sources of revenue then create programs to generate demand from those sources, what could be more important for a business? The other business functions need to be aligned with the organization's business and marketing strategy. What good is lead generation if the sales department isn't staffed to follow up on leads. What good is online advertising if a click-through results in an error message!! If you can believe it, that happens!!

I responded to an online ad recently. It was really effective because a) it was targeted appropriately, and b) it was enticing enough for me to respond. Marketing utopia! But when I clicked on the ad...





Can you believe it?

The online ad was so effective, the response caused bandwidth issues for the company! So everyone that clicked-through was UNABLE to acquire the company's product! Presumably, we all just clicked the BACK button and went about our day. All of us potential customers. All of us lost.

We (marketers) work so hard to find the web sites with audience demographics that fit our product / ideal customer. And we work so hard to create ads that motivate that audience to respond. Then when they finally do respond, an error message?!?

Now, I'm not blaming IT overtly. It's just as important for Marketing to talk to IT and say "We're expecting X% click-through, which could mean as many as Y purchases in a 48 hour period. Can our system support that?" as it is for IT to anticipate the demands on the system based on the overall corporate marketing strategy.

The point is: Marketing and IT need to be aligned so this doesn't happen.

How to facilitate and solidify this alignment is a topic for a book, not a blog post.

I just might talk to a publisher or two...