Improve Your Take Rate with Landing Pages

In our previous article, Five Steps to Building a Successful Marketing Campaign, we outlined five steps that go into building a successful marketing program. If you’ve read that, then you understand the importance that planning and research have in marketing success. Even if you foolishly elect to ignore all that advice, you can improve your results by doing just one thing differently: use online landing pages to take your customers directly to the specific information that you want them to see. Landing pages by themselves are not the answer, but you can improve your results just by implementing one.

Here are the five steps you need to know to make the most of them:

1. Create One (a landing page).
You’re going to make an offer that customers are going to respond to, don’t make them search for the offer/product again by sending the main page of your site. Take them directly to a landing page that delivers on the offer you sent. From your landing page, customers should be able to do three things:

• Learn about the offer
• Buy whatever widgets your promoted in your communication
• Shop for other widgets

2. Get People to Your Page.
Consumers respond to offers, so you’ve got to have something to offer. Without something to respond to, then your limiting your traffic and therefore limiting your ability to sell. So the first step is to extend an offer with a call to action that drives customers online to the unique landing page that you’ve created for this offer.

3. Know the Context of Your Copy.
You can link to the most appropriate location in your site based on the context of your copy. If you’re talking about the offer, link to the an offer specific page; when discussing a product, then link directly to the product page; if your talking generally about the company, only then should you consider linking to the main or about us page. BUT whatever page you take them to, make sure it pays off on the offer and the customer can still do the three things we explained in the previous step: learn, buy or shop.

4. Measure the Response.
Free Download, 20% Off, Buy Two, Get One Free – your customers won’t all respond to the same one offer equally so it’s important to test variations and to measure the response of each. Since each will appeal to different customers at a different time, don’t completely write off an offer if it’s not successful. Use the response information to better target your messages and offers.

5. Monitor the Results.
The great thing about online is that it’s an extremely flexible medium. You can immediately change the copy or offer if one element is not performing relative to the other variables. To get the most out of your campaign, you’ll need to monitor the response and sales rate of your offer. Know matter how the campaign is performing, you should plan on making some adjustments. Use the data you’ve gathered to make those decisions, then monitor and repeat until the program is complete.

Your marketing efforts and develop a consistent call to action for all your material and plan your channel

For example:

• Get 30% off widget X for more details visit mycompany.com/widgetoffer.

Five Steps to Building a Successful Marketing Campaign

1. Create a Plan
Too often, the success or failure of a marketing campaign is judged on the back end results. Unfortunately, these results can be dramatically impacted by the amount and type planning that was put into the campaign on the front end. More simply put: poor planning leads to poor results.

The stage for success is set at the beginning of the planning process. A proper marketing campaign plan will answer: who, what and how.

• Who do you want to talk to?
• What do you want to say?
• How do you want communicate it?

If your plan does not answer these questions, then you’ve left opportunity on the table.Your plan should also include what you hope to achieve as a result of the campaign -- is it sales, awareness, etc. These goals should be tangible and measurable. Depending on the length of the campaign, you should also outline what adjustments you’ll make to the what and how from above and include those as contingencies.Once completed, you should figure out how will you evaluate the success or failure, what will you hope to learn and how will you use these key learning’s in the implementation of future campaigns.

2. Understand (Research) your customer.
By understanding your existing customers and knowing what your potential customers want, you’ll be able to craft a message that appeals most to each particular customer. Unfortunately, without speaking to every single customer, that’s impossible to know, so you’ll have to put your customers into clusters or segments based on how they respond (or how you expect them to respond) to your messages or offers. By putting customers into groups, you can more easily test your various offers and the response that each generates.Many companies also use various socio-economic demo graphics that are way too complicated to explain here. Bottom line: Research is the key to knowing the who, what and how.

3. Execute the plan.
If you’ve put the time into your creating plan and into understanding your audience, then the execution of the plan should be the easy part. The key here is to execute the entire plan start to finish, don’t stop midway through because you think you’ve achieved your results.

4. Keep score.
You’ve set the bar in the planning process, now measure the response in relation to the bar. Be prepared to make adjustments according to your plan based on the response.

5. Review and repeat.
The planning for your next campaign begins here. By understanding what you did to achieve the results, what worked and what didn’t work, you’ll be able to figure out which levers work best. Over time, this knowledge accumulates (and if you use it) you’ll find that your campaigns become more and more successful.