Idea-Driven Marketing

Marketing ideas have historically had to filter through layers of design, production and technology before they become reality. This has robbed marketers of the immediacy and agility fast becoming the hallmarks of successful online campaigns. Testing is bringing marketing ideas and alternatives to their audiences. Agile testing empowers marketers to take their ideas to their audiences quickly and easily — without code and without IT.

LiveBall’s Culture of ‘Yes’

The freedom that marketers gain from ‘going direct’ with their ideas leads to revolutionary changes in how marketing gets developed and delivered. These changes are even more revolutionary than the desktop publishing revolution that turned print upside down in the late eighties. Giving marketers the ability to cut out all middle men and put themselves in a direct feedback loop with their audience finally delivers the two-way conversation that has long been imagined.

Gone are the days of dogmatic defense of abstract ideas. ‘Let’s test it’ replaces ‘that’ll never work’. ‘We can do that today’ supplants ‘let’s look at resources and schedule some time to decide on a go-forward plan’. The new reality of forward-thinking marketing organizations is both fast and free. Fast to execute and free to excel.

LiveBall is optimization software designed to eliminate friction for marketers looking for a way to ‘try it’. Instead of hearing how long it will take or that it simply can’t be done, LiveBall embodies a new culture of ‘yes’. Yes, you can try it. Yes, you can make it happen today. And yes, you’ll know how it worked tomorrow. Testing is simply trying new things. And LiveBall lets non-technical marketers try new things without code, without IT, without a degree in statistics and without friction.

7 Ways to Improve Your Marketing 
with LiveBall’s No-Code Testing

1. Landing Page Testing

Optimizing the first impressions you make on users is a proven step towards improving your online marketing results. Creating and testing sophisticated, high-performance landing pages and matching them to specific streams of traffic makes the most of those critical first impressions.

LiveBall enables landing page conversion rate optimization with both A/B and multivariate testing — without code or IT. Begin by A/B testing different concepts against each other. Run parallel controls and compare those results against your LiveBall pages — in real time. Once you have a champion, refine it using LiveBall’s multivariate testing tools — by varying page content and forms. LiveBall does the heavy lifting so you can focus on what’s being tested and free your mind of how it gets accomplished.

2. Microsite Testing

Creating and testing multipage, navigable user experiences can be daunting and time consuming. Even the most sophisticated content management systems are outside their core competency when multiple independent experiences are required.

Microsites perform well when what’s needed is a deep dive into a narrow topic. Conversion-focused microsites — with lead-gen, add-to-cart or social conversion on every page — are great performers with high-ticket or complex sales.

LiveBall makes complex microsite creation and testing simple. Using a standard web browser, non-technical marketers can create, deploy and test feature-rich navigable microsites without code or specialized resources. A/B test microsites against one another to optimize flow, navigation, messaging and conversion. Refine content and test form variations within pages of your microsites using LiveBall’s code-free MVT features.

3. Conversion Path Testing

Most content management systems (CMS) were designed primarily to edit websites. As websites become less relevant and users demand more specific and more contextually pertinent content, the CMS gets further and further away from its roots.

Conversion paths shine when segmentation into specific groups helps refine messaging and improve visitor engagement. Less specific traffic drivers like paid search engine marketing often benefit from message-matched user experiences that speak very clearly and simply to visitors.

Conversion paths appear very simple to users, but are in fact quite complex to assemble and test — unless you’re using LiveBall. ion’s LiveBall platform makes the creation and testing of complex, multipage, multi-branch conversion paths easy. Market segments can be created as tags within LiveBall that can be applied to any action a user might take. This allows marketers to see and focus on the sources of traffic that convert the best for their most wanted market segments. Conversion path testing is accomplished in three clicks using LiveBall’s A/B testing features and it can be augmented with multivariate content or form testing within pages. All testing is accomplished without code, help from IT or other specialized resources — putting all of the power and control within marketing’s hands.

4. Message Testing

Online marketing — especially search engine marketing — provides an almost instantaneous channel for generating targeted traffic. This is a tremendous opportunity for controlled message testing. Instead of focus groups and usability tests, controlled experiments can be run on real web traffic in real time. How people respond to messaging in real experiences is invaluable data for organizations to carry forward into broader applications.

LiveBall enables targeted message testing — letting marketers float ideas to narrow slices of traffic. This allows for quick learning that can be applied to broader campaigns or across corporate messaging development. Test copy, design, Flash, forms, video and nomenclature with point-and-click simplicity. Insert your ideas into streams of traffic and siphon off as much or as little as you like. Get instant feedback from users and fold that new knowledge into your future creative. LiveBall gives you more knowledge in less time, using fewer resources.

5. E-Commerce Warming Testing

Warming pages can provide significant lift within e-commerce experiences. By inserting a warming page between a paid-search ad and a catalog/product page, a significantly higher percentage of visitors may be inclined to add to cart. What’s more interesting, is that a higher percentage of carts may complete their transactions.

Many shopping cart experiences are sub-par and difficult to improve. Pre-cart warming pages help visitors see more value in the product and the brand behind it. By increasing the value proposition, marketers are providing more fuel to propel people through a likely sub-par cart experience.

LiveBall makes it easy to create and test pre-cart warming pages to find the right ones for the job. The platform provides tracking code that can be inserted during or following the transaction within the cart to track conversion as well as other data like average order value (AOV) — all in real time. By making it fast & easy to increase the value proposition, LiveBall can help improve e-commerce performance.

6. Forms — Data Collection Testing

Forms, like shopping carts, are obstacles to ease of use and visitor satisfaction. The best forms are the ones that make it easy, fast, intuitive and trustworthy for users to share their information. There are many variables involved in finding the ‘best forms’. The number of fields, their labels, their presentation, the number of steps in a wizard, the number of columns, button design and labeling — all impact the usability of forms and hence the ROI of the business behind them. Varying and testing these elements can be time consuming, resource intensive and costly.

LiveBall enables no-code, dynamic form testing using both A/B and multivariate (MVT) methods. The platform separates presentation from data collection to allow for easy, independent testing of alternatives without affecting data integrity or CRM compatibility. Marketers can directly control all aspects of data collection and form presentation without code or help from specialized resources like IT. Form experimentation can have a measurable, immediate and direct impact on conversion rates.

7. Social Engagement Testing

Social marketing can sometimes struggle to show its ROI within the marketing mix. But engagement with a brand is highly valuable and often quantifiable. Social conversion — the idea that there is great inherent value in creating or adding to a brand’s tribe — is an idea whose time has come.

LiveBall supports the use of social widgets as engagement mechanisms to put social on the same level as lead-gen or transactional conversion. Creating and testing user experiences designed to engage is only the beginning. Leveraging and escalating participation within your tribe to shake out the most passionate advocates can lead to business opportunities. LiveBall provides the agile infrastructure needed to create stimulating, flexible user experiences to transform casual engagement into passionate participation. Social-specific user experiences can range from Twitter landing pages, to micro-blogs, to follow-pages and much more. The list is ever expanding and demands flexibility and agility to deliver great brand experiences.

Create a Culture of ‘Yes’

Idea-driven marketing flourishes in a culture of ‘yes’. Agile marketing is unimpeded and free to succeed in a fast-paced world where change is the only constant. Trying out ideas in real time on real people is the foundation of high-speed, high-performance marketing. Testing those ideas in landing pages, microsites, conversion paths, messaging, warming pages, forms and social marketing is the constant that drives innovation, performance, revenue and ROI. It’s the culture of ‘yes, we can try that — right now’. And it’s made possible with LiveBall.

Preface

According to eMarketer, 39% of marketers are not satisfied with their conversion rates. When I first read that, my immediate thought was how can that be? How can nearly two-thirds of marketers be satisfied with their conversion rates?

The Fireclick index at about the same time as the eMarketer article showed keyword & email conversion rates of 4.00% and 3.10% respectively. So a small leap of faith tells me that most marketers believe that it’s okay for 96%+ of their campaign traffic to walk away.

The only explanation for this being ‘okay’ is that it’s normal. The thinking must be that if the average is 4% and I’m in that neighborhood, then status quo is good enough. It’s normal.

It may be average, but it’s not normal. In fact it’s orders of magnitude removed from normal. Normal needs to be re-calibrated. There are many marketers today that have successfully re-calibrated the notion of what’s normal. For them, normal is now 12% instead of 4%. Their cost-per-acquisition is dramatically lower than their competition’s and they’re winning more customers.

But who are these companies that are redefining normal? How do they do it?

I wanted to write this paper because it’s inconceivable to me that more than 1% of marketers are satisfied with their online conversion rates. I’ve seen the competitive advantages taken. I’ve seen the momentum change. I’ve seen the online budgets expand and I’ve seen the champions get promoted. How come everyone isn’t on the bandwagon?

More than anything else, what’s required to shift normal is a change in attitude. The new attitude appreciates the potential and the payoff of the new normal. And it accepts nothing less than monumental improvement. It pushes aside the perceived barriers to success and asserts that the status quo is broken.

Instead of examining a single case study, I’ve tried to weave a few of these marketing leaders together into a story. What they have in common is that they made significant positive business impact to their organizations in a very short time. They truly changed the game — not only for themselves, but also for their competitors.

Better clicks. More business.

It’s not only about how many people click, but also who they are. When the right people click, they convert too. And they buy. And they stay. When you’re transparent about who you are, you get the same in return. When both the marketer and the user are honest, everyone finds success. It’s like matchmaking.

That transparency makes it much easier to see where your best customers and prospects come from. When you can see that clearly, you can also see where they don’t come from. Then it becomes easy to shift your spend to the best sources. It’s much harder to confidently make that call without trustworthy data beyond click-through-rate. But that’s really the weeds-eye view.

Using post-click performance and behaviors to impact the streams of clicks that feed your marketing machine represents a strategic overhaul. It means that a sizable piece of your marketing emphasis moves from ads to pages. It means treating pages like extensions of ads. It can’t be the web content team that makes this happen. It has to be the advertising or marketing teams.

Extend the ad through the pages that follow. Learn more about users. Use that learning to optimize your spend. Here are a couple of examples of this strategy.

More intelligence. Less spend.

Bronto Software focused their pay-per-click (PPC) spend by using post-click metrics to determine where the right people were coming from. A click was not a click. A click became a person with intent. Understanding that intent lead to a 65% reduction in paid-search spend resulting in a net increase in the number of leads and the quality of those leads.

Bronto’s post-click emphasis informed their media spend. How did they get at user intent? By asking. They attached meaning to the decisions that users made in highly specialized landing experiences. For Bronto it wasn’t about behavioral targeting or inference, it was about the explicit choices users made in navigation- and distraction-free environments. These campaign-specific pages were nimble extensions of their marketing messages — made possible by Bronto’s decision to have them live outside of their website infrastructure. Only there could they exercise the message and offer agility they needed.

Specific options were put in front of users in the form of targeted landing experiences called conversion paths. Within two quarters of adopting this strategy, Bronto had multiplied their conversion rate from 2% to over 18%. They did it with 159 conversion paths on 80 specific sources of traffic. Over 800 campaign-specific pages drove this unprecedented change.

Today, Bronto Software is nearly two years into this online marketing strategy. They are running 728 landing experiences on 406 sources of traffic with a lifetime average conversion rate of just under 22% across both PPC and email marketing. That’s over 3,600 agile web pages delivering remarkable value.

Bronto’s online marketing success is truly game changing. The company enjoys a three-year growth rate of over 284% and was recently named number 1,096 on the Inc. 5000.

Micro-targeted spend.

Another example of click optimization comes from Citrix Systems. The $1.2 billion enterprise software company adopted a similar strategy to that of Bronto, but they did it while micro-targeting via paid search. They found their needle in a haystack niche of hospital administrators, but they also found that over 70% of the clicks they were paying for were not even in the neighborhood of their target audience.

They too moved to agile pages outside of the confines of their website infrastructure. Beyond the grind of IT and multi-departmental processes, their landing pages flourished. They created these pages without navigation or other distractions and as extensions of the ads that were feeding them traffic.

As it turned out, Google was much more likely to deliver the target than Yahoo was. So after a year of splitting the spend between the two vehicles, post-click data empirically revealed the truth within two weeks of the strategy change. The Yahoo spend was moved to Google and the post-click landing experiences were further optimized. Ultimately, the result of the three-week effort was 2,500% improvement over the original baseline.

This all happened when marketing took ownership of campaign-specific pages. Those pages became tightly integrated with the ads that fed them and the result was game changing for Citrix.

The long tail of retail.

American Greetings toiled for years with just a few landing pages. This was despite the knowledge that they had highly diverse streams of traffic feeding the $1.7 billion company. But their landing pages were part of the multidisciplinary website team’s responsibility. And they just weren’t a top priority. But lowering the cost-per-acquisition on their millions of monthly unique visitors was certainly a top priority.

American Greetings had already tested and optimized a few landing pages using multivariate methods. They needed something much more dramatic to move their needle much further. American Greetings’ marketing team took ownership of their campaign pages for paid search and began their effort to redefine what they considered to be ‘normal’.

In the first three months of their new strategy, American Greetings deployed over 40 campaign-specific multi-page landing experiences. They tested a wide variety of diverse pages, offers, price points and messaging on over 200 audience segments.

Almost immediately, American Greetings saw an unprecedented 30% increase in conversion rates resulting in a 20% reduction in fully loaded cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Multiply that performance times millions of monthly uniques and you start to see what’s at stake.

Within five months of beginning their program, American Greetings had created over 700 unique landing pages being tested across hundreds of sources of traffic. Today they have 989 landing experiences across 489 sources of traffic. That translates to thousands of unique, audience-targeted, campaign-specific pages — all driven by marketing. All driving ‘normal’ online marketing performance to a whole new level.

American Greetings continues to push higher and higher with conversion goals set 40% higher in 2010 and another 33% higher in 2011. That’s anything but status quo.

Seeing the trends.

I hope you’re seeing the patterns here. It’s pretty exciting stuff. When marketers take control and produce niche, long-tail pages, good things happen. In fact great things happen. Things that are so far beyond the average that everyone should be doing them. And then we’d have a whole new average to exceed.

But there’s some between-the-lines learning here that I want to point out too. My motive for giving you a shower of big numbers is partially to show that this strategy is realistic, but also to illustrate a little-known facet of what’s going on here: these campaign-specific pages are highly disposable. They have to be. If marketers are married to their landing experiences because of over-investment of time and money, they’ll never be willing to kill the poor performers.

All of these successes are built on
disposable pages.

The somewhat cavalier sales saying goes ‘some will. some won’t. so what. move on.’ and the same could be said of online marketing funnels. Some will work. Some won’t. Kill the ones that don’t. In order for that approach to work, you cannot over invest in any one funnel.

I’m in no way advocating unprofessional, ill-branded or half-hearted pages. You need an agile method to deliver nimble, professional pages in minutes — not hours, days, weeks or worse. You have to keep the total cost of a page relatively low and the quality very high.

Link stability is not the same as page stability.

The disposability of pages does not lend itself to the web development world. In web dev, pages and their links are preserved. In the online marketing world, links are divorced from pages, so that they can persist even when the pages behind them die. The way to think about it is that you link to a place — what gets displayed in that place changes all the time, but the place itself is stable. It’s unlikely that a website content management system is going to make that sort of flexibility easy — if it supports it at all. Your website is about stable pages in stable places. The best online marketing experiences are always in flux.

This is the crux of testing that yields dramatic results. The re-calibration of normal happens when you can easily vary what’s shown to users. Why? To find the pages that are most likely to convert them from casual, impulsive clickers into engaged prospects or customers.

American Greetings, Bronto and Citrix are three examples of the redefinition of normal. Their businesses have been transformed by online marketing. In all three cases the transformation happened within weeks or months. They let nothing stand in their way and they were rewarded for their persistence.

What reasons could organizations have NOT to make this change in strategy an imperative? What could be more important than this sort of impact on revenue and income? The reasons I hear most often are trivial.

What wouldn’t an organization trade to triple its return on advertising or marketing investment? What wouldn’t it be worth to reduce customer acquisition costs by 20%? Ask the CEO, the CFO or the CMO for the real answers.

To reiterate: According to eMarketer, 39% of marketers are not satisfied with their conversion rates. The Fireclick index at about the same time as the eMarketer article showed keyword & email conversion rates of 4.00% and 3.10% respectively. A strategy exists that redefines online marketing’s value proposition. Normal should be 3x today’s ‘averages’. It’s doable. And doing it changes the game.

1. No More Landing Pages

   Make a paradigm shift to stop thinking in terms of “pages” and focus instead on creating conversion-focused experiences. It’s hard to convince a respondent to convert by dumping them into a single page. But a well-designed conversion experience can seduce a lot more conversions from your audience by creating a relevant path from the click through to the conversion.

2. Message Match

   Make sure your ad message and your landing experience match. And I don’t mean colors or pictures. I mean messages and promises. In order to get the user to click, your ad implies a promise: CLICK HERE. GET THIS. Your landing experience needs to immediately, directly and simply pay off that promise. Whatever your ad says, make sure your landing experience fulfills that message and promise. When you do this, you will build trust with your respondent, and when you build trust, you will automatically build desire. We call it the conversion path trust cycle: Make a promise, pay it off on the next page. Continue doing this until you ask for, and receive, conversion.

   When you have message mismatched ads and landing pages you are damaging your brand and making your respondents less likely to click the next time they stumble upon you. Ouch.

3. Keep It Simple

   When users click on your ad they aren’t making a considered choice. They are reacting to a simple little ad message. Whether a banner, an email or a paid search ad, the click on your ad is a split second impulse. Either the user saw something that caught their eye, or they were searching for something and your ad seemed like it might lead somewhere relevant. When we dump those ad respondents onto a landing page with a ton of copy, links, choices, or a form, we are breaking the rhythm and expecting them to do all the work. No wonder our conversions are at 3%! This “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to building landing pages doesn’t work.

   In order to keep users flowing through our conversion experience we have to simplify each page. Get rid of all the distractions. When we simplify the page, including the message, the copy, and the choices, users will ultimately flow through at a much higher rate of conversion. Create an experience that keeps them in the “split second” flow that they are in when they click on the ad. Keep them moving by presenting them simple, relevant choices and letting them flow through a conversion path to the point of actually converting. When you simplify your experience, your conversions will increase.

4. Offer Choice

   The way you can keep your experience simple is by using strategic respondent choices within your experience. A page with a ton of copy, links or a form is WORK for the user. Too many choices, too much distraction. Rather than putting everything on the page, create a simple page with a couple of choices. Once the user makes a choice, the next page pays off that choice with relevancy.

   Let’s say I am running an ad for a credit card. I could dump respondents on my application form. Or I could send them to a page of long copy about the credit card and then take them to the application form (if any of them actually make it through my long page of copy).

   Or, I could usher respondents to a simple landing page that has three-way choice for information on the card that’s right for establishing new credit, rebuilding bad credit, or rewarding great credit. I give the respondents a simple choice (they know which group they fall into) and they don’t have to think; they can make that simple choice and move on. Once they have made the choice, the next page can pitch and persuade in a meaningful way. Rather than reading about the card that’s right for everyone, the respondent sees copy thats right for them. I’ve created an experience rather than a page, built trust by matching the ad, and kept the pages simple by giving the respondents choice. Bang, my chance of conversion is going through the roof!

   Giving your respondents choices lets them have a more relevant experience. And when an experience is more relevant, you will be far more likely to get a conversion.

5. Think Apples to Oranges

   The final thing you can do right now to improve your landing experiences is to test, test and then test some more. As opposed to page optimization, around here we talk a lot about “apples to oranges” testing in order to achieve dramatic improvements to conversion quality and quantity. If you test a single page to optimize it (headline color, image, call to action), you will probably increase your conversions a little. And when you are testing the footer font on test number 5,488, you have definitely lost sight of the big picture.

   Rather than focusing on optimizing elements on a page to increase conversions, think about testing widely differing experiences in order to see what really moves more people through your funnel. Sure, maybe the headline size on my credit card landing page is going to entice a few more people to convert. But by testing the choices I offer, the number of choices, and the total number of pages, I have a lot more freedom and flexibility to see which experience is most conversion-friendly. Take a big picture, somewhat heretical, approach to your testing and you will see bigger changes in your conversion rate.

If you implement the five action items above, I know you will increase your online conversions or improve your conversion quality. Above all, have fun and start thinking out of the box with your landing experiences. And gosh darn it, No More Landing Pages.

The objective is the same, to provide a better experience when respondents click through from online advertising and email marketing, and to thereby increase the conversion rate and ROI.

Arguably, even the tactics and creative options for the design and content of the pages — the best practices that are usually written about the subject — are largely the same:

• Maintain continuity from click to conversion.
• Constantly test with innovation and iteration.
• Segment respondents with conversion paths where applicable.
• Speed and agility are critical.
• Embrace the diversity of The Long Tail.
• Optimize to ROI, but don’t optimize away your brand.

The big difference is behind the scenes. Enterprise landing pages have:

• More people involved in the lifecycle.
• More complexity in the process.
• More scale in the overall marketing portfolio.
• More risk, both real and perceived.
• More upside potential.

Although these aspects may seem tangential to most landing page best practices, these factors have an enormous impact on the implementation of such best practices in large organizations.

In an enterprise-scale environment, an under-the-radar, ad hoc approach to landing pages is almost guaranteed to underperform, because the absence of structured processes for post-click marketing robs them of attention, budget, and priority. To thrive and succeed, an enterprise post-click marketing program must be well-defined, systematized, and integrated with the overall marketing engine.

The goal to to turn your size to your advantage.

Here are specific ways to make that happen, to help define your ideal team and supporting infrastructure, and to address the challenges of enterprise post-click marketing on each of these 5 dimensions.

More People

Call it the axiom of the org chart: the larger the company, the more people involved in an activity. Online marketing, however, is a particularly chaotic intersection of marketing managers, web site managers, search specialists, product managers, business intelligence analysts, IT administrators, legal, and at least one floating contractor. Then you go up: your boss, your boss’s boss, your dotted line boss, and probably a committee.

And that’s just inside the organization. There are potentially a plethora of outsourced vendors and agencies in the loop as well: a search agency, an ad agency, a brand agency, a web development firm, an email marketing company, a PR firm, a social marketing consultancy, etc. And across all of these constituencies, personnel are constantly in flux.

This large cast of players isn’t a bad thing, per se. Online marketing is multidisciplinary, and as the centerpiece for almost every company’s interface to the market these days, it’s well deserving of the attention and input from these disparate groups.

To survive this juggling gauntlet of many hands though, post-click marketing initiatives need to meet the requirements of each group — and leverage their talents and contributions — in an efficient and orderly fashion.

Here are 9 steps for incorporating post-click in online marketing with a large cast of players:

1. Start by building recognition that post-click marketing is an important piece of your online marketing ecosystem: bring all the stakeholders and participants together to discuss the objectives, address their needs, and brainstorm ways to optimize the process. Competitive benchmarking can be a strong motivator to kick-start this. References such as the search marketing maturity model can help illustrate the interdependencies between the different participants in the online marketing ecosystem.

2. Officially assign responsibility for post-click marketing, either with the people running the pre-click campaigns (advertising, paid search, email) or with a dedicated post-click marketing manager. It needs to be a primary part of someone’s job description, not something that gets tacked on to an already overloaded schedule (and thereby drops off the end). This role will need to have a budget and either leverage other participants and/or have its own dedicated headcount — i.e., post-click responsibility and the authority to execute it properly must go hand-in-hand.

3. Agree upon a way to measure the performance of post-click marketing and connect it into the overall online marketing ROI funnel. In the New Marketing landscape, nothing is defensible unless it can be measured — the mantra of performance marketing. This doesn’t have to be airtight, as their are diminishing returns to being too pedantic — the stage may be digital, but the actors are all human and full of infinite possibilities — but it does need to credibly connect the dots in a way that the other people in the ecosystem can appreciate.

4. A pilot program is a splendid way to introduce post-click concepts and processes into an organization, both to demonstrate the value and to discover the interconnections and latent serendipity of the various participants in the online marketing ecosystem. For this to be successful, however, it’s vital that initial progress has been made on the previous three steps for cooperation, responsibility, and performance measurement — an orphaned post-click pilot rarely ends like Oliver Twist.

5. Determine an overarching post-click marketing strategy that people can navigate by, even as tactics change fluidly on the battlefield. This must be aligned with the metrics in #3, or people get yanked between what is right for the strategy and right for their performance review — nip that conundrum in the bud whenever you can. Great strategies are often simple in concept: clearly identify the competitive advantages and unique selling propositions of the company across its markets, segmented as finely as possible, and creatively represent those advantages to their respective audiences in a consistent and cost-effective manner. If you get stuck, fall back on the core questions: Who are our best customers? Why do they buy from us? How can we attract more of them? Post-click marketing strategy is all about meeting — or exceeding — the expectations of those best customers as they enter your online marketing funnel.

6. Establish a documented way to coordinate continuity between pre-click ads and post-click experiences — even if they’re controlled by the same people — such as a lightweight message map spreadsheet. This is essential for continuity and message match, the backbone of post-click marketing. It’s also important when you’re running tests with different ads and different landing pages to be consciously aware of any interaction effects. A centralized reference like this makes it possible to scale the number of participants in the marketing mission while maintaining synchronization. (It also helps as personnel changes require new participants to quickly come up to speed.) If you don’t already have a way to easily share file updates and discussions around them online, across both internal and external participants, you might consider Basecamp.

7. Harness the very best creative talent you can — post-click is a creative channel. Tactical superiority can be achieved by crafting landing experiences that look, read, engage, and flow better than the competition. Take advantage of the broader array of human resources within your ecosystem to tap the best designers, graphic artists, copywriters, Flash programmers, and widget makers. These don’t have to be full-time positions for post-click — in fact, you can handily outsource this on a project basis, if that’s easier — but wielding these creative professionals in your landing experience production improves engagement, branding, and visual resonance in ways that lesser competitors can’t readily match.

8. Communicate regular post-click updates and feedback with the whole online marketing team. Not a cacophony of boilerplate multi-page reports, but concise highlights of the most interesting results once or twice a month. Because landing experiences sit in the upper middle of the funnel — often the murkiest stage in customer acquisition — they can reveal substantial insight about your market. Behavioral post-click segmentation is golden here. Sharing this information helps your peers — advertising, site optimization, lead nurturing, etc. — gain new perspectives on their slice of the funnel, encouraging reciprocity and cross-border innovation. Everyone needs early funnel empirical data at some point in a marketing initiative — let them know that post-click is available to help collect it. Post-click isn’t a silo, it’s an interconnected fabric. Embrace this role of “funnel facilitator” and legitimately build political capital for the post-click marketing function.

9. Invest in education and plug into the global online marketing community. Events such as Search Engine Strategies (SES) and Search Marketing Expo (SMX) let you step outside your daily routine, take a fresh look at what you’re doing, benchmark it against a wider range of contemporaries, cross-pollinate ideas from other industries, and network with potential new collaborators. This community interaction — learning best practices from the successes and mistakes of others — can be a catalyzing inspiration and helps inoculate you from “not invented here” (NIH) myopia. Regular blog reading, such as Search Engine Land and MediaPost’s OnlineMediaDaily, is a must. In such a rapidly evolving field, you’ve got to consistently work to put the “knowledge” in “knowledge worker”.

Of course, more people are inexorably tied to more complexity and more scale — so many of the suggestions in the next two sections will also help maximize the productivity of this larger cast.

Just remember: more people should be an advantage, and the foundation of successful enterprise post-click marketing is to make that statement true.

More Complexity

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from chaos. And let’s face it, enterprise online marketing is a pretty darn complex system. To properly incorporate post-click marketing into a large organization, the goal is actually to simplify processes as much as possible.

Landing page production in large organizations must deal with:

• More extensive brand standards.
• More rigid protocols for IT involvement.
• More requirements for legal approval, even in the tiniest campaign.
• More stringent rules for data collection.
• More demands for interoperability with existing systems.

Overall, more coordination is required with more other things in the organization as a whole — more channels, bigger channels, more independently moving pieces in The Great Marketing Machine.

The impact of this complexity is an inflation of the “soft costs” — overhead and time — for producing and managing landing pages and post-click marketing. Every touchpoint adds delays and indirect costs, diminishing your agility and ROI. It’s not unusual to hear tales of big companies taking weeks to launch a new landing page.

Some people might object that formalizing post-click marketing will only make things more complex. But post-click marketing happens whether you consciously manage it or not — people click on your ads, land somewhere in your web universe, and experience an impression of your company. Letting this happen on an ad hoc basis ironically creates more complexity because it causes a drag on the performance of the entire marketing funnel — like trying to bicycle uphill with your brakes on — and generates interrupt-driven exception management every time someone tries to fix the post-click experience for a one-off campaign.

The antidote to that inefficiency is partly organizational structure, partly business process management, and partly software automation. Ultimately, all these ideas share the same underlying strategy: reduce the number of manual touchpoints when launching and managing landing experiences. The goal is to asymptotically approach frictionless post-click marketing.

Here are 10 suggestions for taming post-click complexity:

1. Establish a central repository for all landing pages and their components. At the very least, this should be a source-controlled directory structure in your web site environment. However, it’s much better if this is implemented as a database-driven application — essentially a content management system (CMS) for landing experiences — which can be searched, analyzed, and automated. This can be a partition of your existing CMS platform, or a separate software package, possibly even a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. The benefits of this approach include a foundation for software-mediated workflow, de-duplication of content, better security through centralized access control, and a master archive that can serve as a reference point for all previous and current post-click initiatives. No more having to track down who was running what landing page where with email, voicemail, or stalking them at the coffee machine.

2. Provide a standardized mechanism to “preview” and “proof” landing experiences. Preview should give you the ability to walk through a landing experience — be it a single landing page, a multi-step conversion path, or a microsite — exactly as it will appear to real respondents. You need to be able to do this before it goes “live” in production, while it’s live — but without contaminating the statistics of real users — and after it’s been disabled and archived. Unauthorized parties should not be able to view these pages when they’re not live. A “proof” feature is similar, but instead of walking through the experience as a simulated respondent, a proof provides a condensed map of the complete landing experience, with all the content, behavioral rules, and tracking scripts listed in an organized fashion. With a proof, someone can quickly review a landing experience in a comprehensive and consistent manner, knowing exactly how the experience will behave in all cases.

3. Minimize IT dependency for daily landing page production and management. The IT processes surrounding changes to a company’s web site are usually pretty involved — after all, the global web site must serve all constituencies and can impact everyone. Landing pages, however, are more of a pure marketing initiative — more a part of the advertising for specific campaigns — that typically target small subsets of your overall audience. Agile experimentation is what’s needed. To facilitate that, you should consider setting up a lightweight environment specific for landing pages — a landing.yourcompany.com subdomain — that marketing can use as a sandbox, without interfering with (or bearing the burden of) the primary web site management overhead. This both reduces the number of participants in front-line landing page production and eliminates delays at the marketing/IT divide.

4. Create a set of design templates for landing pages that adhere to your brand standards. These master page layouts strategically separate design and content. Talented designers can produce these layouts and visual themes once — test them on all browsers and receive sign-off from branding — and then they can be reused for dozens or hundreds of landing experiences by front-line marketers. Ideally, your landing page management system (or plain CMS) should tightly control which parts of pages can be dynamically edited by front-line marketers — the content for specific campaigns — while assuring that the design cohesion and brand standards of the templates are unbreakable. This approach saves time for designers, who have their work leveraged repeatedly without their ongoing involvement; it saves time for the marketers authoring new pages, as they aren’t entangled in design issues; and it saves time in deployment, as the guaranteed consistency of these pre-approved templates reduces the number of back-and-forth cycles for reviewing new landing pages and fixing minor interface issues. You end up with landing pages that always look good for your brand.

5. Maintain pre-approved content elements that can be reused across multiple landing pages. Such a digital asset management system can include a collection of categorized images and Flash animations that have been blessed as “allowable art”, email messages and fulfillment files that have been proofed and signed off on by legal, and links to your privacy policy and copyright notice built directly into the templates. Reusability helps cost justify better creative investment, as the payback is spread across multiple deployments. Sharing elements from a common source means that alterations — even thing as simple as fixing typos — can be automatically inherited by all landing pages referencing them. Overall, this approach speeds things up by reducing the production time and cutting down approval processes when deploying new pages synthesized from these existing elements.

6. Standardize data collection and form handling. One of the biggest time sinks in ad hoc landing page production is constructing and debugging forms and data collection processes — often a source of painful iterations between marketing and IT. Again, the solution is to separate these requirements into centralized and reusable components. We recommend 4 conceptual pieces: (a) definition of data fields and their permissible values, i.e., the fundamental data structure; (b) the assembly of forms that collect user responses and map them to the defined data fields — so marketers can change the way the question is asked without tampering with the underlying data fields; (c) placement of the forms on particular pages, including the freedom to collect some data “passed in” from the query string or from several forms spread across multiple pages that progressively build a respondent’s profile; and (d) the formatting and exporting of all collected data to back-end systems — your CRM, your lead nurturing platform, Salesforce.com, etc. — using procedures that take advantage of the standardized data fields, regardless of marketing-level content on the pages from which it was collected. With this approach, the IT elements are configured once and then repeatedly leveraged across a plethora of campaigns — and updates at any level can be seamlessly inherited — without triggering a costly end-to-end fire drill.

7. Don’t fragment your respondent data by turning your landing page environment into a data silo. While it is highly advantageous for marketing to have its own sandbox to create, deploy, and optimize landing experiences — and to use those landing experiences to collect valuable respondent data — you want to make sure that your collected data is quickly and properly transferred to a common CRM or lead nurturing system, inheriting all the security and backed-up redundancy built into that infrastructure. You don’t want the data to grow stale or end up causing integration problems down the road. By using standardized data formats and exchanges — as described in #6 above — you can pass data in real-time (or daily batches at the latest), nicely scrubbed, into existing IT systems designed to maintain a holistic view of prospects and customers. Post-click marketing is a contributor to that data warehouse, not a rogue competitor to it.

8. Interface consistently with enterprise-wide web analytics. Although there is immense value in analyzing respondent data and behavior in the focused context of your landing pages — and their interplay with different traffic sources — it’s important that this activity also be transparently shared with whatever web analytics and/or business intelligence platform(s) you have standardized on for your primary/other web properties. Again, your post-click marketing environment should be a contributor, not a competitor, to any such global infrastructure. Luckily, this is usually very easy to accomplish, by including standardized bits of Javascript tracking code on your landing pages. Ideally, you want to configure these scripts in one place for an entire campaign, and then have them automatically inherited by all pages within. Like many of the strategies above — setup once, leverage multiple times — this makes it simpler to deploy new pages as well as update and maintain existing ones.

9. Favor A/B testing over multivariate testing (MVT) for landing pages. MVT is a more mathematically complex methodology — testing many simultaneous variations of elements on the same page — that typically requires more configuration to set up and more traffic to reach statistical significance. This complexity can make life difficult for a marketer to design tests with a clear hypothesis and can run into trouble with bizarre interaction effects among the different elements. In contrast, A/B tests are easy to visualize, straightforward to implement, quick to achieve statistical significance, and logical to draw conclusions and learning from. They also support apples-to-oranges testing of different kinds of experiences, encouraging bolder experimentation — a strategic luxury of independent landing pages that is rarely feasible in your primary web site. A/B testing promotes simplicity, speed, and flexibility in post-click marketing optimization. Keep it simple!

10. Handle special-case rules in a standardized manner. At first this might sound like a contradiction in terms, but this is a vital concept for keeping complexity under control. There will always be exceptions and custom behaviors requested for the content and flow of particular pages: substitute a different headline if the respondent is a repeat visitor, send an email alert to a specific mailbox when a user submits a particular answer on a form, deliver a different version of a download if the person is connecting from outside the country, etc. What you don’t want is for each special case to be hacked together in its own way — some Javascript here, some server-side code there, some jury-rigged contraption somewhere else — as it’s near impossible to maintain or reuse. Instead, you want a systemized approach that can provide customized experiences using standardized methods, such as something similar to how rules for handling messages are configured in most email programs. When you need more features, extend the shared set of rule options.

By structuring your post-click marketing so that responsibilities are cleanly separated into Lego-like blocks of functionality — that can be quickly and safely assembled into new landing pages experiences by front-line marketing staff — you can keep the complexity under control while increasing the overall sophistication of your post-click capabilities. Expertise is leveraged where it delivers the most value — in a business process architecture that emphasizes reusability — and is not unnecessarily ensnared in day-to-day production or management.

This distributed approach can dramatically reduce your soft costs, making individual landing experiences much more cost effective. This, in turn, sets the stage for scaling up.

More Scale

Marketing in a large organization is all about “more”. Not just more personnel and more processes connecting them — which we covered in the previous two sections — but more prospects and customers, and more vehicles to reach them in more markets.

As input into post-click marketing, this means:

• More search marketing across more keywords.
• More banner advertisements across more networks.
• More email marketing initiatives across more lists.
• More respondent traffic from each of these sources.
• More audience segments/niches within this traffic.

All of this translates into the need for more distinct landing pages, scalable on demand, with targeted landing experiences designed to match the expectations of each of these streams of respondents.

This, however, is a key advantage for larger players. Your scale can enable broader coverage of The Long Tail, investing in more niche exploration, increasing the likelihood of discovering new segments with outsized returns. (This is also one of the secrets for dealing with more risk/reward, as we’ll examine next.)

Another benefit of scale is the ability to cost justify investments in talent and infrastructure. All of the people and processes discussed in the previous two sections are sources of competitive advantage. They’re also mostly fixed costs. With larger scale, you can leverage those fixed costs across a greater number of landing pages with a greater number of respondents, for more efficient utilization and faster payback. The same effort is required to create a landing experience that serves 1,000 people as one that serves 100,000 — but the latter delivers orders of magnitude ROI.

But to make scale work for you — and not against you — you need to structure your post-click marketing so that increases in the number of advertisements, the number of landing pages, the number of respondents, and the number of tracked audience segments in those respondents do not require a linear increase in your fixed or variable costs.

In other words, averaged out, you want more for less.

Here are 10 ways to achieve such scale advantage:

1. Organize your post-click marketing initiatives into campaigns and portfolios of campaigns. As the number of landing pages under your direction grows, it’s helpful to divide them into logical groups. A campaign is a collection of landing experiences and the traffic sources that drive respondents to them, all bound by a common purpose or characteristic. For instance, for paid search, a post-click campaign would naturally correspond to a campaign in Google AdWords — with different landing pages and traffic sources for each ad group within that AdWords campaign. Portfolios are then related sets of campaigns, perhaps clustered by product, audience, or geography. In such a tree-like arrangement, you can deal orderly with thousands of post-click initiatives. You can distribute responsibility and delegate authority for different portfolios and campaigns. Ideally, you want to review performance and analysis not only on individual landing pages, but also in aggregate across a campaign or an entire portfolio.

2. Recycle and test good ideas from one landing page in other contexts. To maximize the ROI from work already done — including those soft costs such as content approval cycles — test your ideas across multiple venues. In the context of a specific campaign, should be as straightforward as including the same landing experience in the A/B testing rotations for multiple traffic sources. For example, for a search keyword group, you might test the same path across Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live traffic sources — while still tracking their performance independently. You then might try them with related banner ads or email marketing messages, perhaps copying a landing experience and making only minor tweaks for vehicle-specific continuity. If performance for the same concept varies across traffic sources, this helps reveal the characteristics of those different audiences.

3. Consider software-as-a-service (SaaS) for your landing page environment to grow smoothly. Because post-click marketing is more of a marketing function than an IT one, you can take advantage of SaaS products for marketers — such as LiveBall — to move your landing page management into the cloud. In-house IT infrastructure investments tend to require upfront capital expenditures, with their own byzantine approval processes, as well as ongoing maintenance. SaaS offerings, in contrast, can be subscribed to on an as-needed basis, where you’re always prioritized as a customer. And since SaaS vendors are specialists, you inherit their economies of scale. By virtualizing this capability, you further eliminates IT dependencies, increasing your agility to scale campaigns on demand — when you hit a winner, you can quickly exploit it and reallocate when opportunities shift. You’re probably already using SaaS elsewhere, such as Google AdWords, Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, etc.

4. Rig your landing pages to automatically expire when their content is outdated. As you increase the number of landing pages you have on active duty, you want to minimize the conscious effort required to manage them. For time-limited offers, promotions for particular events, or content that is regularly changed, it’s best to give associated landing pages an expiration date that will automatically take them out of rotation when their time is passed. This prevents outdated pages from slipping through the cracks, floating around indefinitely, and causing bad impressions or expectation mismatches for respondents. Expired landing pages should still, however, be archived for reference purposes in your landing page management environment.

5. Have A/B tests automatically remove underperforming alternatives once statistical significance has been reached. Keep in mind, A/B tests may actually be A/B/C/D/etc. tests with many variations being evaluated simultaneously. As soon as it can be determined that one or more of those alternatives underperforms the other(s) — using statistical significance of at least 80% for “lead generation” campaigns, or up to 95% or 99% for high-traffic or e-commerce campaigns with a transactional conversion — you want them immediately removed from rotation. You don’t want to waste a single click once your trials have born fruit, but you don’t want to manually babysit them all either. Auto-optimization — letting your landing page software do this work for you — is the answer.

6. Take notes on your experiments, briefly documenting hypotheses and conclusions. Annotating your landing pages and post-click campaigns with your ideas, questions, and analysis of results makes it easier to scale the number of initiatives that you can juggle effectively. These notes don’t need to be long or extravagant — think Twitter, not Pulitzer — but simply quick comments on the thinking behind different tests and campaign organization. You can then pick up a thread weeks or months later, without straining your memory, and jump right back in the flow. This also facilitates hand-offs among team members, who can more readily pinch hit when a colleague is on vacation or called off to another project. Writing down your thoughts can also provide clarity, help you discern insightful patterns across your different efforts, and make status updates and management reviews a breeze to pull together.

7. Promote the development of reusable/parameterized widgets and Flash objects. Interactivity, video, animation, and other engagement devices have been shown to significantly improve conversion rates and respondents’ impressions of a brand. But building one-off applications in Flash or Javascript is expensive and becomes hard to maintain with scale. A better approach is to create widgets and/or Flash objects that accept configurable parameters — and therefore can be reused across multiple landing pages. For example, a reusable Flash object might have a “carousel” mechanism for rotating between several images and links, but the specific images and links shown are dynamically passed in as parameters. Expert designers and programmers can create these dynamic objects once, and then front-line marketers can plug in the parameters for their specific campaigns. The more reuse these objects get, the higher their ROI, and the more engagement features are distributed across your post-click marketing.

8. Install post-click marketing dashboards to continually “scan the horizon”. The more landing pages and post-click marketing campaigns you have running simultaneously, the more important it is to configure performance gauges that will quickly alert you to any unusual activity — either good or bad. The objective is to facilitate continual partial attention across a broad range of initiatives, while focusing on a small subset. Good visualizations can be very helpful in this process. For instance, a bubble chart that shows three dimensions: conversion rate along the x-axis, engagement score up the y-axis, and the size of the bubble representing the quantity of respondent traffic. Small bubbles in the upper-right corner reveal excellent opportunities; large bubbles in the lower-left corner uncover high-traffic underperformers. Ideally, your dashboard should let you drill down in real-time to examine the causes.

9. Grow the different stages of your online marketing funnel in proportion to each other. As the truism goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Although post-click marketing usually starts off as one of the least developed capabilities in an organization, your adoption of the concepts described in this article will change that. At some point, however, to grow further, the next weakest link in the online marketing chain will need to be addressed. Maturity models, such as the search marketing maturity model, can be used to manage balanced development of the funnel as a whole. Since post-click marketing sits in the middle of the funnel, it can help illuminate broader a broader funnel perspective and assist with improvements upstream and downstream — incoming traffic and outgoing conversions. Keep an active dialogue with your counterparts up and down the funnel for cross-stage insights, multi-stage opportunities, and a collaborative culture of continuous improvement.

10. Support international landing pages properly in your environment. Sooner or later, as you scale your post-click marketing, you’re going to need to publish pages in other languages. The world may be flat, but it’s not homogenous. People have an affinity for their native tongue, and post-click marketing needs to build rapport every way it can. You don’t want to be holding back for technical reasons on global growth opportunities, so make sure that your landing page production system fully supports internationalization — Unicode is usually best — and that your pages can be served in any major language.

Remember, however, that the secret of scale is turning a tiny prize garden into a thriving farm — without sacrificing organic, homegrown goodness. You want to leverage economies of scale and optimized production processes, without forgetting that at the end of the day, the tastiest tomatoes win.

All the capabilities for scaling post-click marketing still rely on taking strategic and creative chances to deliver extraordinary landing experiences to your audience. So let’s talk about taking chances the smart way.

More Risk

The difference between small business landing pages and enterprise post-click marketing is analogous to the difference between piloting a two-seater prop plane versus captaining a Boeing 747 jumbo passenger jet. Sure, it’s all flying — altitude, airspeed, compass — but the stakes are higher. Aerobatic stunts that would be fun for a single aviator would be reckless insanity for an airline pilot.

In the context of enterprise online marketing, more risk is perceived because, simply due to scale, a small mistake can quickly become a high profile failure, both inside and outside the organization. And to a real degree, there is — hopefully! — substantial brand equity and goodwill out there that you don’t want to tarnish.

However, the risk of inaction is arguably far more dangerous. The online marketing agility of smaller competitors can pose a serious threat to larger firms that get mired in either their own overweight processes — which many of the suggestions in the previous sections are designed to fix — or their own overly cautious worldview and a reluctance to conduct bold experiments. The market does not stand still.

The objective is to have the best of both worlds: safe and sensible agility.

Luckily, many of the capabilities that should be put in place for efficient scaling also serve as safety mechanisms:

• Standardized brand templates reduce the risk of layout mistakes or browser incompatibilities.
• Auto-optimization features make certain that underperforming alternatives are swiftly taken offline.
• Automatically enforced expiration dates guarantee that outdated content is never left in rotation.
• Standardized data collection process make sure the right information is collected the right way.
• Favoring A/B testing over MVT avoids inadvertently bad combinations (the Russian roulette caveat) and minimizes the chance of misconfigured tests.
• Good dashboards quickly alert you to any unusual patterns that need your attention.

But there are further ways to assuage risk in post-click marketing, where you can use your size to your advantage. Here are 4 recommendations for managing post-click risk:

1. Leverage a portfolio strategy: more experiments = more opportunities to find gold. Take a cue from early-stage venture capitalists, who make relatively small investments in 10 companies, knowing that it only takes one winner to make up for all the others going bust. As a large organization, you should have the ability to experiment with a tremendous number of post-click marketing ideas — far more than smaller competitors could afford — as long as you keep the costs of individual experiments low. This is the art of mining The Long Tail. You want to minimize the loss on the ones that don’t work, by testing on a small scale and promptly jettisoning any that don’t bear fruit — don’t build a castle on swampy ground. Meanwhile, when a specific idea hits a home run, be ready to leverage it for all it’s worth, expanding its reach and iterating further refinements.

2. Learn from your shared, centralized campaign history. Two things that hurt a lot of organizations in their post-click marketing: (1) blindly following tactical advice that worked for other companies but isn’t right for their own market — creative ideas are rarely reducible to universal best practices (e.g., “have navigation”, “don’t have navigation”); and (2) a failure to recognize what does — or doesn’t — really work for their specific market because they don’t share the information across all of their post-click initiatives. As they say, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Make full use of your centralized systems, dashboards, and note taking to exploit hard-won knowledge into your own best practices. But be enlightened from history, not chained to it. Don’t be afraid to revisit old ideas with new perspectives — just do so with an informed background. When in doubt, run a small test and document the results.

3. Use disproportionate traffic allocation for champion/challenger tests. Once you have a winning landing page in a high-volume campaign, you’ll obviously want to reap the benefits of that champion. However, major breakthroughs can usually be enhanced by further refinements, so you want to continue to run subsequent “challenger” landing pages. To balance both those objectives, keep the majority of traffic directed to your champion, and only siphon a sliver for your new challengers — just enough to obtain statistical significance in a reasonable period of time. For high-volume campaigns, that’s probably less than 10%. If the challenger doesn’t work as well, it’s impact on your overall performance metrics will be negligible; if it does work, it can be quickly elevated as your new champion.

4. Mitigate unsuccessful tactical ideas by always representing the brand well. Part of the deal with a portfolio strategy is understanding that many experiments — maybe even most experiments — will not pan out. The upside is that this is how you learn and discover what works spectacularly. Even though you keep those tests small, you still want to respect the value of every respondent. To do that, always make sure that your landing pages are quality work that represent your brand well. Landing page experiments should be quick and cheap, but they shouldn’t look quick and cheap. And they should always live up to the expectations set before the click. Even if someone doesn’t convert on an experimental idea, you want to make a good impression that positively contributes to brand awareness and favorability — the world keeps spinning, and those prospects may very well come back to you on a separate campaign.

Well-managed, the ability to take smart, calculated risks is a powerful cultural advantage. In an online marketing arena where you’re either the quick or the dead, being aggressively innovative — but never reckless — is key to staying ahead of the curve, ahead of your competition.

With intelligent risk can come great reward.

More Reward

For all the challenges of post-click marketing at the enterprise level, the rewards of success make it all worthwhile. Conversion rate improvements as a percentage translate into much bigger absolute wins — a 100% increase in conversion rate is awesome in any context, but when it’s a doubling of millions of dollars in sales, that’s objectively even more impressive. After all, the bigger you are, the harder it is to move the needle.

Once you achieve this success, the tough part is over — congratulations on all your hard work — at least for that campaign cycle. However, there are 3 closing pieces of advice to keep in mind for making the most of your accomplishments:

1. Celebrate and share the credit — remember, post-click marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Recognize the contributions upstream and downstream in the funnel, and use these successes as a catalyst to further closer collaboration. For major improvements, a party is most definitely in order. Tequila shots are optional.

2. Review your ROI, even beyond the scope of your official post-click performance metrics. Particularly in lead generation, which is early in the sales cycle, but also with transactional respondents that can have repeat business, it’s often helpful to look beyond the immediate metrics of post-click marketing (e.g., engagement, conversion rate, quality score, initial transaction amount) and explore the patterns of long-term, deep-funnel value. The same applies to evaluating the indirect and soft costs. Understanding these factors can inspire new strategic post-click ideas and improve your business case, justifying further NPV and IRR investments in your post-click marketing capabilities.

3. Finally, don’t rest on your laurels — online marketing is a highly dynamic environment. Things change quickly: user expectations, competitor responses, the culture and issues of your different Long Tail marketing niches. Left unattended, the arc of every successful campaign eventually wanes. To keep your edge, you must be proactive. Take full advantage of all the infrastructure you’ve put in place for testing, low-cost updates, dashboard alerts, and regular brainstorming from an extended team of experts up and down the funnel. Above all, keep your post-click marketing authentic, genuine, and fresh.

Ultimately, all of the recommendations in this report — 36 in total — come down to one fundamental concept: agility. Speed and efficiency in post-click marketing translates directly into speed and efficiency in bringing new customers — the right customers — through your funnel. It’s not easy, but if you invest in the right structure, you can obtain a magnificent competitive advantage.

As Lou Gerstner, the famed turnaround chief of IBM in the 1990’s stated: who says elephants can’t dance?

Post-click marketing is about what people experience after you win their click. It may be as simple as a landing page, which builds on your ad or email, engaging respondents before forwarding them deeper into your web site. Increasingly though, the most effective landing experiences go beyond one page — using conversion paths and microsites to target specific audiences and deliver complete campaigns.

The goal is a high conversion rate. You want as many of those clicks as possible to convert into qualified leads, online transactions, new registrations — any metric by which you measure real online marketing success. The higher your conversion rate, the higher your ROI. See, the economics of online marketing pivot almost entirely on conversion rate. If you can acquire more conversions from your same advertising and email marketing spend, you win at two levels:

• you deliver more net business: more leads, more transactions, more registrations, etc.
• you lower your cost-per-acquisition (CPA), making your spend quantifiably more efficient.

Paid clicks are expensive, particularly for desirable keywords or popular sites. Instead of always having to bid more and more to increase your net results — pouring more clicks into the top of your marketing funnel — it’s time turn more and more of your existing clicks into real business. It’s time to widen your funnel at the next stage forward.

It’s time to focus on great post-click marketing.

After consulting to major marketing departments for many years, we developed a set of post-click marketing best practices for consistently generating strong conversion rates. In the past two years, we’ve seen more than 80% of our customers double their conversion rate — or better — by adopting these principles. Over the past year, the average conversion rate across all of our customers has been 11.1% — more than 4X the industry average.

However, you don’t need to be our customer to put these principles to work in your online marketing. The following five best practices — several of which go against the conventional wisdom of cookie-cutter landing pages — make the difference, and they’re yours to employ:

1. Beyond the Web Site. Your primary web site, www.yourcompany.com, is your virtual headquarters. But when you drop respondents in there cold on their first click, it can be an undirected and distraction-filled experience. In many cases they encounter “message mismatch” — what they stumble into can seem frustratingly disconnected from what they clicked on in the first place. Or they might just wander, lost in the corridors, until they fade away.
   
   Landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites are like your virtual field offices — they speak directly to the people in a specific niche, more focused and approachable. These independent landing experiences are ideal for campaign-specific marketing, as their messaging can be tightly matched with the different vehicles that generate clicks. Greater relevance + fewer distractions = more conversions.
2. Paths not Pages. The intent of landing pages is good — click-specific messaging and offers — but their single page format is artificially restrictive and can turn off respondents with a take-it-or-leave-it structure. This obscures the outcome for you as the marketer: if only 5% of your respondents convert, then you learn nothing about the 95% who don’t.
   
   Conversion paths are friendlier and more conversational. Respondents are gently guided along a short two or three-step path that lets them indicate what’s most important to them. They become more engaged because each step is a quick 5-second click, which pays off with more relevant details. In addition to converting at a higher rate, this approach also “fills the gap” with insight into respondents who abandon along the way.
3. Meaningful Segmentation. There are old-fashioned ways to segment people on the web: ask them questions in a form or try to guess their “persona” based on where they came from and where they go. Unfortunately, form data doesn’t help if someone never fills out the form, and making undeclared assumptions from a clickstream is prone to mistaken identity.
   
   A more modern approach is to make segmentation open and participatory with conversion paths. Choices on a path are transparent to respondents — ways to match them with the most relevant content — without imposing on their anonymity. Because their choices are intentional and driven by self-interest, the accuracy of your profiling increases significantly. You learn how respondents differentiate themselves through their own eyes, an invaluable perspective.
4. Strategic Testing. Test alternate landing experiences to maximize your success. But give much more credence to “big picture” experiments (via A|B testing) over the rote combinatorial testing of thousands of variations in content (via MVT).
   
   Great testing starts with a genuine hypothesis about your audience — from which you can learn real insight — not a throw-it-at-the-wall jumble of disjointed elements. Bold ideas, such as alternative segmentation strategies and different types of landing experiences, are the key to double-digit leaps in performance.
5. Brand the Conversion. Brand on the web is hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it — the quality, consistency, and interplay of all the elements — the credibility, authenticity, and passion of the message — the synergy with external brand equity — and ultimately the degree to which expectations are met or exceeded.
   
   Some landing experiences give great brand; others reek of amateurism. The good ones are crafted and deliberate, sending cues of excellence and trustworthiness, signaling to respondents that you value their experience. This is achieved with a blend of good design, good content, and zero tolerance for breaks in the experience: bad links, browser incompatibilities, inconsistent brand standards, expired information, sluggish response times. First impressions matter: make yours count.

Winning a respondent’s first click is important, but it’s only the beginning. Whether you adopt these principles or develop your own, the next level of online marketing effectiveness can only be achieved by looking beyond the click to what happens next.

It’s time to focus on great post-click marketing.

We need to think outside the box, because right now, the most highly optimized landing pages or microsites will only convert in the single digits. Why? It’s not because that’s the best that can be done, it’s because that’s the best that can be done within the constraints of landing pages. It’s time to throw them out the window!

The problem is short and punch ads that lead to convoluted, long-winded next steps. One of the keys to online marketing is brevity. We earn clicks with short and sweet messages that make vague promises. It works. We generate a lot of clicks from a wide variety of people, but then what?

The best of us use optimized landing pages or microsites to handle those clicks. And, generally speaking, the next thing that our respondent gets is a long, convoluted page that attempts to be all things to all people. It’s a huge mismatch. We get five seconds of a person’s attention and then ask them for five minutes to wade through a complicated page. It doesn’t work. The proof is in the numbers. According to Marketing Sherpa, we’re converting less than five per cent of all our paid clicks to anything more than one click. The problem is, we need more than one click. We need customers. That’s why we market.

Think like a respondent

Cast your mind back to the last time you clicked on an SEM ad or banner. It’s likely that the ad made you a promise, a “click here, get this” kind of thing that got your attention and made you click. You probably gave it hardly any thought.

Let’s say that promise was a discount on a Caribbean holiday. The next thing you need is a specific, short, easy page that gets you a little more engaged and excited. You don’t want to think or spend time. You’re willing to keep clicking, as long as there’s something in it for you. So, let’s say that next page presented a few options for your discounted Caribbean holiday—with kids, just the two of you, or traveling alone? You’ll click on the option that fits, because it’s making the original offer more valuable to you. Now you really want it.

Then you get an offer that’s hard to pass up. You’re traveling with the kids and you can get 20 per cent off a five-night stay at a family resort in Antigua. All you have to do is complete a short form and the resort will email the discount code, along with a brochure. Or, if you’re ready to book right now, by all means get to it. It’s fast and easy, so you complete the short form to get the discount and brochure.

You get a confirmation page. It thanks you for your interest with more rewards—take a virtual tour, choose activities, or connect to someone who can tell you all about the beach. It’s fast, easy and engaging. That process was a post-click marketing conversion path. When we plug conversion paths into online marketing instead of landing pages, microsites or deep links, we see 200-1,000 per cent increases in conversion rates. And that’s what I mean by moving the needle.

No more mediocrity

“No more landing pages!” should be the battle cry for online marketers. We’ve come to accept mediocrity in the form of “optimizing” square pegs for round holes. When you think like a user, you don’t want to see a landing page, regardless of how optimized it is. You want fast and easy. You want clarity and brevity. You want what was promised to get you to click, and you want it right now.

Conversion paths can segment, qualify, and convert up to 10 times the rate of outdated alternatives. They are multi-page landing experiences that reflect positively on your brand by keeping the promise you made to earn the click. They stop you form disappointing your users. Throw away your idea of a landing page. We must get more out of online marketing. And the way to do it is to think beyond the click and outside the box. No more landing pages!

Flexible and targeted, conversion paths allow you to segment, qualify and convert your online respondents from paid search, display, email and other sources of paid and unpaid web traffic.

Let’s kick off the anatomy lesson by defining what we mean by “conversion path.” A conversion path is a conversion-focused, linear landing experience, specifically designed to catch and convert incoming traffic from your online marketing campaigns. Conversion paths live outside of the structure of a company’s main site, and are typically used in place of landing pages, microsites or deep links to improve conversion rates, lead quality and overall marketing intelligence for your respondents and traffic sources.

Conversion paths move respondents from landing through conversion, using simple or complex branching experiences. Conversion paths comprise a series of connected pages:

1. Segmentation
2. Offer or pitch
3. Thank you

The graphic above shows a simple conversion path flow of landing pages, where segmentation is represented by A and B, and subsegmentation represented by A1/A2 and B1/B2.

It All Starts With Segmentation

A conversion path always starts with a segmentation page—the page respondents land on when they click through from an online ad.

A segmentation page should be utterly simple, with just a couple of choices. This is the page that is going to take the somewhat anonymous respondents from paid media and segment them based on who they are or what they’re looking for.

For example, let’s say we are marketing a high-end Caribbean resort on Google. After users click on our text ad and land on our conversion path, our first mission is to target the right content to each respondent. We know they are interested in our resort, but are they interested in vacationing with children? Water sports? A destination wedding? Maybe a honeymoon? In this example, we might present two segmentation choices—romantic rendezvous or family vacation-—so users can learn about the resort based on their specific interests.

Of course, we could offer more than two options to respondents—say, golf, boating or diving—but it’s important that the segmentation page be simple, focused and clear.

Now that we’re pitching our resort to the user’s interest, we could segment one step further if needed. Say we have an initial “Island Wedding” segmentation. We can then subsegment wedding respondents based on whether they want to work with a staff wedding planner or plan the wedding themselves.

The key to segmentation and subsegmentation is that each click pays off with a page that’s relevant to the respondent. The bride who wants to plan her own island wedding should be directed to a different page than the bride who wants the help of the resort wedding planner. Rather than expecting respondents to randomly surf around on a site and find the information themselves, or expecting a single page to appeal to everyone, a conversion path makes it easy to serve up truly relevant content to your audience.

What We Learn From Segmentation

To the marketing manager running the campaign—aside from targeting the right content to the right respondent, which naturally improves conversion rates—the tracking of these segmentation choices reveals who’s responding to which ads, even if they don’t convert. This yields insight into segments and conversions—so instead of trying to globally optimize a marketing campaign for all, we can maximize each audience segment independently.

What Do You Have to Offer?

Make it compelling and make it clear—now’s your chance to get the conversion.

Now that we’re pitching our resort based on the user’s very specific interest, whether it happens to be the family vacation of a lifetime or the bride’s big day, we can tailor the offer accordingly and provide highly relevant and compelling information to help generate a conversion.

Every offer page will be different and every company will have a different idea of what a “conversion” means. For our resort, it could be an online booking or it might be as simple as a completed contact form exchanged for a vacation planner filled with local excursions and offers.

So, at the point of conversion, we ask for the conversion only after we have given them relevant information. And as a result, we get a higher conversion rate than we otherwise would have.

What We Learn From the Offer

By segmenting our users according to their interests, we can apply highly relevant A/B tests for offers or fulfillment that enable us to quickly determine what works best. Again, by not trying to globally optimize our offer, we can really maximize the potential from each audience segment.

Mind Your Manners and Always Say Thank You

Whether respondents have booked a vacation or simply supplied contact details to receive their vacation planner, we should always thank them for the exchange in a manner that deepens our engagement and builds the relationship even further.

The thank-you page of our conversion path is our final opportunity to provide users with content that relates to their conversion. This is where we can introduce all the information that, had it been included elsewhere, would only have served to distract the user from our ultimate goal—the conversion.

Here we can deep link into a photo gallery that lives in our website, link to a customer feedback blog or serve up additional offers to further engage our user. The point is to do it only after we have achieved the conversion.

What We Learn From the Thank You

Saying thank you is not only the polite thing to do, but also a great opportunity to test offers or content. By including various links to resources after the conversion, we can gauge user interest without jeopardizing our campaign goals.

Overwhelming user interest in a resource offered on the thank-you page could provide fuel for an upcoming promotion or identify a vehicle for cross-promotion. Keeping our resources rich and tracking our clicks helps us uncover even more knowledge about our respondents.

We’ve acknowledged the “good” things about landing pages—even though many of those things could be better served by more evolved post-click marketing. Much like Fox News, we want to be fair and balanced, so here are the top 5 bad things about landing pages (and to clarify on semantics, when we say “landing page”, we mean a one-page format for post-click marketing, as compared to just the first page of a multi-page landing experience):

1. Sagging Page Syndrome (SPS), also known as “the kitchen sink”. Some things in life really are so simple that one short page sums it up clearly for everyone. But for the far majority of products and services in the world, there’s a little more to it. Trying to cram as much of it as possible on to one page puts the burden on the respondent to sift through it. Unfortunately, most of the time, they’re just not that into you yet. With a landing path, you can jettison the page one clutter—what Justin refers to as the 5-seconds to 5-minutes disconnect—and help respondents quickly get to what’s important to them in particular.
2. Rushing for the close. Landing pages that immediately present the respondent with a form to fill out—to subscribe, get a download, request more information, etc.—are just plain rude. A respondent clicked on your ad by expressing a modicum of interest, a willingness to consider what you have to say. If you immediately demand a commitment with their name and email address, or more, it’s like walking into an electronics store and having a salesperson instantly thrust a purchase order in your hands. Not surprisingly, this approach has a low conversion rate. Good post-click marketing builds trust with a step or two of a “conversation” before popping the question, as any good salesperson would.
3. No segmentation—clicks are treated as a commodity. Not all clicks are created equal. Ad response traffic often contains a spectrum of different audience segments. They clicked on the same ad, yes, but not all for the same reason, not all with the same needs. The one-page page format of landing pages makes the same pitch to all of them, oblivious to their distinctions. If the page focuses only on one segment, it disenfranchises the others; if it tries to speak to all segments at once, its passion and relevance to any one segment are watered down. The best practice of landing paths is to use that first page to induce a one-click directed behavioral segmentation choice — and then speak with conviction and authority to a respondent’s specific interests.
4. Optimizing the deck chairs on the Titanic. Landing page optimization is not unlike Henry Ford’s original production line: you can do any optimization you want, as long as it’s on this one page. Hey, we’re fine with testing which combination of headline, image, and offer button works best, but you can waste a lot of time on minutia (”does this work better with a comma or a semicolon?”), when you should be testing much more important elements of your campaign—such as your audience segmentation and the sequence of your pitch. With so many niche marketing opportunities competing for your attention, you need the big hits far more than the incremental tweaks.
5. Giving bad brand. Collectively, all of the problems above contribute to making landing pages bad branding experiences. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, landing pages are quick and cheap—which is good—but they often look quick and cheap, which is not good. Not good at all. Because it signals quick and cheap for your brand, and unless you’re the Dollar Store, that’s not a good image to put in people’s minds. A landing experience should look and feel and behave so as to signal two important things: A you care about the impressions of that respondent who just clicked and B they can be assured that you take pride in everything your organization does.

The good news is that fixing these problems in post-click marketing really isn’t that hard. Stop thinking at the page level, start thinking at the path level. Leverage audience segmentation. And remember that your brand never gets a second chance to make a first impression.

Kicking the landing page habit is not unlike cutting saturated fat from your diet. You know it’s bad for you, but it’s wrapped up in french fries and chocolate chip cookies that are just way too tasty. If you’re going to give up the sat fat—to, errr, improve your brand—you still want delicious snacking.

So let’s deconstruct what has been good—or claimed to have been good—about landing pages to make sure that we incorporate the tasty parts in our next generation of healthy post-click marketing:

1. Landing pages are quick and cheap. That’s not a putdown—fast, inexpensive experimentation is very important in this landscape of a thousand niche marketing opportunities. But “cheap” should be measured by CPA (cost-per-acquisition), not just absolute dollars. If I spend twice as much on a 3-page path, but it generates a 5X factor on my conversion rate, I win economically. As for being fast, speed in the digital realm is almost entirely a function of “process-izing” repetitive tasks; although the mechanics of producing conversion paths over landing pages are more advanced, they can still be streamlined.
2. Landing pages can be “matched” with advertisements. Huge benefit! (Although not everyone using landing pages takes advantage of it.) Arguably the power of message match, where content a respondent sees post-click is tailored to the promise of the specific ad they clicked on, is the core reason why landing pages have improved conversion rates. We think it’s vital to retain this pre-click/post-click continuity in other landing experiences that go beyond a single page.
3. Landing pages can be tested and optimized. Absolutely: test, test, test. One of the problems with big web sites is that they suffer from inertia. Online direct marketing campaigns thrive on the freedom of rapid experimentation (we call it the post-click marketing ecosystem), and landing pages have enabled that…to a point. You can experiment only so much within the box of one page (”let’s try every color in the web palette as our background!”). It’s time to experiment with bigger blocks such as the sequencing of presentation or the directed behavioral segmentation of your respondents, and to start testing in three dimensions (traffic source, landing experience, audience segment) instead of one or two.
4. Landing pages are easy to manage. Actually, this may not be true—you’ve no doubt run across a lot of outdated or link-broken landing pages. As you scale up to running dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of targeted landing experiences of any kind, the content management challenge is daunting. But this too is a problem that can be solved by software, whether it’s single pages or multi-page paths. Marketers shouldn’t have to be in the weeds here, regardless of the format.
5. Landing pages are friendly for respondents. Welllllll…the idea of message match is friendly, to be sure. But there are three cases of how a one-page format can be used: A a simple but compelling idea, applicable to all respondents, is well presented on one short page; B a more complex idea with different variations for different respondents is all jammed on to one long, crowded page shoved at everyone indiscriminately, leaving the confused and overwhelmed respondent to sort it out for themselves; and C a more complex idea with different variations for different respondents is artificially edited on to one short page—but loses fidelity at best or becomes empty/nonsensical at worst. The dream of friendly landing pages for respondents is only materialized in case A, but there’s a heck of a lot of direct marketing campaigns that don’t fit that mold that end up being short-changed in the landing page format to be B and C. Trying to squeeze a labrador retriever into a chihuahua carrying crate is just not pretty.

Of course, this begs the list of the Top 5 Bad Things About Landing Pages too.

No wonder online marketers love it. Buying Google ads is a smart move.

But how successful are those ad buys? How many people who click on your ad actually convert? On average, 3 in 100.

What about the other 97 percent? Who are they? Are they valuable to you? If so, why did they leave? How can you hold their attention? You got them to click, but they landed and left. Why? Chances are, you’re in the dark.

The solution is smart post-click marketing. Abbey Klaassen of Advertising Age called it “how to finish a Web sale.” Post-click marketing results in much higher conversion rates, higher quality conversions and satisfied customers.

The reason post-click marketing works is that it focuses on what happens after someone clicks. What good is a click, after all? Wouldn’t you prefer to have a customer? Or a conversion?

Too many marketers depend on microsites and landing pages to convert respondents. Success rates are slim. To understand why, imagine you’re the respondent. You see an ad and make an impulse decision to click. Suddenly, you’re presented with a page that requires a five-minute commitment. Furthermore (horror of horrors) it requires you to think. The result? Too much, too soon. And you abandon.

Post-click marketing has a simple precept: “Click here, get this.” You present the respondent with a series of easy choices. We call it pre-conversion segmentation. Here’s an example:

Citrix wants to target one of its products to large hospitals. It buys a Google ad that promises a white paper on HIPAA compliance. When respondents click the ad, they are taken to a simple page that asks whether they want a solution for a large or a small hospital. It’s one simple click. One split-second impulse. And you, the marketer, get valuable data—large or small hospital?—even if the person ultimately abandons. You paid for the click. Might as well learn what you can.

It’s important to approach your segmentation strategy from the user’s point of view. Respondents should make selfish choices that will pre-segment them in the background.

You lead the respondent down a conversion path. Every page on your path keeps the promise made in the ad. Citrix’s ad promised the white paper. It paid off the click by speaking to the needs of the various segments.

The results of Citrix’s campaign were staggering. By replacing its microsite with post-click conversion paths, the company increased its conversions by 556 percent. From our experience, smart post-click marketing with conversion paths will at least double the effectiveness of an online marketing campaign.

Bottom line, post-click marketing gives you conversion rates you never thought possible. You’ll convert a higher quantity of higher quality people. And by boosting conversions and learning more about those who don’t even convert, you dramatically improve your ROI.

Pre-conversion segmentation. Good for your user, good for your conversion rate—good for you.

In the beginning, your company created a website. And it was good.

But then it grew. And grew. And grew. Until it encompassed the heavens and the earth in content. Something for everyone. Everything for someone. And it ceased to be a coherent presentation to anyone in particular.

It became Encyclopedia Corporatica—a massive tome of information that includes press releases from five years ago. An impressive body of work, to be sure. But as a sales tool, as a marketing vehicle, it sags under its own weight.

In the lightning-paced world of online marketing, your website actually became less nimble. Now, before you can run with a daring new idea, you have to make sure it fits with your existing information architecture, look-and-feel, and IT feature set. While those constraints are important for your corporate site, they severely restrict more tactical web marketing campaigns.

You can break free of this paradox by separating the two: maintain a full, rich corporate website, but also use independent web marketing paths—small sequences of web pages that make a focused pitch—to target key product and field marketing opportunities.

Compared to working inside the box of your corporate website, these lightweight web marketing paths are faster to produce and easier to change, increasing your agility and reaction speed.

Such paths are often an ideal next step for respondents to online advertising and e-mail marketing. As “landing experiences”, they are more than a landing page but less than a full-scale website. At the critical post-click marketing stage, where a prospect has given you one click but is still skeptical of your relevance, this clarity of purpose and message can be just the right size.

A web marketing path starts with a landing page, but instead of trying to cram an entire pitch and offer into one screen, a good path will use that first page to gently segment the respondent. It gives them 2-3 choices of what to click next—a branch in the path—to identify what’s most relevant to them. The second page of the path then delivers on that promise, providing a deeper and more targeted presentation.

Depending on what you’re selling and who you’re targeting, a given path might have 2-5 steps that visitors walk through. It can branch again to further sub-segment audiences or filter key prospects through a qualifying process. In a lead generation campaign, it will typically culminate in a conversion offer that captures contact information in exchange for a meaningful deliverable.

The right balance is to have a path that’s deep enough to be valuable, yet small enough to be digestible. Paths don’t replace your website; they preface and supplement it. Paths certainly can—and should—direct visitors to your main website, but that’s usually best near the end, after you’ve made your pitch, to deep-link into highly relevant content.

For example, imagine your company sells research reports and consulting services. You might be running ads for a new report you’ve released, but you’re hoping it will appeal to several different types of customers. Let’s say it’s a study on click fraud, which could be of interest to both advertisers and site operators.

Here’s how a three-page web marketing path for this product marketing opportunity could be constructed:

The landing page of your path would start with a message aligned tightly with the ad or e-mail that generated the click and give respondents a two-way choice: “findings of most value to site operators” and “findings of most value to advertisers”.

With their second click, you take respondents to a page that lives up to that promise, presenting the most relevant highlights of the report to each segment. At this point, you offer to e-mail a free executive summary—again, tailored to their segment—in exchange for their contact information.

The final page of the path, after a respondent takes the offer on the previous page, thanks them, lets them know that their fulfillment is being e-mailed to them immediately, and now presents them with a mini-portal of segment-specific deep links into your corporate site. (The choices a respondent makes at this point may further suggest their sub-segment or lead quality grade.)

Respondents may have had the option to jump to your corporate site at any point in the path—it’s best when paths are presented as voluntary for respondents who receive real benefits from them. But now those respondents have their perceptions framed according to the campaign that won their click in the first place.

Keep in mind, your corporate website is chock-full of distractions, places where people can wander off to read about where your CEO went to school. That sort of free-form exploration is wonderful at a certain point in the marketing cycle, but it saps momentum early in the process—there is simply too much content speaking to too many different people. A good path sets the stage so that prospects surf your site with a clear idea of what’s in it for them.

A key advantage of lightweight paths is that they’re easy to produce, often at a fraction of the time and overhead required for corporate website changes. Since the marginal cost of creating path variations is relatively low, you aren’t constrained by the one-size-fits-all approach of a big website. It becomes practical to pair different ad campaigns with their own tailored landing experiences, increasing “message match” synergy between them. It also becomes feasible to run more tests, experimenting with multiple ideas to determine which is most effective. Both of these optimization techniques can deliver significant lift to your conversion rate.

In our example with the click fraud report, you might try several variations of your offer: only require their name and e-mail address, include a 10% discount code for the complete report, or a 15% discount that expires in one week. Which of these generates the greatest number of qualified leads? Which has the greatest impact on short-cycle sales? You may even want to experiment with different segmentations, perhaps to marketing-oriented or IT-oriented readers, or a special segment for SEM and advertising agencies.

To enable this kind of rapid-fire testing of alternate paths, it helps to create “frameworks” of path templates that you can quickly customize and deploy. It’s worth investing in good frameworks so that your paths maintain high standards in image and brand.

However, because web marketing paths are independent of your primary website, visibly delineated even in the minds of your audience, it’s safer to try bold, innovative ideas with them. Paths don’t have to match side-by-side or preserve the paradigms of your main website—each one is a clean slate. If something doesn’t work, it’s easy to swap it out. This creative freedom can be inspiring, revitalizing the energy of your online marketing.

Of course, paths should absolutely uphold your brand integrity. But it is important to remember that your brand is bigger than your corporate website. Given the weight that Encyclopedia Corporatica drags with it, your brand is almost certainly much bigger.

Your palette is broad, and “the” website is only one canvas. Web marketing paths and meaningful landing experiences in your post-click marketing let you paint a wider world.

If you’re responsible for performance-driven online marketing—particularly for web-based sales or lead generation—then your mission is to optimize a funnel. The online marketing funnel is an upside-down pyramid, sort of like a great, big waffle cone. At the top, you start with everyone who is exposed to your banner ads, paid search keywords, and e-mail marketing messages. Some portion of those people click-through, and thereby move one level deeper into your funnel.

At the very bottom of that funnel, some much smaller portion of those respondents pop out as “conversions”—as leads, subscribers, or possibly even customers, depending on the nature of your business and its sales cycle.

What happens in the middle, between click and conversion, is the space of post-click marketing. Unfortunately, there is often a big gap here, where a number of respondents disappear without explanation.

How big is this gap? As an industry average, only about 3% of the people who click into your funnel make it all the way down to conversion. Your mileage may vary, but odds are that your funnel is pretty darn narrow at the bottom, and you face constant pressure to increase the number of conversions flowing out of it.

One way to squeeze out more conversions, of course, is to increase your advertising spend, reaching for more and more people to pour in at the top of your funnel. After all, 3% of a larger number is a larger number itself, right?

But online advertising can be expensive and is constrained by the law of diminishing returns—as you continue to increase your spend, the impact of each additional dollar eventually starts to decline. If your funnel is responsible for generating qualified leads, casting an ever wider net can also take a toll on lead quality.

A better alternative is to concentrate on improving your conversion rate. This is what post-click marketing is all about: optimizing the middle of the funnel to convert more respondents. Doubling your conversion rate would give you as many net conversions as doubling your media spend—yet simultaneously increase your flow and decrease your cost per acquisition (CPA).

For many companies though, the middle of the funnel is somewhat of a mystery. Metrics at the top and bottom are clear—clicks and conversions—but what do you measure in between? What happens in that gap between 100% of the people who land and the 3% who convert? Who are those 97% and why did they slip away?

Traditional web analytics are interesting, but since they span everything people do on your site, in whatever order, they are usually too broad and ambiguous to answer these questions accurately—especially when you have to rapidly judge the performance of specific campaign initiatives.

A good solution is to install path-based “landing experiences” at the top of your funnel. More than a landing page but less than a full-blown web site, landing paths are short sequences of two to five pages that provide a structured follow-up for each of your sources of clicks. Appropriately, these are also known as conversion paths.

From the respondent’s point of view, a landing path is good when it quickly matches them up with content and an offer that’s most relevant to their interests. It might be a preface to deep-linking into your main web site, or it could be an entirely self-contained presentation. But it makes and delivers on meaningful promises in short order.

If respondents receive a more focused and targeted post-click pitch, that will certainly increase your conversion rate. But the big bonus of landing paths is that they establish a measurable structure that lets you “fill the gap” of the funnel before conversion.

Steps along a path can correspond with well-defined intermediate stages, with the performance at each stage giving you valuable insight into the effectiveness of previous stages—all the way back to the ad or e-mail from which the click originated.

A best practice is to include a segmentation step early in the funnel, typically on the first page of your path. Without requiring the respondent to fill out a form, you give them a choice of two or three branches in the path to determine which one best aligns with their reason for clicking in the first place. If you design these choices to correlate with your different target audiences, this step can provide precise behavioral segmentation.

Segmentation rate is then a useful pre-conversion metric, measuring the engagement and alignment of each group of respondents. Since segmentation rate can be very high—over 50%—you also learn more about the people who don’t convert. This gives you powerful clues as to why they abandoned, so you can test and adjust your pre-click and post-click marketing accordingly.

Subsequent steps in your paths can feed into an “affirmation rate”, as respondents pass identifiable milestones on their way to conversion, further illuminating their behavioral profile. You don’t want to go overboard, as the primary purpose of the path is to serve the best interests of the respondent, but two or three well-defined stages between click and conversion will make a world of difference in understanding the end-to-end dynamics of your funnel.

Increased visibility into the middle of the funnel makes it easier to manage because you know better what you’re optimizing. A more optimized funnel means more conversions, at higher quality, with a more effective media spend. It’s time to say goodbye to the gap.

Here’s a popular way to generate online leads: Buy a keyword ad on a search engine site. In your ad, offer free content, such as a white paper, to respondents who complete a short form.

In theory, this type of campaign works well: The people who respond get something of value. You get leads. Everyone’s happy.

Not so fast. Too often in this scenario, the sales department follows up on the leads and tells marketing they’re no good. What went wrong?

The campaign described above is a wide-net campaign. When you post a search engine ad—no matter how targeted it is—you will attract people with diverse motivations and different pain points. Some of them are sales-ready. Others are simply interested.

But this doesn’t have to be a problem. In fact, it can be a golden opportunity to learn who is interested in your offerings and to tailor your sales and marketing to their desires.

A wide-net campaign can yield terrific results if you know how to craft it. These six steps will help you get the most from yours.

1. See the big picture. When using wide-net marketing vehicles, it helps to take a longer-term view of lead generation. Wide-net campaigns are often the first step in a larger program. In fact, lead generation that starts online has to be a process that combines effective online and offline tactics to nurture and qualify an inquiry until it becomes a lead. Perhaps you begin with a white paper, then send an e-mail or offer a webinar. The point is, you’re generating interest—and building on it.
2. Talk to your sales team. Don’t wait until the end of the campaign for your sales team to tell you the leads aren’t good. Find out in advance what sales needs, and build it into your marketing strategy. We’ll use this example: You are marketing a product to health-care companies. The sales team wants to talk to decision makers at large hospitals. Make this a part of the campaign. How?
3. Find out who’s clicking, who’s converting and who’s abandoning. For a wide-net campaign to pay off, you must know who’s responding. You do this through post-click marketing. Rather than directing respondents to a single landing page, offer a landing path—a series of pages that collects information from the visitor. Using our example… Your ad promises a solution for health-care companies. The respondent arrives at the first page of your landing path and sees three choices: “Solutions for small hospitals,” “Solutions for large hospitals” and “Solutions for other health-care agencies.” (Your segmentation can be driven by whatever information you’d like to know.) The visitor makes a choice, giving you an important bit of data in the process. As they move along the path, be sure you’re delivering on whatever promise you made on the previous screen. Did you promise them a solution for a large hospital? Give them some information that pays off that promise. Respondents will continue along the path, and they’ll give you valuable information as they do so. Even those who abandon before converting (i.e., filling out the form) leave important data. The beauty of post-click marketing is that it allows you track respondent behavior. What does a visitor click on? How much time does someone spend on a page? You have this information. And the more you know about the respondent, the better your sales team can focus their efforts.
4. Score your respondents. Assign scores to respondent behavior. Remember that our sales team wants to talk to decision makers at large hospitals. So when someone clicks “Solutions for Large Hospitals” on your landing path, you’ll assign that person a high score, giving a lower score to someone who chooses the small hospital option. Let’s say your large hospital respondent not only completes the form, but clicks every link on the “thank you” page you included in your path. More points. Design your post-click strategy and scoring any way you like. Remember: It should serve the goals of your sales department.
5. Feed information to the sales team. In a successful post-click marketing campaign, you have a lot of information on a lead by the time you turn it over to the sales team. You can pass along not only the contact information, but statistics on behavior that give clues about their interests. And because you’ve scored each respondent’s behavior, the sales team knows the value of every lead it receives. Armed with information from the post-click campaign, a salesperson knows whom she is calling. If it’s a decision maker at a large hospital, she’ll talk about solutions for large hospitals. She might discuss case studies of larger hospitals, etc.
6. Use your campaign knowledge to nurture those leads. Because the sales and marketing teams have solid information on respondents, they can plan their follow-up strategies accordingly. The large hospitals go to the top of the call list.. Small hospitals are second. Non-hospital respondents might get regular e-mails on topics related to health care. And within these categories, sales can prioritize its calls and tailor its efforts based on scoring and behavior information. Did someone download a demo? Sales can contact them to let them know about a more recent demo that may be of interest. Post-click data can even be used to divvy up leads. Perhaps the hottest ones go straight to the sales manager, while others go to a support team. Marketing may even decide to hold off on sending certain leads to sales, and instead plan a series of follow-up campaigns for some respondents. So a prospect receives a white paper as fulfillment, then gets a personal e-mail with an additional piece of content. By the time sales gets the lead, perhaps this person has indicated further interest, or at a minimum they have received additional, supporting content on the topic they originally expressed interest in.

As you see, a wide-net campaign can yield terrific results. With solid planning, strategy and execution, you’ll collect valuable data that helps you streamline sales and convert clicks into clients.

Post-click marketing at its most basic is this—a conversion path rather than a single landing page. People who respond to your ad land on a path. As they move along this path, they make choices that give you information. Here’s an example: You advertise a health-care solution to hospitals. On the first page of the path, the respondent must choose between “Solutions for Large Hospitals” and “Solutions for Small Hospitals.” When the respondent makes this choice, he “segments” into one of these categories. Your post-click results should show you how many small hospitals are converting, how many large hospitals are converting, and how many of each are abandoning.

Take things a step further. Instead of putting up one path, you might test two or three paths at one time. Let’s say you’d like to test the effectiveness of a certain graphic look and feel. Or the effectiveness of using more text as opposed to less. You do this by putting up more than one path. A person who clicks on your ad lands on one of these paths, assigned at random. The results tell you which path is converting the most respondents.

A good post-click marketing deployment should also allow you to collect data on traffic sources. So, say your traffic comes from ads you’ve posted on Google and Yahoo! You can see the data on conversions by traffic source, and know where to optimize your buy.

Putting it All Together: The RTP Matrix

Viewing the performance of respondent segments, traffic sources and paths each on their own is helpful. But the potential for real breakthrough post-click marketing intelligence is at the intersection of these three forces. ion interactive calls this the RTP matrix, for Respondents, Traffic sources and Paths.

RTP matrix testing addresses the ultimate question: Which respondent segments, arriving from which traffic sources, are converted most effectively by which paths? Once you uncover that answer, you can optimize your entire online direct marketing chain, not just its individual components.

We call this matrix testing because it compares every segment in every traffic source against every path, in a three-dimensional matrix. If you’re familiar with Excel, this is similar to a pivot table; in data mining applications, it’s often referred to as a cube. Success is measured according to a combination of three metrics:

• the conversion rate, as a percentage of the total traffic;
• the actual number of converted respondents;
• the average qualifying score of converted respondents.

When reviewing the RTP matrix in all three dimensions, you’re able to identify hot spots of activity at a high level that are performing particularly well. From there, you can zoom in on more detailed comparisons to better understand the specific reasons for their unusual performance.

The following table demonstrates one possible RTP matrix view that identifies three hot spots. Two path/traffic source combinations are excelling on specific audience segments, and one path/traffic source combination is decidedly sub-par:

This detailed cross-analysis gives you crucial revelations. For instance, Path A paired with Traffic Source 2 may only be delivering an 8 percent conversion rate overall-which hardly distinguishes it from most of the other path/traffic source combinations. Here, however, you are able to hone in on the discovery that for Segment Y, this particular combination is a real winner.

For different perspectives, ion interactive also examines two-dimensional grids that are sliced out of the full three-dimensional RTP matrix:

• RxT (Respondents x Traffic Sources) Grid: which traffic sources are drawing in which audiences; where are your different respondent segments coming from?
• RxP (Respondents x Paths) Grid: which paths are resonating most effectively with your different target audiences; what is the best way to present your message to convert different respondent segments?
• TxP (Traffic Sources x Paths) Grid: what is the best combination of click marketing and post-click marketing?

Post-Click Perfection

RTP matrix testing can answer almost any reasonable question about post-click marketing performance. ion interactive captures the most common RTP matrix analyses in simple reports so that once you have identified which results are most relevant to you, they’re quick and easy to reference.

The insights you gain from RTP matrix testing give you tremendous power in the strategic design and tactical deployment of your post-click marketing efforts. You’ll maximize your return on traffic sources, identify shifts in opportunities and act on them more quickly.

In order for a sizable house list to be a tenable goal, it must be cost effective and of high quality. Traditionally those two characteristics have been at odds. You could generate a big (cheap) list or a higher quality, small (expensive) list. But ‘traditionally’ doesn’t apply in 2007. When you focus on what happens after your prospect clicks on your online ad or email, you can reduce your cost per acquisition and raise your overall lead quality. Here’s how.

First, think of your entire end-to-end process as a giant funnel. You want to pour in a huge number of clicks (respon-dents), but get out a much smaller number of qualified prospects. ‘Much smaller’ here is a good thing, so don’t think that means three out of a hundred. Think more like 7-15% conversion and you’re in the right ballpark (if you play your post-click cards well).

• Good post-click marketing matches the post-click message to the one that earned the click. You must be on message, not merely on topic. Your first page must clearly capitalize on the promise you made to earn the click that brought the respondent in.
• Then, post-click marketing presents short, single-minded pages that include simple decisions for respondents to make. Based on their behaviors at those decision/segmentation forks, you can then make your pitch more and more specific to narrow your funnel. Depending on the complexity of your product or the ticket of your sale, you may use multiple segmentation forks—each one will further narrow your funnel and improve your lead quality.
• By the time you ask your respondent to convert to a prospect and give you their data, they trust you and actu-ally want to give it to you. That trust and desire translates to higher conversions and much higher quality data—real email and snail mail addresses.

2007 is the year of what happens after the click. Focus on that, and it will also be the year you build the house list you’ve always dreamed of.

Every email, ad and search engine marketing placement entices a click by making a promise. Most of the time that promise is immediately broken and the brand behind it is tarnished.

Marketers work very hard at enticing that first response. We treat the click as the objective and consider the battle won as soon as that first action takes place. Little thought is given to what happens next. Sure, a few of us have some topic-specific landing pages or micro-sites, but most of us are still landing our traffic on our home page—or somewhere equally irrelevant. It’s fair to say that little consideration is given to keeping that first promise.

You can understand the size of the problem by looking at a simple statistic: While $15 billion worth of clicks are gen-erated each year, a whopping 97% of them amount to nothing more than that first click. Only 3% convert. If we’re keeping the promises we make to entice our clicks, then why are all of these interested people so fast to leave? We’re not. We promise the world to entice that first impulse and 97% of the time we under deliver. Billions of times each year marketers begin a relationship by betraying a confidence. That hurts.

Your brand is at stake. Think of the last time you clicked on a marketing link only to land on a page that had nothing to do with the message that captured your interest. It’s likely you felt a combination of disappointment, confusion and maybe even anger. The more respondents care about the initial message, the stronger they’ll feel when their expec-tations go unfulfilled. That means your most valuable respondents take the disappointment the hardest. And when that emotion is taken to heart, your brand is damaged.

The enemy is post-click message mismatch. And we can avoid it by objectively looking at what happens after that first click. When your click and post-click messages match, your promise is kept and your brand is enhanced.

Keeping your promise means matching the landing experience to the message that earned the click. It means treating the respondent as a person, not as a mouse button. And it means letting that person know that you appreciate their interest and will reward it by fulfilling their expectations. When you do these things your brand is not the only beneficiary—you’ll also earn much higher conversion rates.

Rule number 1: Be on message, not on topic.

Clicking on a marketing link is an impulsive reaction to a compelling message. Far too often marketers create topic-specific landing pages or micro-sites and use them in scenarios where they need message-specific pages. The result is a message mismatch—despite what the marketer perceives to be a relevant landing experience. Respondents engage when the first page they see is message-specific to what they just clicked on.

Take an example of a marketer targeting the healthcare market. Let’s say the call to action promises a free white paper. When the person clicks, they expect to see something about that free white paper. Their interest will wain im-mediately if what they see is a landing page about healthcare, a page about a product for the healthcare market, a company home page, or a even healthcare micro-site. Healthcare is the topic. The reason they clicked was the white paper—and that’s the message they need to see.

Rule number 2: Use multiple, single-message pages.

Go back to the basic premise that a click is an impulsive reaction to a message. What comes next must be equally as simple and clear. This first impression should have a single, simple, message-specific purpose. It should capitalize on the impulse that enticed the click. Once we earn one more click, we have the respondent engaged and we can expect more effort from him—on the next single-message page.

Let’s say that same healthcare marketer knows that her best prospects are large hospitals. She can use her first page to keep her promise, engage her respondent and segment her traffic. All using one simple message that asks if the respondent would like a white paper specific to smaller hospitals or larger ones. The respondent clicks one way or the other—and in the process deepens their interest in something they perceive to be more specifically applicable to their needs. They also give our marketer the critical segmentation data she needs for her field sales teams.

Rule number 3: Trade for conversion.

Let’s review how the respondent got here: A brand made a promise in an ad or email. A person liked that promise enough to click. So far, that’s one promise from the brand and one action from the person. Then the brand presented a compelling, focused landing page that engaged the person—who was then invested—to click again. Now that’s two promises made by the brand and one kept. It’s the brand’s turn to come through.

What happens next for you depends on what your objective is, what constitutes a conversion for your organization, and what interest you have in deeper segmentation or qualification before conversion. But it’s clearly the brand’s turn to keep the promise from the previous click and to make a third promise to earn conversion. Trading step by step lets us build trust to the point where we can credibly ask for personal information and expect to get it.

Going back to the healthcare example, our marketer could now present the high points of the segment-specific white paper to build interest even more. And along with that, she could present a short form for the respondent to fill out in order to download the white paper. There is a much higher-than-average likelihood that the respondent will now con-vert. Why? Because two clicks of trust have been established. And because they still want the white paper.

This step-by-step trust building is done using multi-page conversion paths. And they can be as simple or as complex as the concept they are representing. Your conversion paths may need only three steps to build enough credibility to earn a respondent’s conversion, or you might need more steps. What’s vitally important is that you are aware of the levels of engagement and trust at each point within the path. When marketers overstep the boundaries of earned trust, respondents abandon the path. You cannot ask for what you want until you have given the respondent what was promised. When respondents feel that they are being treated fairly, they too behave fairly.

E-marketing offers a unique, immediate opportunity to enhance or degrade your brand. No other mass communica-tion vehicle let’s you make a promise and keep it—interactively, on the spot. That presents an exciting opportunity and a tremendous responsibility. What you do after the click dictates the impact your email, advertising and search engine marketing will have on your brand. Remember to be on message; use multiple, single-message pages; and trade information within the boundaries of earned trust. You’ll get more conversions, increase your ROI and—most importantly—keep your promises.

How many times have you clicked on a banner or email link only to be disappointed by landing on a generic page that has nothing to do with the reason you clicked? You look, you give the sponsor the benefit of the doubt — but nope… there’s nothing there. You probably feel frustrated, betrayed, maybe even angry — feelings that profoundly affect the perception of the brand behind the message. And if you’re the marketer behind the message, you’re responsible for that negative brand impact. Ouch.

Every promise made in every banner, email or keyword ad is a pivotal branding opportunity. By keeping the promise you made to entice the click, your brand is enhanced. If you break that promise, your brand is damaged. That means many things we don’t traditionally think of as “branding,” really are. And it means we have a tremendous responsibility to uphold.

In today’s e-marketing world, most email, online advertising and search engine marketing brand moments are pretty bad ones. With 95-97% of e-marketing respondents never moving beyond the first click, it’s safe to say that we’re not keeping our promises.

How we choose to handle what happens after the click dictates if our brand moment is a good one or a bad one. Making the promise to entice the click is the easy part. Keeping it is much harder. Since e-marketing success is judged on click-through rate, most of us will say just about anything to earn that first click. Far less thought is given to what happens next — after they click. Sure, some of us dedicate some resources to landing pages or topic-specific micro-sites. But the bottom line is that 95% or more of first clicks never go further. Often, that drop off is due to a broken promise — a brand moment gone bad.

Unkept promises come in many forms. There’s the most obvious example, where you click on a specific message only to land on a company’s home page. Then there are less obvious cases where you have landing pages or micro-sites that are topic specific, but not message specific. Remember, clicking is an impulse reaction to a message, not a topic.

Opportunity knocks. When you keep the promise you made to earn the click, you see not only better brand perception, but also significantly higher conversion rates. Success measurement can then begin to shift away from click-through rate and toward much more meaningful metrics—conversion and branding. Match the post-click message to the click originator, and you’re on your way to the e-marketing hall of fame. But how?

Let’s say you run a banner that entices the click by promising a 30% savings on a trip to a resort. If you pay off the promise with a landing page that speaks to that resort (the topic), but fails to capitalize on the 30% savings (the message), you have broken the promise and will lose a high percentage of your respondents. On the flip side, if you land your respondents directly on a booking form, you’ll also lose a high percentage, because you neglected to engage them deeply enough to ask for the sale. E-marketing is a conversation that merely begins with the first click. Think of the promise as the first sentence of a paragraph, and your post-click effort as the completion of that first thought.

Post-click message matching means being very specific and earning a respondent’s trust by engaging them with a simple, single-purpose extension of the original promise. Match the post-click message to the promise made, and put your direct response to work on your brand—in a good way. And watch your conversion rates soar.

Historically, the most popular metric of Web marketing has been traffic. How many visitors come to your Web site each month? How many unique, how many repeat?

This is how the Web grew up, with “hits” as a common denominator across all properties. The more you have, the better you are. Simple math.

Web advertising has been primarily concerned with feeding this engine of growth. The overarching mission of click marketing has been to drive traffic to an organization’s Web site. Keep the number of clicks high and the cost-per-click low.

The implicit assumption has been that if you get enough traffic to your site—the right kind of traffic, even more so—then Web advertising has succeeded, and it is now up to your site to take over from there. Because this hand-off is viewed as independent, the teams running the advertising may very well be different from those managing the site.

But that assumption is rapidly evolving.

Demand for traffic on your Web site isn’t likely to subside, but that’s not necessarily the objective for every online ad campaign anymore. Increasingly, Web marketing campaigns are measured by leads generated and sales transacted. These metrics have been tracked for a while, but what’s remarkable now is the proliferation of end-to-end campaigns that don’t drive traffic to the organization’s main Web site at all.

These end-to-end campaigns exist as standalone microsites, encapsulating everything relevant to a particular pitch—and nothing more—in a focused presentation for a specific target audience. The yardstick of success is the percentage of conversions.

When you think about it, this is a fascinating divergence of two very different modes of Web marketing: search mode vs. pitch mode.

“Search mode,” with a nod to John Battelle’s book The Search, is the de facto way in which the Web works. You concentrate on making your site deep, accurate, and usable, and then rely on search engine optimization (SEO), affinity links, and paid keyword search to point to your content in whatever context—at whatever level of granularity—that the user doing the search finds relevant.

The user is empowered in search mode. Your mission is to give users as much access as they want, facilitating open-ended “go-anywhere-from-anywhere” navigation throughout your site. The users have the freedom to assemble whatever pieces they want, in whatever order they want, and then introduce themselves to you as a prospect or customer only if and when they think it’s valuable. This is the great power of Internet search.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and in this mode the responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of the users to sell themselves on the best solution and to decide the next steps to take. That works beautifully for many products and services, but not all. There are many scenarios—particularly with complex, high-end, or innovative products and services—where it can be confusing and inefficient.

In search mode, since the flow is largely out of your hands, visits to your site is as good a metric as any to gauge market appeal and estimate its origin.

“Pitch mode,” in contrast, takes people who respond to an ad and channels them down an intentionally narrow path. The marketer is in the driver’s seat, crafting a presentation that the user sees one screen at a time, usually in a linear sequence. The choices are limited at each step and primarily serve to identify the most relevant needs and characteristics of the respondent so that subsequent pages in the pitch can be tailored accordingly. Everything drives to a conversion event, typically to acquire the respondent’s contact information.

This is a reincarnation of classic direct marketing, genetically enhanced to adapt in real time to each respondent in a dynamic Web environment.

An interesting aspect of pitch mode is that the ad that initiates the click can have a much tighter connection with the post-click marketing path that follows. The ad is essentially the first step of the pitch, and what follows can—and should—be a seamless experience.

Although hits matter in pitch mode, since they give you a sense of how well your ads and their placements are pulling, the real metric to watch is your conversion rate. Better yet, if you segment respondents based on their choices along the path, you can also measure the segmentation rate and the relative conversion rate within each segment. This can be much more accurate and enlightening than traditional traffic analysis.

Pitch mode doesn’t necessarily eliminate search mode. In many situations, users will still prefer the freedom of browsing on their own terms. But when it’s time to make a solid pitch in a Web marketing campaign, both the marketer and the respondent can appreciate a little more structure.

Traffic is good, but ultimately it’s all about conversion.

Historically, the most popular web-marketing metric has been traffic. How many visitors come to your website each month? How many unique, how many repeat? The web grew up with “hits” as a common denominator: The more you have, the better you are.

So it’s no wonder web advertising has been primarily concerned with feeding this engine. The mission of click marketing has been to drive traffic to an organization’s website — keep the number of clicks high and the cost-per-click low. The assumption is if you get enough traffic to your site, especially the right kind of traffic, then web advertising has succeeded and your site can take over from there. And because this handoff is viewed as independent, the teams running the advertising may very well be different than those managing the site.

The conversion rate

But that assumption is evolving rapidly. The yardstick of success isn’t the number of hits per se, but rather the conversion rate. When you think about it, this is a fascinating divergence of two very different modes of web marketing: search mode vs. pitch mode.

In search mode the responsibility to “convert” rests squarely on the shoulders of the user. You concentrate on making your site deep, accurate and usable, then rely on search-engine optimization (SEO), affinity links and paid keyword search to point users to your content in whatever context they find relevant.

You give them open-ended “go anywhere from anywhere” navigation throughout your site and then let them introduce themselves to you as a prospect or customer only if and when they think it’s worth it. There are many scenarios — particularly with complex, high-end or innovative products and services — where this mode can be confusing and inefficient for users.

“Pitch mode,” in contrast, funnels those who respond to an ad down an intentionally narrow path. The marketer is in the driver’s seat, crafting a presentation the user sees one screen at a time, usually in a linear sequence. The choices are limited at each step and identify the most relevant needs and characteristics of the respondent so that subsequent pages in the pitch can be tailored accordingly. Everything drives to a conversion event, typically to acquire the respondent’s contact information.

It’s classic direct marketing, genetically pumped up to adapt in real time to each respondent on the dynamic web.

A carefully sequenced pitch

What’s a good example of “pitch mode”? Imagine you’re launching a web-marketing campaign for a new line of hybrid cars. Prospects will click on paid search keywords or banner ads and you could send them to a regular search-and-discover website — but instead you decide to route them to a directed series of web pages (a “landing path” instead of a “landing page”) that delivers a carefully sequenced pitch.

Hybrid cars are ideal for pitch-mode marketing because they are a big-ticket item that comes with complex and innovative — but not particularly well-understood — technology. Many of your prospects are likely to want some guidance in their exploration here.

The first step of your hybrid car landing path would probably be a segmentation choice: Have you ever owned a hybrid before? Most people will click “no,” of course, although a great market for your product is also the owners of competitors’ hybrids, who could be compelled to trade up. Clearly the pitch to these two audiences should be different, so this is a perfect place to branch and adapt your presentation accordingly.

Drilling down at the next level, you might offer forks in your path that further stylize the pitch according to the prospect: urban vs. suburban use, personal vs. business use, etc. Many of these interests are served by the same set of underlying features (gas efficiency, maintenance, safety), but they can be emphasized in ways that make them most relevant to each audience segment. This creates a pitch that’s more like a dialogue.

To “convert” a respondent on the hybrid car path probably means that you collect basic contact information from them — perhaps driven by an offer of a promotional DVD, a high-design literature kit or a free issue of Green Car Journal magazine.

Hybrid cars are one example, but you can envision a similar approach in markets for novel or luxury travel, shared services for small- to medium-sized businesses, financial advising, executive education and so on.

The ad is the first step

In pitch mode the ad that initiates the click can have a much tighter connection with the post-click marketing path. The ad is essentially the first step of the pitch, and what follows should be a seamless experience.

The “experience” is the key in pitch mode — and this is territory where creative agencies can bring their full talents to bear. Crafting an effective and engaging landing path — or paths tied to different online advertising placements — is considerably more work than simply publishing the usual suspects of specs, case studies and news blurbs on a regular website for search-mode surfers. It’s a shift from producing brand-compatible content to producing an actual brand-building encounter. And while such experiences are more expensive, they can outperform more passive web marketing in net results. And because conversions track easily with sales, there’s a clear way to see return on investment.

Although hits matter in pitch mode, because they give you a sense of how well your ads and their placements are pulling, the real metric to watch is your conversion rate. Better yet, if you segment respondents based on their choices along the path, you can also measure the conversion rate within each segment. This can be much more accurate and enlightening than traditional traffic analysis. It also gives you insight into respondents who segment but don’t convert, the often large and mysterious group of “abandoners.”

Doesn’t replace search

Pitch mode doesn’t necessarily eliminate search mode. We often recommend that pitch mode paths contain “escape hatches” that let search-oriented respondents jump to your regular website for a more nondeterministic surfing experience. In many situations, users will still prefer the freedom of browsing on their own terms.

However, when it’s time to make a solid pitch in a web-marketing campaign, both the marketer and the respondent can appreciate a little more structure. Traffic is good, but ultimately it’s all about conversion.

Yet too often in search engine marketing, the click is commoditized. Every respondent to a particular keyword ad receives the same result upon a click-through.

This is particularly troublesome in search engine marketing because paid keyword search has a few unique segmentation challenges when acquiring that click.

First, considerable ambiguity can exist in the meaning of a particular keyword depending on the frame of mind of the search user. Many advertisers chase the same keywords with very different markets in mind.

Next, squeezing a compelling ad message into 130 characters of plain text leaves little room for segmentation cues. Often, AdWords-style ads are accidentally — or intentionally — misleading, pulling in respondents who have very diverse intentions.

These issues contribute to the relatively low average conversion rate of clicks acquired via paid search: 3.6 percent.

However, even when a search user attributes the same meaning to the keyword that the advertiser has, and the smidgen of ad text induces a correctly intentioned click, the fact remains that not all prospects are the same.

A stream of traffic from search engine marketing is likely to contain several distinct audience segments. These segments can have different value to the advertiser, and they are likely to be attuned to different sales propositions. To optimize your SEM, you need to be able to segment these audiences, both to tailor your pitch to them accordingly and to accurately assess the type of traffic your keywords are drawing.

The best time to segment respondents is immediately after they click on your keyword. Instead of a one-size-fits-all landing page, we suggest a “landing path” — a sequence of two or three pages. The first page of the path should be your segmentation page, offering two or three choices to the respondent: If you are interested in X, then click here for details; if you’re more interested in Y, click here instead. You are offering respondents information more relevant to their needs in exchange for one more click. Using this technique in campaigns for our clients, we typically have seen segmentation rates of 60 percent to 70 percent.

Your segmentation can be based on whichever factors are most important to your lead acquisition strategy, including:

• Desirability of prospects (luxury versus economy vacationers).
• Implied interest level of the respondent (hot versus lukewarm respondents).
• Audience characteristics that alter their receptivity to variations of your pitch (selling a resort for a romantic getaway is different than for a family vacation).

With this information, the second page of your landing path — and all subsequent content — can deliver on giving respondents what is important to them. This is the essence of good post-click marketing. As might be expected, tailoring your post-click marketing by audience segment tends to boost your conversion rate, often by more than double.

However, this approach yields another benefit that can affect your paid search strategy: You now have a high percentage of segmentation information on those incoming clicks that can directly tie back to each of your keyword ads.

This early segmentation means that you acquire segment data even for many of the respondents who don’t convert. This lets you distinguish between segments that are drawn only to your keyword association and ad text versus those that also are oriented to convert based on the rest of your marketing pitch.

Once you know which keywords and ads draw in which audiences on particular engines, you can manipulate those levers in pursuit of your overall SEM strategy.

If you sell a complex or high-ticket item, you know how hard and expensive it can be to generate quality leads. The more that’s at stake, the smaller the market and the longer the sales cycle. Generating better leads can make dramatic differences in your close rate and revenue. If you’re using email online advertising or search engine marketing you can generate higher quality leads by focusing your energy on what happens after you earn the first click.

When you think of generating leads online, you probably think conversion is your number one priority. Think again. If you want highly qualified, warm prospects, focus more on pre-conversion segmentation than conversion. That means focusing on a guided path of choices, not just a single ‘landing page.’ But don’t worry—focusing on segmentation will also bring you more conversions, so you’re not missing out on anything.

Of course, pre-conversion segmentation must be self-serving to your respondent’s interest, while serving your interests, as well. Remember, industry-wide, 95% of e-marketing respondents abandon without converting. Properly designed pre-conversion segmentation can entice 40-80% of all respondents beyond the initial click, and get you valuable data in the process. Step by step, you’ll engage your respondents, earn their trust and profile them. It’s a win-win for everybody.

Let’s walk through an example of an enterprise software company selling to elusive decision makers like CIOs, CTOs and CEOs. Let’s say you promised a white paper to entice the first click. Immediately upon landing, you should offer versions of that white paper that allow you to segment your respondents in a way that’s strategically valuable to you. Perhaps your software is especially effective within certain industries. In that case, offer white papers that are industry specific. This offer should be graphical—with very few words—and formless. With this next click, you’ve earned trust by keeping your promise, and you’ve engaged the respondent; you’ve made them want the white paper even more, as you’ve made it more specific to them, and you’ve learned their industry. Now you can use sub-segmentation to weed even further.

So far, you’ve learned the respondent’s industry and eliminated some poor fits. Now you need to determine if they’re decision makers or not. For this, you should segment them again. Perhaps this time you offer industry-specific pain point choices that help you determine their role within their organization. The pain points of a C-level executive are far different than those of a mid-level manager, so you design your white paper solution choices to ferret out the C-levels from the rest. You should be getting down to some extremely good prospects. Now it’s time to convert them to leads.

The last thing you want to do is lose your highly qualified respondents before you get them to submit their name and contact information. But the last thing they want to do—now that they’re engaged and invested—is miss out on that tailored white paper. Present them with a short, simple data capture form, along with an obvious, one-sentence privacy promise. Don’t ask for more than you need: name, email address and country—maybe phone. In many cases, you can get away with one, optional scoring question like number of employees. And be sure to let them know you’ll be delivering their white paper via email, so you’re sure to get a valid address.

This example shows how two sets of rudimentary pre-conversion segmentation can yield invaluable data on a high percentage of all respondents—not just on the small percentage who end up converting. What’s better is that your investment in targeted post-click messaging and content will now reap two more benefits—higher conversions and warmer leads. You can leverage the pre-conversion data and track it back to your traffic sources to know exactly which vehicles and messages are delivering your best prospects. And you can compare your pre-conversion and conversion profiles to know if you’re converting your most qualified traffic. If not, make some adjustments to your conversion mechanism until you are converting the best respondents. Pre-conversion segmentation is the backbone of an efficient, high-quality, lead-generation machine.

Before you convert a respondent, you should be using multi-step segmentation techniques to learn where your best prospects are coming from. You should also use that segmentation information to tailor targeted messaging that sub-segments and sifts your respondents even further. By the time you seek a conversion, you should have built trust and you should be speaking very specifically to an individual. That makes it easier to get the conversion—and you can pass valuable behavior-based profile data to your re-marketing or sales team. Bottom line: by focusing on what happens after the click, you can make e-marketing your best source of high-quality leads for complex or high-ticket items.

Pre-conversion segmentation can shed light on who’s responding versus converting. It’s far more meaningful than what you learn from conversions, because it’s taken on a much higher percentage of respondents.”

Instead of having knowledge on only the 5% who actually convert, pre-conversion segmentation may yield high-value data on 40-80% of all respondents. What you learn from those 40-80% can help you in two key areas. First, you can know who’s not converting. Second, you can know which traffic sources are giving you the highest quality clicks.

Early segmentation works best when it’s self-serving for the respondent. If you make your pre-conversion segmentation all about the user, he or she will choose accurately and, as a result, give you the data you need. In addition to being user-beneficial, early segmentation should be formless, easy and commitment-free. A very effective means of early segmentation is to make the first page the respondent sees a very simple choice closely related to the message that enticed their click. By making that choice important to the user, you earn the next click. By making that choice strategically significant to your marketing, you make that click extremely valuable to your organization.

Let’s say, for example, you’re marketing a product to hospitals and your offer to entice the click is a free white paper. Your means of pre-conversion segmentation could be to build on the free white paper promise by immediately asking if the respondent would like a white paper for smaller hospitals or larger hospitals (or if it doesn’t matter because they’re not affiliated with a hospital). After respondents make that next click, you know how many large, small and non-hospital respondents you’re attracting. Compare that with who’s converting and learn how effective your post-click messaging is at engaging your ideal prospect. Compare segmentation data across traffic sources, and see which vehicles are doing the best job of delivering the audience you want most.

Taking that example a step further can help you understand how valuable that early segmentation data can be. Let’s say your conversion data shows that 75% of conversions are from large hospitals, but pre-conversion data shows that 70% of respondents are actually from small hospitals. Right away, you know that whatever you’re saying after the click is much more engaging to larger hospitals than smaller ones. If you’re targeting larger hospitals, that’s great, but if you’re after the smaller ones, it’s time to make some adjustments. Without that pre-conversion benchmark data, you would have no way of seeing the untapped potential in your respondents.

Using pre-conversion segmentation, you can design simple decision trees that describe who’s who by simply recording their choices. This is a formless and commitment-free process in which users engage to gain content or offers that they feel are very specific to their needs. As a marketer you can use this pre-conversion data to judge how good you are at converting the people who are the best fits for your products or services. Typically, pre-conversion segmentation works on 40-80% of respondents — a far cry from the 5% that are likely to convert. With that you know a lot more about a lot more people.

Successful post-click marketing campaigns are characterized by the following seven techniques:

1. Conversion paths
2. Message matching
3. Segmenting
4. Qualification
5. Conversion
6. Testing
7. Analysis

Conversion Paths

Post-click marketing is built around the concept of conversion paths. Respondents begin by clicking on a paid search keyword, a banner ad, or email link. They land on a starting page from which they make a one-click choice about who they are and what they’re looking for. Subsequent pages on the conversion path give respondents a series of simple choices, stepping them along through a short sequence of targeted messages, based on the choices they’ve made, toward conversion.

An effective path might have two steps or eight, with multiple branches for each category of respondent. Each step is custom-tailored to deliver the right fulfillment to the right respondents. Since conversion path messages are matched to the message of the originating click, each campaign may have multiple conversion paths authored to speak directly to the audience for each paid search keyword, banner ad, or email marketing link.

Conversion paths consist of:

• Initial segmentation page
• Any number of sub-segmentation pages—depending on how many are necessary for you to group and categorize your field of prospects
• Offer page
• Fulfillment page

Why Conversion Paths are Valuable

Post-click marketing enables you to collect information in real time as users move along the conversion path, which can be used to qualify respondents and assign them a score based on their relative importance to you. By collecting data with each self-identifying respondent click, post-click marketing enables you to gain valuable insights about respondents who don’t convert, even those who may abandon halfway through the path.

Message Matching

Post-click marketing matches the message to the click. Conversion paths fulfill the promise of the originating click, delivering each respondent to a targeted message and fulfillment based on the message in which they originally expressed interest.

At each step along the path, every message from the initial segmentation page through conversion features the same content and tone as the banner ad or email message that directed respondents to that path, confirming a match between what you offer and what respondents want.

Why Message Matching is Valuable

With message matching, post-click marketing reaffirms respondents’ choices, paying off their investment in the click and ultimately yielding a more qualified lead. That’s good for your response rate, and good for your brand.

Segmenting

Respondents, even those arriving from the same traffic source, are not all the same.

They often click through based on a very small “hook” of information, such as a banner ad or search keyword, which leads to many diverse audiences arriving at each conversion path. Post-click marketing provides the tools to segment these audiences into manageable, discrete groups.

Through a simple series of clicks, respondents self-select the experience of your message that is most tailored to their interests. Every piece of information that is collected from respondents can then be used to segment them at any point along a path. In some cases, this might be the result of landing on a particular page (or some other form of automatic segment identification), but more often it will be the result of a choice by the respondent—a click, a download, filling out a form. These self-identifying actions by the respondent provide key intelligence that gives you the ability to understand which audience segments are abandoning and which are converting, which leads to understanding which sources of traffic yield better respondents and better conversions.

Why Segmenting is Valuable

Segmenting respondents within conversion paths benefits you and them. Path content that’s custom-tailored to each audience delivers the best experience of your brand, and builds trust that you are responding to their unique needs. Segmenting also enables you to determine the different audiences arriving from each traffic source and the degree to which the path qualifies and converts them, ultimately enabling you to adjust the path or traffic source in a way that will maximize your results.

Qualification

The post-click marketing qualification score provides a way to assess the relative attractiveness of respondents and conversions from a particular path. In post-click marketing, a qualifying score is automatically calculated as a respondent navigates through a path. When a respondent first lands on a path, his qualifying score starts at 0. Scoring can be affected when the respondents take any action on the path, such as downloading a file or clicking through to another page, or automatically, based on the originating domain, day of the week, or other relevant criteria.

Qualifying scores are extremely flexible. You decide how many points are possible on each given path—different paths may have very different ranges—and how those points are distributed across each action on that path. Therefore, the meaning of a particular score is entirely dependent on its context.

Why Qualification is Valuable

Particularly when you’re acquiring respondents on a pay-per-click basis, the quality of respondents from each traffic source becomes a crucial metric. This is a valuable way to quantify the effectiveness of traffic sources as well as paths.

Conversion

The final step of a post-click marketing path is conversion, usually signified by submission of a form that enables you to capture a lead (but technically a conversion can be anything). A path may have more than one way in which a respondent can be converted—reaching the last page in a path, downloading a particular document—and in post-click marketing, this can be easily configured on a path-by-path basis.

Conversion rate is the marketing term for the percentage of respondents who “complete” a path out of the total number of respondents who first land on that path. Conversion rate is traditionally the most common metric by which to judge campaigns, but it’s important to also note the actual number of respondents. A 4% conversion rate on a traffic source that only generated 100 click-throughs is not necessarily equivalent to a 4% conversion rate on a traffic source that generated 10,000 click-throughs: it’s the difference between 4 leads and 400. Similarly, qualifying score makes a big difference: 400 mediocre conversions are not the same as 400 qualified leads.

Why Conversion is Valuable

Qualified leads are not clicks, they are people who have expressed an interest in your offer. Post-click marketing acknowledges that cost-per-click isn’t the best metric for gauging the success of a campaign. If your mission is to generate qualified leads, the relevant metric is cost-per-conversion.

Testing

A disciplined way to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign, testing is the cornerstone of post-click marketing. A/Z testing is the strategy, an evolution of A/B testing that allows an almost unlimited number of very different types of paths to be compared to see which offers the best net effectiveness. A short two-page path can be tested side-by-side with a long seven-page path. An image-heavy path can be tried versus a copy-heavy path. A path with many branches can be weighed against a path with fewer choices.

Different web response paths will be effective in different situations. Depending on the campaign, the traffic source, the media in which the traffic source was placed or the segments of the respondents, a very different type of path may prove best. With post-click marketing’s real-time analysis tools, conversion paths can be tested and immediately improved to yield ever-more significant results.

Why Testing is Valuable

Post-click marketing gives you the ability to easily experiment with substantially different paths, and over time recognize patterns of what works best in a variety of circumstances. You’re able to leverage and expand your organizational learning about effective path-based marketing—tailored to your markets.

Analysis

The ion Post-Click Marketing Console provides ready-to-go tools that address the fundamental question: which respondent segments, arriving from which traffic sources, are converted most effectively by which paths?

The console aggregates all campaign data in an online dashboard that enables real-time performance tracking. The console is designed for marketers, with clear charts and easy-to-read data, and is available from any web-connected device.

The ion Post-Click Marketing Console requires no setup and presents all information from a single, centralized console. It can export respondent data to any database or CRM application, and data is preformatted for one-click print-to-PDF. It can be configured to send automated email to respondents, or email alerts to internal staff to stay informed as key milestones are achieved during a campaign. The ion Post-Click Marketing Console also provides auditing and metering tools, and is professionally managed and securely hosted.

Why Analysis is Valuable

Knowledge about your most valuable traffic sources and most qualified leads enables you to make the right media buys, capture the right audience and convert the best leads with the right fulfillment—in short, to optimize your entire online direct marketing chain, not just the individual components.

This is what happens when your marketing team is unplugged.

This morning, while reading The Industry Standard, I came across a great print ad for a new AltaVista search feature. You may have already seen the ad I am referring to—it is the one with the cute kid twirling around the room and the father playing piano in the background. The copy reads, “How can I tell if my child is gifted? Search AltaVista. Are triple-turn fouettes considered neoclassical exaggeration? Search AltaVista.”

I gather from this ad that AltaVista is introducing Natural Language Query on their site. This technology is growing in popularity throughout the web, thanks in part to the phenomenal success of the search engine Ask Jeeves (ask.com) which returns relevant results when you type in normal, conversational questions.

According to this ad, I can now ask AltaVista a question like “How can I tell if my child is gifted?” and it will return relevant results. Being a huge fan of Ask Jeeves, I am intrigued that one of the leading portals is offering this technology. I am actually intrigued enough that before I turn another page, I jump online to try it.

Pause to reflect on this for a moment. The ad, by virtue of running in The Industry Standard, is targeted to Internet decision makers. Because I am an Internet decision maker, we can then infer that the ad worked. The ad was effective enough to make me stop, read the copy and immediately act upon it.

So, anyway, there I am on AltaVista. I type in:

“How can I tell if my child is gifted?”

The engine results say:

“AltaVista knows the answers to these questions:
Where can I find toy recommendations for children aged 0-12 months?
Where can I find gift ideas and suggestions for kids?”

Huh. That’s not what I asked AltaVista. But, since I am already there, I figure I might as well find out what their toy recommendations are for children aged 0-12 months. I think that by clicking on this link I will see a list of stores that sell educational toys for gifted children. But no, indeed. The link sends me straight to the Toys ‘R Us home page. This link was paid advertising space for Toys ‘R Us!

I can’t believe that AltaVista tricked me into clicking on an ad when I was just innocently trying to ascertain whether or not my child is gifted. Does someone over there at AltaVista or Toys ‘R Us really think if I am trying to find out whether or not my child is gifted that I will stop to buy him a present along the way? Ugh. I am sure someone in the marketing department at AltaVista thought up this ploy — offer a Natural Language Query and then sell advertising space in the results. That’s fine. It might even be a great idea. But tell me it’s an ad before I click. And even better, make sure the ad is relevant to what I am looking for.

My rant does not end here

By now I have started to really wonder if my child is in fact gifted. So I jump over to Ask Jeeves to see if they have the answer to my question. Guess what. They did. They also had a couple of links to stores, but these are in a separate section and above them reads the line, “The following questions will take you directly to an online store.”

AltaVista has forever lost a customer (a customer with a big mouth, I might add), by failing to connect with me and understand what I expect. Meanwhile, by fulfilling my expectations, Ask Jeeves has made me an even bigger fan of their site. Ask Jeeves understands their product and understands their audience. AltaVista has experienced the Big Disconnect.

The Big Disconnect occurs when marketing departments:

a. Do not understand the site they are marketing or,

b. Do not understand the people who use their site.

If your marketing team is not working hand in hand with your web team, then somewhere, somehow, you will experience the Big Disconnect. You will market a web application that is not quite working properly. You will have a valuable web application that is not marketed at all. You will dash the hopes of your users by raising them up high and then not fulfilling them.

If you are going to market your site in any way (even a little URL at the bottom of your traditional print ad), then your marketing department should live, eat and breathe your website until they understand it better than anyone does.

By the way—I am sure that Toys ‘R Us paid a pretty penny to be the first in the search results on AltaVista. But they blew it by treating me like any other site visitor by dumping me on their home page when I clicked through to their site. They could have salvaged the interaction with me if they had instead sent me to a short, little selling path that acknowledged where I came from and mentioned all the great, educational toys they had for my gifted child. But, then that is the subject of another article. Check out, The Path to Personal Selling for more.

Calling your re-purposed PowerPoint presentation a web sales “tool” is as ridiculous as calling red Twizzlers licorice. There’s no licorice in red Twizzlers, and a good PowerPoint preso does not make a good web path. Let’s look at selling on the web—as a practical reality.

Most websites don’t really sell anything. I mean plenty of sites conduct sales transactions and some up-sell/cross sell. But the standard operating procedure is to present a product and hope someone buys it. There’s no real selling involved. It seems rather ironic for a medium that’s founded on the idea of one-to-one interactive communication that the preferred relationship between buyer and seller is anonymous and to large measure, irrelevant.

A selling path is a series of screens where, unlike a random-access website, the prospect’s choices are limited, controlled and purposeful. A series of these screens is crafted to work together to win trust, build selling propositions and ultimately result in a purchase decision and transaction. A path sits on top of a traditional website. We are in no way advocating the demise of the random-access web property for an Internet full of selling paths.

There is a tremendous opportunity beyond the dutifully repurposed catalog and shopping cart metaphors brought online by everyone from Amazon to The Gap. The opportunity is mass personal selling and it can’t be accomplished through the confines of the traditional web site experience. And before you challenge the validity of what seems to be an oxymoron in “mass personal selling,” imagine a thousand or a hundred-thousand simultaneous prospects getting involved in sales paths on your website—that’s mass personal selling—and that smells of one-to-one interactive communication as well. Nifty.

But most websites are random access. You present the choices, your participants choose to click on something and that’s where they go. Your only control over where they click comes in your presentation of the choices. But ultimately, you have no control over their course through the sale.

Traditional, offline selling presentations are linear. You take a prospect step by step through a series of points that build up to a purchase decision. The order of those points is important and controlled as is the pace of their presentation. These basic truths hold fast in personal selling of everything from lunch to a house. So real selling takes place when a prospect gets moved from point to point, buying in at each step and getting more and more involved along the way. For a sale to take place he or she must get moved to the purchase decision a little at a time, so at the end, he’s sold and there’s really no decision to be made.

The web hasn’t changed the psychology of selling. It’s changed the psychology of marketing. The web psychology of marketing says that you need buy in early on and that you have to befriend and ask permission to get that buy in. A big part of that is the perception of choice and control on the part of the prospect.

What good selling paths do for web-based marketing is to combine web marketing psychology with traditional selling methodology. There are several valid premises on which a path can be presented as a valuable alternative to your random access site: Speed “Click here for the fastest way to find the tire that’s right for you.” Simplicity “Click here for the easiest way to decide which tire fits your car.” Personalization “Click here and we’ll match our tires to your lifestyle.” Offer “Click here to enter to win a set of Roadhugger Supremes.” Whichever premise you jump from make sure you pay it off—right away—in the first screen. Don’t forget why you asked them to click on the path in the first place.

Nine rules for making a sales path that sells:

A web sales path should not be truly linear

Think of it as limiting the number of choices and outcomes—but not limiting the number of choices to none. That won’t work as it flies in the face of the web psychology of marketing. There should be one, main, incredibly obvious and clear “NEXT” type of choice, but there should also be pop-ups or free-form fields, or “click here to choose A”, “click here to choose B” scenarios as well. It must appear as though the input the prospect is giving is affecting the results of their efforts. If your selling path is simply click-click-click, you’ll get no prospect involvement, no early buy-in and you’ll be no closer to selling them at the end of the path than you were at the beginning of the path.

Exude speed and efficiency

Make your first screen short and punchy. (Really you need to make all of your screens short and punchy, but make the first one extra short and extra punchy.) Your path needs to load fast, look clean & simple and scream “I promise I won’t waste your time with any meaningless garbage like our president’s bio!”.

Get smarter at every click

So if your prospect needs to make choices, have him make choices that give you more information so you can narrow the selling message. Let him choose features he’s looking for, things that interest him, colors he likes, etc. Make it all about him and make the questions smart enough that you learn something valuable.

Be clear and don’t ask unless you need to

Each choice the prospect makes should impact their next set of choices or certainly the outcome of the sale. In other words don’t ask them anything that’s irrelevant—they don’t have time for it and they’ll only end up questioning your motives.

Stay focused

Don’t distract them. In other words, don’t tell them anything they don’t need to know to make the next choice or the purchase decision. Resist the temptation to go into the details of how the process works when data travels in and out of the database that functions as the central repository of information related to the migratory flight of cow egrets on which your company based the research and development of the bird seed you’re selling. The bottom line is to give them the big picture, big selling propositions and make them click for the details as they want them. (That type of “purchase decision support” is excellent anyway as it makes your prospect feel involved and like they’ve done their homework by looking at more information. And you kill two birds with one stone—the prospect gets to choose something and gets more involved in the process.)

Don’t ramble or waste their time

Limit the number of screens in your path and make your point succinctly on each screen. For simple products, make your case in three steps. For complex products, wide product lines or high-ticket products, go to no more than seven steps. If you really have a complex sale that requires the web equivalent of the Appalachian Trail, build in pauses that pay off the previous screens with some conclusion before moving on and asking for more. Regardless of the number of screens, limit the copy on each screen to two, or at most three, short paragraphs.

Be honest and up front

Let them know where they are in the path. Clearly display how many steps there are in total and the prospect’s current place in the path. This is a key ingredient to building trust and letting them know that they haven’t committed to giving you the next 30 minutes of their life just to pick-out kitty litter.

Barter for information

When you ask for your prospect to give you information, give them something in exchange. You’ll be much more likely to get what you’re looking for this way, and you’ll build trust and equality into the relationship. This is especially true in paths built around contests or offers.

Sincerity wins the day

Avoid the ad. If your path is nothing but a series of ads linked together, you’ll lose your prospect early on — probably screen 1 or 2. Really try to visualize the medium as an extension of a real, flesh & blood relationship—a good one—where the byproduct is the sale of your wares. Remember that trust, mutual respect and mutual freedom need to come across on every screen—after all, you’re befriending. Also remember that advertising and selling used cars are competing neck and neck for the low position on America’s respectometer.

Testing, one, two, three

And now the sweetest piece of the path puzzle—you can test the hell out of every nuance and tweak everything to maximize your yield. You can’t do that with salespeople—we’re too damn moody and inconsistent (not even scripted telemarketers can be tweaked like this).

You should know what works and what doesn’t by where prospects bail out of the path. Identify problem areas, make adjustments, watch your results and adjust some more. Then look at targeting specific segments with specific paths—drive traffic to the promised land, watch the results and tweak some more.

Then once you have your paths selling strong, tweak them to increase the purchase value or push a particular model. You have total control of your sales force—yippee! And the whole time you’re selling you’re also learning about your customers, providing excellent sales support and customer service and building solid relationships. Not a bad path to success is it?

Okay, so we all know that ad banners don’t work. At least not in the traditional sense of delivering a return, that as marketers, we feel is commensurate with our investment. But we continue to try—searching for a strategic or tactical panacea by which we can claim to the world that, unlike theirs, our banners do work.

But again, most don’t. And as we examine why they don’t, the reasons vary from broad strategic miscues to relatively simple executional issues.

Who’s in the click?

In the online world, with our rush to get to market, we tend to forsake a lot of the basics. Target definition, market segmentation and demo/psychographic profiling is the often-neglected first step in assessing opportunities for online advertising. Of course, we wouldn’t do anything offline without all of that (and more). But as prevailing wisdom would have it, the online world is a special place where none of that is necessary. Wrong.

Just as with any other advertising, understanding who your target is, what he or she wants and what drives them to act, is the absolute only hope of buying a strong schedule and crafting messages that catch the click. In fact, the online world demands more, not less, understanding of target behavior—specifically how they behave when they use the Internet. It’s imperative that you put yourself behind their mouse button. You have to know if they’re casual browsers or serious information seekers; if they’re savvy to the ways of the web or newbies searching for instant gratification; and if they care if you’re giving away a toaster oven or not.

What do you want to tell them?

This one’s neglected online and off. It’s the simplest of all the questions, which is what makes it the hardest to answer. Especially since, as a medium, banners demand single-minded communication—sell one thing and sell it strong.

So decide what that one thing is and put it on paper in the form of a campaign strategy. For example: “Tell the target that Pampers is the most absorbent, and hence comfortable, diaper brand for babies” is a possible campaign strategy for Pampers diapers. The campaign strategy should define your most compelling selling proposition from the most compelling angle for your target.

There are cases, primarily where the selling propositions are weak, non-existent, too complex for the medium or unbelievable, where the campaign strategy will be unrelated to what you’re selling. We see this more on the web than offline. For example: “Tell the target that they have a chance to win $100,000 when they click here” could be a strategy in any of these cases.

Whenever possible, narrow your strategy to the same degree that you want to narrow your responses. If you’re advertising a mass-market website looking for eyeballs, then leave it wide open and collect the clicks of the masses. But, if you’re advertising to a vertical or niche market, do yourself and your sales staff a favor—narrow your strategy and messaging to weed out the unwanted clicks before they clog up the works. So where the previous $100,000 contest example would work great for a mass-market promotion, a niche version of it might read: “Tell the target that they have a chance to win $100,000 for their small business when they click here.”

Where are they (really)?

So now we know who they are and what makes their clicking finger twitch madly, but where are they? Not physically—we’re interested in where they are on the web. Although Yahoo! reaches over 50% of the people that use the web, directories and search engines are not necessarily the answer.

There are targets and strategies for which buying search engine keywords for your banners will yield results. But for the most part, look deeper and you’ll find stronger, less costly vehicles for your campaign. The search engines may well end up supplying a piece of your online media plan, but to rely on them exclusively is as foolish as pouring (or more appropriately flushing) all of your offline media dollars into one, untried publication and crossing your fingers.

One could argue that much of the disappointment with banner results stems from this search engine fallacy. Search engines play the role of middle man for information seekers—both casual and serious. Casual information seekers are generally spending disposable time looking for things to do or see on the web; they are newbies and they are susceptible to banners and promotions. You can think of casual information seekers as “browsers”—defined in much the same way a retailer defines the term.

As the information seekers get more serious, they become less susceptible to marketing ploys and frankly will seldom notice your keyword banner (regardless of its bells, whistles and use of skin). Reaching serious information seekers is better accomplished through their destinations versus directories.

Destination sites are generally more credible, more targeted, less costly and more effective in reaching members of vertical and niche markets. With over 2 million sites on the web today (many of which accept paid banner advertising) your choices are mind boggling. And just as there are sources for offline media information and planning, placement opportunities are chronicled at length by Standard Rate & Data Service, Media Mark and others. Click for the iDecisionMaker onlineCompanion and reviews of the strongest interactive advertising resources.

The magic click.

Okay, but how do we get that damn click?

Just as in offline marketing communications, the creative has to be good. But what constitutes “good” is different online.

Banners are an amalgamation of media types. The result is as unique as the Internet itself. The messaging tactics of banner creation meld outdoor, direct response and broadcast. We take the simplicity from outdoor, the immediacy of direct response and the involvement strategies of television. What we get is pretty groovy when done right and an abomination to the sanctity of advertising when done wrong.

So if most banners don’t work, and it’s not the placement or the strategy, then it must be the creative… Yep…

Most banners are too slow and heavy and far too print-like. Most try too hard to dazzle and end up losing the key direct-response message: “Click Here” in the process. Most forget the rules of design. And most just don’t pop.

The trick is to deliver a compelling message, 3-5 tight frames of animation and a clear call to action to “Click Here”—do that all within 10-14k of optimized glory and you’re on your way to the all-elusive click.

There are banners that pull and pull big. And while no one has claimed to have found the perfect formula, there are some guidelines that can help your campaign draw 3-5% versus the paltry <1% averages…

Good ad banner criteria:

Recap

If your banner is animated and can’t loop (most Yahoo! placements are restricted this way) you must recap all of the important elements of your message in the last frame (as it will be the only thing that sits there in front of the participant after your six seconds of animated hoopla). If you don’t recap and include “Click Here” in the last frame, you’ll reduce your clicks.

Freeze Frame

Then there’s the horrific realization that a lot of people won’t notice the first frame of your animation because: (1) nothing has moved yet to catch their attention; or (2) the page may be loading around your banner and the first frame might just get lost in the shuffle. The moral to the story is that your banner will pull less if it depends on its first frame to make its message.

Timing Is Everything

Try to keep your animations to 3-5 frames and definitely under six seconds of total run time. Also on the timing front: look at your banners over a common 28.8 modem—frame timings can be tricky and making them too short will keep your reader from reading—drag them out and your banner feels flat. And a flat banner is a bad banner.

Blue

Most (good) portals use blue as their link color. They protect the integrity of the link color with their very lives—if it doesn’t link, it ain’t gonna be blue. This is because Internet participants have been conditioned to identify with blue as the universal interface cue for taking them somewhere. So if blue is the most-clicked color on the web, and we’re looking for clicks, what color do you suppose is proven to generate the highest percentage of clicks for the words “Click Here” at the end of your banner? You guessed it—blue. Anything else will reduce your pull.

Pop

This is a hard one. It so depends on the context of a particular placement. But just as you do offline—do whatever the others aren’t. That doesn’t mean you break the rules outlined here. It means if you’re running a standard 468x60 banner and the page background is white, you could make your banner smaller (with a transparent background) and move the frames around within the space. The effect is that your banner is a different size than the rest. It captures attention, draws the viewer in, and gives you the opportunity to make the rest of your case. That’s just one of a myriad of examples. The key is to cut through the clutter, grab eyeballs and get the click.

So go and prove the pundits wrong…

The bottom line is that good banners work and bad ones don’t. Put a good banner in a bad place—it won’t pull. Put a bad banner in a good place—it won’t pull either. But if you define your target, set a sound strategy, plan a solid schedule and create banners to catch the click—you will have banners that pull. No bull.