Hold on tight, because online marketing as we know it continues to advance at record speed.

One area that continues to gain momentum is widgets. As post-click marketers, we can take advantage of their portability and ease-of-use and integrate them into our post-click marketing.

Adding widgets to your landing pages can:

1) Keep your landing pages current and up-to-date. 

Examples of timely widgets include the airline ticket prices, mortgage rates, stock quotes, blog RSS feeds, and hotel inventory. In the age of engage, it’s imperative that marketers stay on the cutting-edge, and continuously update their efforts in response to news and market conditions. Widgets make that easy. Incredibly easy.

2) Increase visitor engagement.

Widgets such as calculators, demos, and social connectors are interactive, and increase the likelihood that a visitor will stay and engage with your brand and offering.

While adding widgets to landing pages is relatively new territory, split testing makes it easy to determine i) the type of widget that produces the highest conversions and ii) their optimal placement within your post-click marketing.

For more widget inspiration, visit some of our recent posts on widgets and post-click.

Widgets, landing pages, and marketer freedom

Examples of engagement widgets on landing pages

Get Widget: A How-to Guide

4 Free Widgets to Include on Your Landing Pages

But I’ve gotta tell you, the more miles I put on my experience odometer, the more I find the principles that guide and shape my personal and professional lives seem to blur. In other words, what’s useful for one is useful for the other as well.

Today’s example? Focus on the big picture.

Too often we get bogged down in the details, and lose sight of exactly what we’re trying to achieve and how it fits into the overall plan. A forest? There’s a forest out there? It’s not just the trees we’re wrapped up in, but the leaves — and maybe even the seeds!

When you’re starting to plan your post-click marketing campaign, don’t start with the details. Start with the objective. What is it you’re trying to achieve? It’s much easier to decide what details are important if you can evaluate them based on how they help achieve your objective.

On the other hand, if you start with the details, you may spend (i.e. waste) a bunch of time fretting over a ton of little things that actually have nothing to do with getting you towards your goal.

I once heard a lame little joke about Michelangelo, in which the artist was asked how he could get a beautiful sculpture of a lion out of a square block of marble. Michelangelo replied, “It’s easy. I just chip away everything that doesn’t look like the lion.”

And why should your post-click marketing be any different? When you sit down to plan and execute, keep your eye on the big picture, and chip away everything that isn’t going to help you achieve your goal.

By simple, I mean keep your design simple. Keep your landing pages elegant, sophisticated, and streamlined. Remove excess copy, confusing navigation, and unnecessary links. 

Provide visitors simple choices to make about who they are and what they are looking for, and seamlessly navigate them to the most relevant offer, product, or service.

Behind the scenes, use robust analytics. Have an advanced strategy. Use personalization, optimization, and segmentation.

Advanced, streamlined post-click experiences result in higher conversions and can easily be launched with a post-click platform like LiveBall.

The easier the conversion process, the more likely people will be to convert.

Simple for them. Easy for you. Better for everyone.

After all, you probably wouldn’t jump in your car and start driving around without having a clear idea where you want to go.

Just because you know you need to pay attention to your post-click marketing doesn’t mean you know why you need it, and what you hope to achieve.

Increase revenue? Build a database of names? Learn something about your user base? Increase lead quality? What is the ultimate goal of your campaign?

The next thing to decide is how you will measure success for your post-click marketing. If respondents buy something? Sign up for a newsletter? Download a report? That’s how you’ll measure a conversion.

Your overall objective will impact the design of your landing experience. For example, beyond best practices for messaging, the structure of your landing experience can also help you achieve your objectives. Say you want to learn something about your user base and/or increase lead quality. In that case, you’ll want to segment your respondents as they come in, so you can put them into buckets and weed out the less-profitable section of your audience.

If you want your respondents to buy something, you’ll want to make it as easy as possible for them. Don’t make them go through a million hoops once they’ve decided to purchase. Simplify the purchase process and let them buy!

The other key part of your strategy development beyond what you want respondents to do, is what you want them to think. Many times, marketers seem to forget that landing pages are also critical components of branding and positioning. These pages need to accurately represent your brand and reinforce your positioning every step of the way — including messaging, style and execution.

In short, your high-level strategy development shouldn’t be packed with a million things. Just one key objective, along with what you want respondents to do, and what you want them to think. If you haven’t sorted it out, don’t start executing.

Those of us in the world of interactive marketing are ever-so familiar with this term as well, or should be. Above the fold, in our realm, is the content visible without scrolling down.

Don’t assume your respondents will scroll down and explore everything your page has to offer. No matter how engaging your copy, imagery and offer, not all respondents will scroll.  You have the opportunity to put everything they need directly in front of them, so why not do so?

If your competitors serve up a more user-friendly landing experience than you do, your audience (and conversions) could slip. Give your page an objective look over with an editing eye. Your company may have a lot to say to your potential customers, but don’t overwhelm them with too much copy or too many possible options to take.

Following the ion interactive mantra of best practices, you’ll want to keep it simple and present a clear, defined CTA. This should allow you to keep your content above the fold. If this just is not possible, definitely implement a strategy. The following elements simply must be kept above the fold-

The Offer- Don’t make them scroll to see what it is you are offering. Sure, they may have clicked on a search ad, email or followed the link from a print ad, for example. Yet chances are they want to see an instant message match, so give it to them!

Key Messaging- Tell them what they need to hear. Your copy may be brilliant, but if it’s not in front of your respondents that really won’t matter. Don’t chance any key messaging below the fold.

Your CTA- The placement of your CTA is vital. After thoughtfully crafting a clear, well defined CTA, you certainly don’t want to hide it below the fold!

It’s a simple concept, yet very important. If you want your visitors to see it, read it or click on it, keep it above the fold! 

I’ll admit (reluctantly) that I have perfectionist tendencies. And when there’s only one chance to get it right, it can be a great quality to have. But testing means you have many, many chances. Hitting a home run can still be the goal, but if you’re waiting on the perfect pitch, you’re probably getting benched. To get in the game and increase your chances of a hit, you’ve gotta swing first. 

Consider a post-click experience with a benchmark conversion rate of 5%, and let’s say the goal is to double it. That’s a pretty common expectation and one that can put tremendous pressure on the marketer to, well, knock it out of the park. Testing is the surest way to get there. With each test, you have the opportunity to learn something about your audience, make informed decisions on strategy and execution, coming closer and closer to meeting their expectations and increasing the conversion rate. 

These incremental improvements in conversions are key to the end goal. Why waste 2 weeks (or more) trying to perfect a landing page, when you can launch, learn and increase your conversion rate in that same amount of time? Remember that results are the name of the game. To get results, you’ve gotta get out of the batting cage, step up to the plate and swing. Now play ball!

It’s important to keep them in the rhythm that got them to click on your ad in the first place.

While elaborate Flash animation is impressive, we aren’t quite recommending it for your post-click marketing. Rather, use Flash to develop richer, more engaging and compelling post-click experiences. 

Post-click Flash can help also help you:

1. Improve your brand
2. Engage your audience
3. Give you a competitive advantage that ultimately results in higher conversions

Quick tips for successful post-click Flash:

• Make sure your Flash text is selectable so it renders as HTML. This is easy to do and will help your Google quality score! Flash can now be search engine friendly!
• Don’t be afraid to test. Flash support makes it easy to run Flash A/B tests to optimize segmentation and creative strategy. Or, test a Flash path against a static path to see which is more effective at converting respondents. 
• Remember your product/service and the context in which you will be using Flash.

In it, the author breaks down traditional conversions vs. social conversions, and also discusses different “types” of social landing pages.

It’s important to note that social features can improve traditional conversion metrics in your post-click marketing. While you measure the two separately, they can certainly work together and be included in the same landing experience. I don’t advocate stuffing social features and traditional conversion opportunities into a single landing page, but including them in engaging, multi-step landing experiences.

Check out the article when you have a chance!

 If someone says at the beginning of the show he will make a chair, he spends the next 20 minutes making it in his garage, and then he sits down in the chair, people will watch that all the way through, and they love it.

Personally, I am a big fan of companies who use video to demonstrate or showcase their software. Show me “how-to” easily use your product and I will be sold. Show me a box shot and you’ve put the burden on me—to research, compare, read reviews and make my own assumptions. And, I still may not be sold.

Below I searched on “Spanish language software.” Rosetta Stone is well-known brand whose ad caught my attention immediately—it’s simple, to the point and “award-winning” anything is always nice.

Our recommendation? Try testing rotating screenshots of these features or maybe show me a short demo of the product. Try video. But don’t let it distract from conversion—use it to persuade your potential customer—let it support conversion. ]]>landing pageshttp://www.ioninteractive.com/liveball-support-blog/2008/12/18/landing-page-tip-18-getting-the-most-from-scoring-your-respo.htmlSusan Delz2008-12-18T21:10:56Z2008-12-18T21:10:56ZOur world is becoming more and more convergent.  Every day the lines begin to blur more and more. This convergence is especially true in the world of sales and marketing.  Gone are the days where marketers stayed in one corner and sales stayed in the other.  These two business dependent practices are continually being drawn together by various forces including accountability.

How does that effect scoring your respondents on your landing pages?

Landing pages create leads. Hot leads, cold leads, luke-warm leads…all kinds of leads.  Marketers are held accountable for how many leads their marketing dollars generate and how qualified the leads are.  And sales is accountable for converting those leads into opportunities and opportunities into customers.

The convergence zone of the two in this case is qualification. The more qualified the leads are, the more customers we create.  The question is what makes a lead qualified?  

As marketers, we feel like we know the best practices and actions that determine lead value—like the number of action points the respondent engages with or if the respondent had previously converted—and we move forward and apply grades or scores accordingly.  However there is always the few that score below the radar, then raise their hands and move on to become high valued customers.  These are the few that begin to break down the value of lead scoring and further the divide between sales and marketing.

Respondent scoring to bridge the divide.

When sales and marketing unite and sit down to review the data, share experiences, and reach a consensus on what types of actions or engagements within the company’s post-click marketing could be indicative of a “qualified” lead—and then score them respectively—you begin to bridge that divide.

After you’ve held your post-click scoring summit and reached a consensus with your sales team, you can easily use LiveBall to score or grade your landing experiences so each respondent has an assigned grade or value that is exported with the lead record and into the CRM. And depending on the score, you can also use LiveBall to notify the sales team immediately when a “HOT” lead has entered the sales funnel.

If you’re ready to get started, check out these posts for more information on implementing scoring and grading in LiveBall.