The Year of Post-Click Marketing

Wow, 2008 was an incredible year for post-click marketing!

We were delighted to see triple-digit growth in our customer base, with millions and millions of respondents being served world-class landing experiences in well-managed post-click campaigns. Collectively, our customers launched thousands of landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites.

Of course, it’s not just the quantity, it’s the quality: our “lead gen” clients continue to convert at over 4X the industry average — wrapping up Q4 with a stunning 14.6% conversion rate. Our transactional and e-commerce clients haven’t been too shabby either, with better than a 2X lead over the industry average.

Our software-as-a-service (SaaS) model freed our customers from IT worries, while delivering a rock-solid 99.997% uptime across our service (including scheduled maintenance!). With a triple-digit investment in our infrastructure and reliability/redundancy this year, we’re committed to keeping SaaS as an “IT-free, no worries” solution for marketers.

It was a year of innovative ideas for making landing pages more engaging and effective — and delivering the capabilities to execute them — including:

• dynamic Flash objects
• social networking features
• reusable, interactive widgets
• iPhone-specific landing experiences

In August, SES San Jose became the first industry show to have a dedicated post-click marketing session, where Tom Leung of Google began his presentation by proclaiming, “Google loves post-click marketing!” Thank you, Tom, we love you too.

In September, Compete became one of the first independent third-party research groups to publish an objective analysis of the difference post-click marketing can make. Their report: best-in-class post-click marketing generates 5X the ROI in online marketing.

This year our customers also received industry acclaim for their post-click marketing success stories. The New England Journal of Medicine presented at the post-click marketing session at SES San Jose. Overland Storage presented at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Lead Gen Summit in both Boston and San Francisco. And American Greetings presented their case study at SES Chicago earier this month (see ClickZ’s summary, How Agile Marketing Pays Off). Kudos!

And although most of our customers like to keep their results secret — outsized conversion rates are, indeed, a tremendous competitive advantage — Expand Media, MarketingProfs, and Millennium Bankcard were all kind enough to share their success stories in new cases studies for us this year.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface of the year’s events…

But the conclusion is unmistakable: it’s been a wonderful year. Thank you to everyone who has contributed, supported, and participated with us in the post-click marketing movement. Happy holidays, and best wishes for the New Year.

Here’s to 2009 being even more “The Year of Post-Click Marketing”.