The scent of a conversion path

Does your organization have a strong … smell? 

Not an odor, not a stink, not an over-perfumed old lady smell, but rather the sweet, sweet scent that leads to conversion.

In Always Be Testing: A complete guide to Google Website Optimizer Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar talk about the need to maintain scent:

“Your visitors follow your conversion process as if it were a sort of treasure hunt. They are looking for reinforcement that you will fulfill the promise that originally grabbed their attention. When you abandon your scent trail, at any point, you strand your visitors and destroy the persuasive movement on your site or campaign.” 

One great way to maintain scent is by putting together a really flexible yet targeted conversion path that segments and qualifies your visitors. 

What is a conversion path?

A conversion path is a linear landing experience, specifically designed to catch and convert incoming traffic from your online marketing campaigns. They live outside of the company’s main site, and are used in place of landing pages microsites or deep links.

Conversion paths are great ways to improve lead quality and overall marketing intelligence for your respondents and traffic sources. They take a user post-click from the initial landing through conversion, and are connected through segmentation, offer and the thank you page.

To learn more about conversion paths, check out our article called The Anatomy of a Conversion Path.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to tweet it to us, or leave a comment below! 

Why 2 clicks are better than 1

As ion begins its Fall 2008 post-click road show next week, I’ll be heading down to New York City for SMX East (and hopefully a bite to eat at OTTO while I’m there — ah, I miss living in NYC). I’ll be speaking on the Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing panel at 3:15PM on Tuesday, October 7.

The panel will also have a couple of great optimization specialists from agencies ZAAZ and Page Zero Media, as well as a representative from Google. Gordon Hotchkiss of Enquiro will moderate.

For my section of the talk, I’ll be focusing on why 2 clicks are better than 1, demonstrating how both B2B and B2C marketers have successfully leveraged multi-step landing pages to significantly boost their conversion rate and ROI in search marketing campaigns.

After walking through a few specific examples, I’ll wrap up with a bit of theory about why 2 clicks are better than 1. After all, conventional wisdom is that the fewer steps you give respondents, the better your campaign will perform. That’s true other things being equal. But, as is often the case in marketing and life, other things aren’t always equal.

Here’s a sneak preview of 5 reasons why an extra step or two in your landing experience can dramatically improve your campaign — and give you an unequal competitive advantage:

1. Proportional engagement. Clicking on an ad is a 5 second proposition. Shifting immediately into a jam-packed landing page can be overwhelming by comparison. A multi-step landing experience enables respondents to proportionally engage with you, maybe 5-10 seconds on your first page, 10-20 seconds on your second — building trust and relevancy at each step. In a way, this is essentially contextual navigation that helps people get to what they want more easily.

2. Self-identification. Every company has multiple audience segments. The spirit of Long Tail marketing is to address the particular interests, needs, and desires of each segment as specifically as possible, using language and examples that resonate with their frame of reference. When you offer respondents a choice on a landing page to explicitly choose their segment — in exchange for receiving details and offers most relevant to them on the subsequent page — you’re tapping into the powerful psychological response of self-identification. If a respondent see a choice that calls to them by name, you’ve made a good first impression that your company cares specifically about them. You just have to be sure to fulfill that expectation when they clickthrough to the next page.

3. More focused content. It’s hard trying to cram everything for everyone into a single page. With multi-step landing experiences, you can break out your content into several different buckets — delivering the most relevant content to each segment on page two, without muddying the water with content that’s geared to other segments. This helps with the conversational flow of your engagement and eliminates conceptual and visual clutter. And, as you know as a marketer, subtle shifts in language can have a big impact. By knowing who your audience is on a particular page, you can speak specifically and authentically to them — and that’s what really boosts conversions.

4. Signaling. Investment reflects commitment. When a respondent arrives at a quick-and-dirty landing page, it’s often pretty clear that the marketer who created it didn’t invest a lot of time into it. A respondent could logically infer — consciously or subconsciously, rightly or wrongly — that the marketer doesn’t think their particular search intent is that important. Now consider the alternative: if a respondent clicks through to a more substantial landing experience, with more focused content and higher production values, they are given the impression that the marketer cares a great deal about what they were searching for. The logic is that marketers invest the most effort in places which they believe have the best match for prospective customers — so when a respondent sees such investment, it’s a signal from the marketer to the respondent that, yes, they’ve come to the right place.

5. Market research. Perhaps the biggest problem with single-page landing pages is that they’re so often a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: the respondent either converts or goes away. If 90% of your respondents go away at that point, you know almost nothing about them or why they left. With multi-step landing experiences, you gain the benefit of behavioral feedback that lets you learn about your audience. If the first page of your landing experience is a segmentation choice, then seeing which respondents segment which way reveals which ads are attracting which segments. And, if conversion rates differ from segment to segment — and they will — you learn which segments you’re winning with and which ones you’re not. Even experimenting with different segmentation approaches (several of which are described in Justin’s great post on post-click innovation and iteration) can provide tremendous insight for the marketer.

For those of you at SMX East next week, I look forward to meeting you.

Post-Click Perspectives: Q&A with Carrie Hill

As part of our mission to expand the coverage of post-click marketing on this blog, we’ve started to invite other respected professionals in and around this space to contribute their perspective. This is our inaugural post of that kind, a Q&A with Carrie Hill.

Click to read more ...

Business 2.0

If you haven’t checked out the March issue of Business 2.0, try to pick up a copy.  I just read a really great article by Paul Sloan titled “The Quest for the Perfect Online”.   The article is about how web advertisers are moving beyond search and using science and algorithms to figure out what you want to earn your click and ultimately earn your business.

We hear about behavioral targeting and various methods for ad serving on a regular basis—especially if you attend any of the industry conferences.  In his article, Sloan offers some really interesting technology practices you might not be aware of yet depending on the size of your company or agency.  Carla Hendra, co-CEO of Ogilvy North America talks about the agency’s interactive arm—one of the fasting growing operations they have—and how most of their new hires must come with a deep understanding of analytics.  It seems Ogilvy has a pretty cool in-house optimizer that enables the company to run thousands of calculations to evaluate the performance of an ad campaign AND pull or modify the underperforming ads in real-time.  So if the background or an image isn’t working, the system can automatically change it—or if the copy isn’t pulling, they can swap it out of the ad. 

Usama Fayyad of Yahoo—a former NASA rocket scientist and the original founder of Revenue Science—has models that process more data on a daily basis than the entire Library of Congress—12 terabytes flowing into Yahoo’s servers a day.  If you didn’t already know, Yahoo has an option to buy ad space throughout their sites based on behavioral targeting, not content.  Which translates to Fayyad being able process and determine within 75 percent certainty who will or won’t purchase a particular product.  Pretty impressive stuff…

From Ogilvy to Microsoft to Right Media, everyone is chasing clicks—and finding new and different ways to entice users and optimize ad performance.  Which brings us to our favorite question at ion—what happens after the click? 

If you read our blog regularly, then you have heard us ask this question before.  As a matter of fact, we are continually urging marketers to take a look at what happens after the click.  We call it post-click marketing.  All the ad-serving science available in the world and the inter-workings of Yahoo and Google will not help convert your users after they click.  It’s up to you to do that.

I could say it again a few different ways, but instead, let’s revisit some of our favorite blog postings: Message Match
Leads or Inquiries
What is a Conversion Path
Be Confident, Be Sure
Thoughts About Early Segmentation

What is a conversion path?

I’ve blogged on this before…but since the conversation around here is always about landing pages versus conversion paths, it’s worth continued blogging around this concept.

What is a conversion-focused landing experience? We think that a conversion-focused landing experience is different than a one-size fits all landing page. Usually that means a “conversion path” — a multi-page “pitch” that branches according to the respondent’s segment and behavior. Pitch is in important word here. When we sell offline, we tailor our pitch based on who we are pitching to, how they are responding to us, etc. Conversion paths bring some of that offline selling methology online.

What the respondent clicks on leads them down branches that are of interest to them. Selling a CRM software? Why send respondents to a generic landing page, when you can send them to a path where they select a next step based on their industry. Then the next page talks about why your CRM is so right for that industry. And then maybe another choice leads them to even more specific information.

Scott said recently, and it is worth repeating: “A web site is a wide river of prospects and customer at different stages of the funnel. Post-click marketing paths are the tributaries and feeder streams that make sure people enter at the right spot.”