Your website may actually have several landing pages.  It will only have one home page, but there are advantages in having landing pages and even testing alternative versions of those landing pages.  A landing page is a webpage that link from any marketing campaign, like an advertisement, email, Pay-per-click campaign or a web page listed naturally in the search engines.  For example, when you click from an email, you should be directed to a page that is specific to the offer or product addressed in the email.

The hazard of linking to a “catch-all” homepage is that the customer has to do too much work to find what was advertised in an email — or worse, they get lost. Every time you make someone click, you lose 50% of your visitors.  The point is to have prospective customers taken directly to where you want them to be without having to depend on the customer to carry out another step on their own unattended.  Either way, you lose the prospect along the way.  It is important not to let that happen.  A web designer such as Thrive Marketing can show you how.

Tip #1

Keep the copy on the landing page short and to the point.  This page is designed to be a specific payback for the email from which the transfer is made.  The payback needs to be quick and to the point.  Be clear about what conversion activity you want to have happen (for example, is it a contact form submission, a sale, email newsletter subscription, membership?) through the landing page and write the copy accordingly.

Tip #2

Don’t expect your prospect to do too much.  It isn’t their job to weed their way through your website to your goal; it is your job to serve them as directly as possible, in two clicks or fewer.  Ask for only the information you need from them with the objective of conversion in mind.  If you ask them to do too much at the outset, you run the risk of turning off a customer who will then seek out your competitor to complete their purchase.  No one will ever complain that your website is too easy to navigation or utilize.  Also, warm them up with finesse; don’t be pushy.

Tip #3

If you are testing different offers, or even different versions of a product, use separate landing pages to measure the effectiveness of the items being tested and compared.  Landing pages are not usually used as a testing medium for marketing nearly as often as it could be.  You can measure and learn a lot from checking the click-through rates of different versions of the landing pages using A/B split testing or multi-variate testing.

Tip #4

Remember to follow-up those leads.  The entire point of generating leads is to achieve a sales conversion or new customer.  You are missing the manna falling from the sky if you fail to follow-up with leads.  Prepare in advance follow-up emails and be ready to respond automatically from a leads data base.  Infusionsoft is a wonderful tool for doing that and you can customize the letters any way you want and self-manage the mailing criteria.  We can tell you a lot more about automating Infusionsoft follow-up but, in a nutshell, it is not unusual to double your catch through automated lead follow-up mailing programs.

Tip #5

Conversion is the name of the game.  Typically, conversion rates are extremely low ranging from about 6% for catalog shopping down to about 1% for electronics.  Most conversion rates for most ecommerce website range from 1% to 2%.  In other words, for every 100 potential customers (on average) you will make only one or two sales.  Can that be improved?  You bet it can!  If you know what you are doing and plan your process well, you should be able to do two to four times those averages.  It is fairly easy to attract the traffic to your site but converting a portion of that traffic takes planning and expertise on what turns a buyer on and what turns a buyer off.  You do not have a successful site until the site provides you with the desired customer action.

It is great to know which of your marketing efforts are the most productive, but the real payback to intelligent use of landing pages is in the rate of conversions for your product or service sales.  Just as with your home page, it takes good planning, knowledge of how the customer’s eyes track the page, and making it easy to bring your customer through the process to complete a sale.  Give your selling efforts a new home on a specially designed landing page.

So how do you avoid this fool’s errand? Constantly tweak your marketing and never rest on your laurels.

Are you just sitting back expecting the money to roll in?

If so, you need to understand that marketing is much more than just sending one piece to potential customers or creating an ad on the Internet.

Two critical components to the success of any marketing strategy – tweaking and measuring!

Tweaking involves making minor modifications to your website, direct mail campaigns, even presentations to obtain results, and potentially an increase in profit. And measuring is an important task to see if those changes are actually bringing in revenue. Though timely, both tweaking and measuring are the keys to improving your response rate!

What Marketing Works for Your Business?

A 24/7 Salesperson: Your Website

Simply getting potential customers to your site is not enough…Google Analytics is a powerful measurement tool including:

• What’s the average time spent on your site? For example, if visitors are staying for a small amount of time – say around 10 seconds, there’s probably something that’s turning them off – be it the copy or the images. If so, it’s time to tweak!
• What Internet Ads yield the highest conversion rate? For example, you might find out that your Yellow Pages ad converts 1 out of every 100 visitors, but you might convert visitors from Google at a rate of 4 out of every 10 visitors. In this case, you could drop your Yellow Pages ad and concentrate your marketing dollars on more lucrative websites. By running split A/B tests, you can tweak the ads that aren’t working and keep the ones that are for a possible overall increase in response rates.
• Determine what day you have the highest activity on your website, so you can “tweak” your email marketing campaigns and send out email promotions on those high traffic days.
• Find out where people are abandoning your shopping cart, so you can tweak your shopping cart process, making it easier for visitors to make purchases and thereby, increase your sales.

Knowing the answers to these questions and more will help you to know what is working, and what needs tweaking. Many of our clients benefit from us interpreting their website reports and making the appropriate tweaks to the marketing for them on a monthly basis.

Tracking Direct Mail on Your Website

The Internet has literally changed the role of direct mail! A 2004 Direct Mail Association study indicated that 33% of direct mail recipients prefer to respond online. Intrigue prospects by adding personalized URL’s to postcards or other direct mail pieces (some clients report a 10 – 25% response rate compared to the average response of 2-3%!) in combination with a VIP landing page developed specifically for your campaign.

Today’s digital printing technology allows for you to send specific messages to each of your prospects – called “variable printing.” This allows you to automatically personalize each postcard with the person’s first name or company name, as they are being printed. You can also create a list of “A” clients and “B” clients and send different creatives to each list without expensive set-up charges. It also means you can mail fewer, more targeted pieces for a better ROI.

For the best return on investment, make sure your direct mail project is a campaign, not a one-shot chance. For example, you might mail your prospects one letter, a personalized post card and then send an email. Nowadays must make a number of contacts (anywhere from 3 to 23 times!) before they will remember seeing your message and respond.

Placing a Print Ad is Not Enough Anymore

Don’t place an ad in the newspaper or Yellow Pages with just your logo, phone number and website! Entice your audience with a benefit driven headline and a compelling offer such as a free gift with purchase. Measure results by asking new customers how they heard of you or create a specific 800 number, unique domain name, or email for them to respond to. Then, remember to track your results and measure them against your other marketing campaigns to determine which campaigns are returning an investment.

Tweak Your 60-Second Commercial

Great marketing is not just print and online material…it also relies on your personal sales skills. If you are not satisfied with the number of business cards you are getting or with your conversion rate, consider tweaking your sales pitch.

How Do You Measure Up?

You can’t be successful without measuring the efforts of your advertising dollars. Compare your results to those of industry standards to see where you rate. According to the Direct Marketing Association, the average direct mail response rate is 2.77 percent, email is 2.48 percent and telemarketing is 8.55 percent. According to FireClick statistics, e-commerce websites enjoy an average of a 2.3% conversion. However, there are many factors involved which include number of prospects, target market and how effective your message is.

Thrive Marketing is a Phoenix marketing firm specializing in website design, full-service search engine optimization and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) online advertising services. Thrive offers the expertise to assist with your marketing campaign so that you will see better results and a return on your investment. Every thing we do is done with the end result in mind: more clients for your business.

Before you do ANYTHING, you need to determine the value of a single lead or a single visitor to your website. How much can you afford to spend getting just one person to look at your business?

You don’t want to guess - there is actually a formula to this!

Here are three metrics that can help you develop a smart web marketing strategy:

When you take all three of these components together, it will be easier for you to determine your proper marketing strategy.

Example 1: If your ROI is 1000% and your CPA is one cent, but your profit is $10, that’s not too exciting.

Example 2: However, if your ROI is 50%, your CPA is $10 and your profit is $5000, that’s a little more exciting.

As this shows you, ROI and CPA alone can’t determine how effectively your advertising dollars are performing. If a campaign has little ROI, you could still invest in it as long as it generates real profits.

Knowing this, you can make money EVERY TIME you launch a marketing campaign – you will have unlocked the secret to having an unlimited marketing budget. You can spend as much as you want, as long as it makes you more money!

50 Marketing Ideas

How much should you spend on marketing? The rule of thumb is to invest approximately 3% of your annual gross revenue into Marketing: capturing new leads, closing sales and retaining your current clients. You should also have about 10 different marketing strategies working for you at the same time. Marketing strategies don’t have to cost much – or anything for that matter. Check out the list of 50 marketing ideas we put together.

“More than half (52%) of CMO’s believe that traditional, large ad agencies can’t meet online marketing needs, and nearly half (49%) believe they have difficulty thinking beyond traditional print and TV models.”

Hiring a Bigger Marketing Agency Isn’t Better.

If executives at large multi-million dollar companies believe this, we can only surmise that small business owners and managers feel the same way.

The study went on to say, “Most marketing execs strongly prefer blended firms with roots in technology that can offer creative and traditional print proficiency and online expertise. Even more (68%) prefer to work with multiple agencies in order to benefit from specialization.”

Thrive Marketing is a full-service marketing  firm with strong expertise in online strategies: website design, search engine optimization, email marketing and conversion strategies. We also offer traditional marketing, including brand identity, copywriting, and print design.

6 Factors for Choosing a Marketing Firm

The six most important factors to a CMO or Business Owner when choosing a marketing partner are (in order of importance to aggregate respondents):

1. Quality of creative content
2. Innovation and strategic value
3. Price/cost
4. Sophisticated analytics and measurement systems
5. Proficiency in emerging, interactive or digital media
6. Traditional print, offline and media buying services

Source: Michael Fielding, Marketing News, American Marketing Association, April 1, 2007