/Opinion/ No more landing pages!
11/10/2007 | Filed under Discover > Opinion
There are alternative post-click experiences, says Justin Talerico. To put an end to landing pages, online marketing agency ion interactive has launched a grassroots campaign
We need to dramatically move the needle on what happens after the paid click. The solution? Post-click marketing. It’s a radically new approach to what happens after people respond to your paid search, email marketing or online advertising.
We need to think outside the box, because right now, the most highly optimised landing pages or microsites still 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 of the window!
The problem is short and punchy 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 optimised 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 travelling 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 travelling with the kids and you can get 20 per cent off on 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 “optimising” square pegs for round holes. When you think like a user, you don’t want to see a landing page, regardless of how optimised 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 at 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 from disappointing your users.
Throw away your idea of a landing page. We must get more out of our online marketing. And the way to do it is to think beyond the click and outside the box. No more landing pages!
Justin Talerico is CEO of online marketing agency ion interactive, and one of the founders of NoMoreLandingPages. He has provided online marketing for clients such as Samsung, Yahoo, Wyndham Worldwide, Siemens and Citrix Systems.
Comments
Nick Reffitt / 12/10/2007 / 02:02 / http://www.nickreffitt.co.uk
Thanks for the article, really simple idea that is virtually not used at all. Definately going to incorporate that in my next marketing campaign. Cheers.
Mathew Browne / 18/10/2007 / 11:11 / http://www.mbwebdesign.co.uk
This is all well and good, but at the lower end of the market it's still very common to get the dreaded "can I have a Flash intro" request. Getting such clients to read through this is not very likely - they value whizzy Flash over the usability experience, and overcoming that preconception is challenging.
Richard Morton / 23/10/2007 / 16:18 / http://www.qm-consulting.co.uk/
It might just be me, but in the case of clicking on an SEM ad or similar, the first thing that I want to see is the terms and conditions (preferably in simple terms), because I have this horrible feeling that I am going to go through several pages only to find that I don't qualify because my dog doesn't have a pedigree, or my inside leg measurement is marginally too short.
A good/bad example is the free google adwords links that have appeared a great deal on hosting sites, which promise £30 of free advertising. Being the skinflint that I am, I am quite happy to pay £6 for a domain name that I will just allow to lapse, in order to get my hands on £30 worth of advertising. I'm only slightly discouraged when I find out that £5 of the £30 has to be provided by myself, but the real show stopper is when I find out that it only applies to new Google Adwords customers (and not even just setting up a new account is allowed), so it is of no use to me. I fully understand the reasoning behind the campaign and the terms and condtions, I just wish landing pages (or the suggested replacement for these), would be clear from the start. It would save my time, and the website server's bandwidth.
Alistair Macneil / 06/02/2008 / 23:34 / http://www.healthywebsites.co.uk
I read this article in the magazine a few months back and started to get excited, "I Got it", so did one of my clients, we implemented a post click experience and his sales have increased 3.7%, now converting at 8.99% on the same ad and same volume of traffic over the last 3 months, no other variables have changed. For the 2 years previous there was an average of 5.29%.
For the original client I have just finished doing the same process on a product that wasn't selling with a one page product description that was shown to all, only in first couple of weeks of data but the results look good.
I've now got two more clients to come on board with the idea and it's looking like its going to be a good year of growth ahead for 2008 :-)
