'Landing Pages' Connect Your Marketing Efforts

By MARK FEFFER

None of your marketing efforts stand alone. Just as you use common themes across print advertising and brochures, or display your ads in your showroom, you should coordinate your Web site with the rest of your marketing campaigns. This goes beyond the notion of sharing copy, colors and images between your online and offline materials. With the right planning, your Web site can drive home critical points, capture information from prospects, track responses to specific campaigns and, in some cases, even close sales.

The key to this is called a "landing page." It's a simple idea that doesn't require expensive programming or automation -- but does require thought and effective copywriting. In fact, most marketers believe effective landing pages are critical components of a campaign's success. Says Jeanne Jennings, an online-marketing consultant in Washington, D.C., "If you do any kind of promotion, the page that your prospects land on is your first chance to impress them."

What Are They?

Technically speaking, a landing page is simply a Web page that looks and feels like the rest of your site, but isn't included in its regular menus. Instead, users access it by entering a URL you've provided in another marketing piece, be it a postcard, e-mail, brochure or press release. In a brochure promoting a new product, for example, you might invite recipients to visit "www.yourcompany.com/offer.html." Along with details on your product and the particulars of the offer, the page should include a form for visitors to enter information about themselves or possibly make a purchase. Because visitors have taken the step to visit the page, you have an opportunity to reinforce your message and gather information from potential customers who are already interested in your company and want to learn more about it.

E-mail service Constant Contact, a product of Roving Software in Waltham, Mass., recently used this tactic in an e-mail newsletter. It offered subscribers a free-of-charge online seminar on the basics of e-mail marketing. The newsletter included a link to the offer's landing page: http://webinar.roving.com/email101/register/index.shtml. To register for the seminar, visitors were required to enter their name, e-mail address and phone number into an online form.

"Landing pages serve the same purpose as a reply card in direct mail," explains Michael Granoff, executive vice president of sales and marketing for PrimeCard Corp., a retention-marketing company in Wellesley, Mass. "They tie up the back end of your campaign by collecting information, and they're a wonderful way to lead users to your Web site."

Typically, landing pages are used in connection with an offer promoted through a separate marketing piece. The purpose of your campaign may be to find qualified leads as a first step toward selling a product or service. But don't expect it to generate sales immediately. As Ms. Jennings points out, the likelihood of someone actually buying something from your Web site is inversely proportional to the price of the product. In other words: the higher the price, the less likely the sale at that moment. But that's fine. People who visit the landing page can provide you with valuable information about themselves and their needs.

Of course, you can't expect visitors to tell you about themselves just by asking. So it's best to give them an incentive. PrimeCard, for example, is preparing a direct-mail campaign intended to gather leads among banking executives who manage debit-card portfolios. By visiting the landing page and answering four or five questions through an online form, users will be able to download a white paper, "Winning the Turf War for Wallet Share." Although free of charge, the paper provides real value to its target readers -- enough value, Mr. Granoff believes, to warrant their taking a minute to answer his questions.

While Mr. Granoff believes some people will "bail out of the page," and others will enter gibberish in the form, still others will enter real information that PrimeCard can use to make immediate follow-up sales calls. "I need one client to sign on to pay for the entire effort," he says. In addition, many respondents will be qualified prospects who may purchase services in the future. "This is one of the fabulous ways to build your e-mail database," Mr. Granoff notes.

All of this comes with little risk. Even to visitors who've entered gibberish in the form, all Mr. Granoff loses is a download of the white paper.

Focus on the Offer

When planning a landing page, the most common mistake is to muddle its focus, says Ms. Jennings. "You have to focus on the offer, hone the information and be clear on what you want the visitor to do," she says. In other words, if you want to swap a white paper for a prospect's name, title, company and telephone number, your campaign has to convince people the paper is worth their time to retrieve and read. Additionally, most people are savvy enough to know you're collecting their particulars for sales-and-marketing purposes. In many cases, your offer must overcome resistance to that notion as well.

"You really need to see the landing page as part of the campaign. Don't try to do too much with it," advises Ms. Jennings. Be sure to include links to your privacy policy and a page about your company. Try to anticipate any objections or questions users may have about your offer, then list them with links to answers. Each visit should be like a mini sales session, in which you increase prospects' interest level by reinforcing your offer and allaying their reservations. A good starting point, says Ms. Jennings, is to ask yourself: "What do people need to know?"

Hidden Value

"With a good landing page, you'll definitely see a difference in the results of your campaign," says Ms. Jennings. A great believer in testing different marketing tactics and offers before beginning a full-blown campaign, Ms. Jennings advises business people to test different offers with different landing pages to see what works. "Marketing is part art and part science," she says. "It's important to test. So, test different landing pages to see what sells."

-- Mr. Feffer is the publisher of Small Business Web Update, a publication of Tramp Steamer Media, a publishing company based in Trenton, N.J.