• you deliver more net business: more leads, more transactions, more registrations, etc.
• you lower your cost-per-acquisition (CPA), making your spend quantifiably more efficient.

Paid clicks are expensive, particularly for desirable keywords or popular sites. Instead of always having to bid more and more to increase your net results — pouring more clicks into the top of your marketing funnel — it’s time to turn more and more of your existing clicks into real business. It’s time to widen your funnel at the next stage forward.

It’s time to focus on great post-click marketing.

After consulting to major marketing departments for many years, we developed a set of post-click marketing best practices for consistently generating strong conversion rates. In the past two years, we’ve seen more than 80% of our customers double their conversion rate — or better — by adopting these principles. Over the past year, the average conversion rate across all of our customers has been 11.1% — more than 4X the industry average.

However, you don’t need to be our customer to put these principles to work in your online marketing. The following five best practices — several of which go against the conventional wisdom of cookie-cutter landing pages — make the difference, and they’re yours to employ:

1. Beyond the Web Site. Your primary Web site, www.yourcompany.com, is your virtual headquarters. But when you drop respondents in there cold on their first click, it can be an undirected and distraction-filled experience. In many cases they encounter “message mismatch” — what they stumble into can seem frustratingly disconnected from what they clicked on in the first place. Or they might just wander, lost in the corridors, until they fade away.

Landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites are like your virtual field offices — they speak directly to the people in a specific niche, more focused and approachable. These independent landing experiences are ideal for campaign-specific marketing, as their messaging can be tightly matched with the different vehicles that generate clicks. Greater relevance + fewer distractions = more conversions.

2. Paths not Pages. The intent of landing pages is good — click-specific messaging and offers — but their single page format is artificially restrictive and can turn off respondents with a take-it-or-leave-it structure. This obscures the outcome for you as the marketer: if only 5% of your respondents convert, then you learn nothing about the 95% who don’t.

Conversion paths are friendlier and more conversational. Respondents are gently guided along a short two or three-step path that lets them indicate what’s most important to them. They become more engaged because each step is a quick 5-second click, which pays off with more relevant details. In addition to converting at a higher rate, this approach also “fills the gap” with insight into respondents who abandon along the way.

3. Meaningful Segmentation. There are old-fashioned ways to segment people on the Web: ask them questions in a form or try to guess their “persona” based on where they came from and where they go. Unfortunately, form data doesn’t help if someone never fills out the form, and making undeclared assumptions from a clickstream is prone to mistaken identity.

A more modern approach is to make segmentation open and participatory with conversion paths. Choices on a path are transparent to respondents — ways to match them with the most relevant content — without imposing on their anonymity. Because their choices are intentional and driven by self-interest, the accuracy of your profiling increases significantly. You learn how respondents differentiate themselves through their own eyes, an invaluable perspective.

4. Strategic Testing. Test alternate landing experiences to maximize your success. But give much more credence to “big picture” experiments (via A|B testing) over the rote combinatorial testing of thousands of variations in content (via MVT).

Great testing starts with a genuine hypothesis about your audience — from which you can learn real insight — not a throw-it-at-the-wall jumble of disjointed elements. Bold ideas, such as alternative segmentation strategies and different types of landing experiences, are the key to double-digit leaps in performance.

5. Brand the Conversion. Brand on the Web is hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it — the quality, consistency, and interplay of all the elements — the credibility, authenticity, and passion of the message — the synergy with external brand equity — and ultimately the degree to which expectations are met or exceeded.

Some landing experiences give great brand; others reek of amateurism. The good ones are crafted and deliberate, sending cues of excellence and trustworthiness, signaling to respondents that you value their experience. This is achieved with a blend of good design, good content, and zero tolerance for breaks in the experience: bad links, browser incompatibilities, inconsistent brand standards, expired information, sluggish response times. First impressions matter: make yours count.

Winning a respondent’s first click is important, but it’s only the beginning. Whether you adopt these principles or develop your own, the next level of online marketing effectiveness can only be achieved by looking beyond the click to what happens next.

It’s time to focus on great post-click marketing.

---Source: Reprinted with permission from Ion Interactive at www.ioninteractive.com