You can improve lead capturing and sales conversion rates by directing your prospects or customers to a special landing page. But you can achieve even greater success by expanding your landing pages—turning them into microsites—and customizing the homepage and navigation menus of the microsites based on whatever you know about each visitor by an interactive personalisation-engine.
Personalize for Maximum Effectiveness
The most effective online lead-generation campaigns drive traffic to multipage microsites that have infotaining homepages (the landing pages) and links to enticing offers, if possible segmented, targetted or personalised. The user experience, creative wise should be nice but not overwhelming.
For maximum impact, personalize your entire microsite (and especially the landing page) based on whatever information you might have about the viewer. For example, your microsite should present different information and offers depending on whether the prospect arrived by clicking on a banner ad (and depending on what ad he clicked) or by searching Google for a particular keyword (and depending on what that keyword was).
An email campaign can permit even greater microsite personalization through specially coded hyperlinks in the email messages. When prospects click on the link, their browsers provide your microsite with unique ID codes that enable the microsite to look up the prospects in a marketing database.
Even if you buy a list of prospects to send your email message to, that list will likely contain at least the first and last name of each prospect and perhaps much more. Your microsite can look up that information and do a “merge’ and personalize the microsite’s pages with the prospect’s first name, etc. (e.g., “Hello Johan, thanks for visiting”). And if the list you buy includes each person’s job title, your microsite can, and should, present different information and offers based on the job title.
Reduce Abandonment
In addition to being more relevant and welcoming to prospects, customizing and personalizing microsites and their landing pages eliminates the temptation to create a single, “one-page-fits all” landing page that ends up containing too much text to be effective.
Customizing microsites based on the sources of the prospects also reduces the need for your landing pages to ask viewers for any information about themselves. Studies have shown that asking a prospect for information on a landing page increases abandonment.
Instead, save the information-capture for after the prospect clicks on a link to request more information (a whitepaper, for example). Even then, you should severely limit the number of questions you ask. Our measurement research has shown a dramatic increase in abandonment rates between forms that have six questions and those that have seven.
Rather than trying to gather, up front, all the information you’d like to have, your microsite should ask for just the basics on the first visit and ask for more information with each subsequent visit, progressively building a profile on the prospective customer in the long run.
Summary
Landing pages are an important part of any online demand generation strategy, but complete microsites are even more effective—especially if the microsites dynamically present different information and offers based on whatever is known about the viewer.
At These Days we work integrated by combining our Elastic-platform (eDirect marketing) and Doubleclick (Campaign management platform) to realize personalized, segmented and targetted campaigns.
Our Elastic service platform can put such dynamic, personalized microsites within reach of even small to medium sized businesses. Such systems enable marketers to run the microsites and related campaigns without the involvement of IT departments and Web programmers.
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