Branding After the Click. We All Do It—Good or Bad.

In today’s e-marketing world, most email, online advertising and search engine marketing brand moments are pretty bad ones. With 95-97% of e-marketing respondents never moving beyond the first click, it’s safe to say that we’re not keeping our promises.”

How many times have you clicked on a banner or email link only to be disappointed by landing on a generic page that has nothing to do with the reason you clicked? You look, you give the sponsor the benefit of the doubt — but nope… there’s nothing there. You probably feel frustrated, betrayed, maybe even angry — feelings that profoundly affect the perception of the brand behind the message. And if you’re the marketer behind the message, you’re responsible for that negative brand impact. Ouch.

Every promise made in every banner, email or keyword ad is a pivotal branding opportunity. By keeping the promise you made to entice the click, your brand is enhanced. If you break that promise, your brand is damaged. That means many things we don’t traditionally think of as “branding,” really are. And it means we have a tremendous responsibility to uphold.

In today’s e-marketing world, most email, online advertising and search engine marketing brand moments are pretty bad ones. With 95-97% of e-marketing respondents never moving beyond the first click, it’s safe to say that we’re not keeping our promises.

How we choose to handle what happens after the click dictates if our brand moment is a good one or a bad one. Making the promise to entice the click is the easy part. Keeping it is much harder. Since e-marketing success is judged on click-through rate, most of us will say just about anything to earn that first click. Far less thought is given to what happens next — after they click. Sure, some of us dedicate some resources to landing pages or topic-specific micro-sites. But the bottom line is that 95% or more of first clicks never go further. Often, that drop off is due to a broken promise — a brand moment gone bad.

Unkept promises come in many forms. There’s the most obvious example, where you click on a specific message only to land on a company’s home page. Then there are less obvious cases where you have landing pages or micro-sites that are topic specific, but not message specific. Remember, clicking is an impulse reaction to a message, not a topic.

Opportunity knocks. When you keep the promise you made to earn the click, you see not only better brand perception, but also significantly higher conversion rates. Success measurement can then begin to shift away from click-through rate and toward much more meaningful metrics—conversion and branding. Match the post-click message to the click originator, and you’re on your way to the e-marketing hall of fame. But how?

Let’s say you run a banner that entices the click by promising a 30% savings on a trip to a resort. If you pay off the promise with a landing page that speaks to that resort (the topic), but fails to capitalize on the 30% savings (the message), you have broken the promise and will lose a high percentage of your respondents. On the flip side, if you land your respondents directly on a booking form, you’ll also lose a high percentage, because you neglected to engage them deeply enough to ask for the sale. E-marketing is a conversation that merely begins with the first click. Think of the promise as the first sentence of a paragraph, and your post-click effort as the completion of that first thought.

Post-click message matching means being very specific and earning a respondent’s trust by engaging them with a simple, single-purpose extension of the original promise. Match the post-click message to the promise made, and put your direct response to work on your brand—in a good way. And watch your conversion rates soar.