Opening Doors with Direct Mail

At ion interactive, we love digital marketing. But we also love creating experiences, online or otherwise, that will open doors. Most recently, our sales and marketing team, focused on creating a meaningful direct piece that will create conversations. For those that say direct mail is passé, I say think again. Direct mail can open doors for sales and marketing that have previously been closed. The key is doing it in a meaningful and relevant way. This is important - direct mail is no different than any other channel. You must create an experience that resonates, allows you to stand out, and focuses on how you can help your customer or prospect.  Here’s how:

• Be creative. Don’t just send a postcard. If that target prospect or customer is a valuable opportunity you want to get in front of, it’s important to be creative in how you approach it. Think themed packages or product gifts that tie to customer successes.
• Be targeted. Don’t send to the masses. Direct mail shouldn’t be a “one-size-fits” all and creating a target audience allows you to customize the message and content. Relevancy is important – and may mean the difference between getting voicemail again and getting someone who’s excited to speak with you.
• Be personalized. Don’t forget to send a note. Create a personalized experience with a quick note that introduces yourself, promises on follow-up, and begins the relationship.
• Be actionable.  Don’t leave them wondering “what next”. Create the “next step” for your prospect or customer with a call-to-action that leads them down a unique experience.

Are you eating conversions for breakfast?We took the following four key elements listed above and created a direct mail piece that created conversations with prospects that we’ve been attempting to open for quite some time. We called it the conversion breakfast. It included the following:

• ConversionO’s. Our package begins with a box of ion branded cereal that focuses on the key ingredients to driving conversions with landing page optimization.
• Cereal Bowl & Spoon. We didn’t want to be the company that sent cereal without a bowl and spoon.
• Personalize Notecard. Our notecard is simple, focused, to the point and allows room for personalization from the sales organization.

These items were packaged and sent to targeted prospects that we wanted to start a conversation with. I’m going to repeat, this is a conversation starter, not a deal closer. How do we measure our success? By the number of companies we’ve created meetings with that previously didn’t have the time to talk landing page optimization. To date, that’s 14% of our targeted send. We’re happy with the success to date - it provided an opportunity at a conversation that would have previously been out of reach.

Making the Case for Dynamic Content

One key advantage of using landing pages for your online search engine marketing campaigns is the ability to add dynamic content. Technically, dynamic content is any variable page element that can be swapped out given a set of conditions, like the presence of a keyword or location information.

Using dynamic content allows you to automatically swap page elements like copy or imagery in order to add a customized look and feel to your landing page with minimal effort—no extra pages required!

The two most common applications for dynamic content are insertion, or placing a keyword directly into the headline or body copy, and substitution, which replaces content on your page if certain parameters are met. 

Dynamic content can also turn a generic page into a highly-targeted, localized experience. For example, imagine you own a travel company that buys and sells theme park tickets nationwide. You know that landing pages containing elements that reference the theme parks that your visitors are searching for usually perform better than generic ones, so you set up your landing page with dynamic content tags that automatically insert the theme park’s city onto the page. You also set up substitution rules to display relevant imagery, and even testimonials from past clients who have visited local parks using your service.

Instantly, you’ve created a landing page that can provide a unique experience to each visitor, regardless of their search term. Those interested in “Orlando Theme Park Tickets” can read about your offers for Disney and Universal, while those who search for “California Theme Parks” will see content relevant to them—all from the same landing page!

You can also test both dynamic content insertion and substitution easily on your page by swapping each type out in a multivariate test, or A/B testing different substitution elements such as images, headlines, and body copy. That way, you’ll know if the presence of a search term on your page converts more visitors, or whether dynamic images are more powerful.

In this way, dynamic content is a versatile tool for delivering targeted experiences to multiple audiences by using only one landing page. Be sure to test different types of dynamic content in your landing page program, and tell us how it’s working for your online campaigns!

Have questions about using dynamic content on your landing pages? Want to share a funny landing page story with us? Post a comment in the section below and let us know!

Make the Grade with Landing Page Testing

Uncover A+ Landing Pages Using A/B TestingAs a child, a good report card can be a great thing—it’s something you could redeem for a trip to your favorite restaurant or even a shiny new toy.

In marketing, report cards are an important way to gauge visitor interest in your offer. Generating a landing page ‘report card’ involves testing page elements, layouts, and copy in order to find winning combinations for your campaigns. 

A/B testing is a great way to determine whether your landing pages are making the grade. If you’re not currently A/B testing, it may be difficult to declare winners and make progress against your overall campaign goals. If you’re on the fence about starting a landing page testing program to grade your pages, remember this:

Landing Page Testing Only Serves to Improve Conversion.

Just as testing was a key component to your school-house report card, landing page testing will help you to discover what’s working and also highlight what needs improvement. Here are three great reasons to incorporate landing page testing as part of your overall campaign strategy:

1. Some results defy conventional wisdom.
   
   It’s happened to us all: we’re in a hurry, so we deploy modified versions of landing pages that have worked in the past—except this time, the grades are not too hot. Despite using what’s worked in campaigns prior, each new launch is truly its own isolated experiement. Since there are a lot of variables (e.g., segmentation, time, or target audiences) that can affect how a particular page is performing, it’s important to perform isolated tests to be sure that you’re deploying the best landing page for any given campaign.


2. Better grades can mean more business.
   
   In our case studies, we’ve covered some top brands who have significantly improved both their ROI and revenue by grading their landing pages through landing page testing. Landing page testing helps you to squeeze the most out of your campaign spend. Keep in mind that most clicks come with an associated cost, so any boost in conversion can have an immediate impact on your bottom line.


3. Everyone has room to grow.
   
   Just like a report card, testing can identify key weaknesses in your landing page strategy. Although a perfect A+ (or 100% conversion) may be nearly impossible, there’s no reason why we can’t set the bar really high. Even top-performers can be refined; champions can be challenged, and winners declared.

Landing page testing allows you to be flexible and make adjustments, helping you build winning campaigns. Testing helps to challenge the status quo, bring in business, and grow your landing page program. Moreover, it’s a continuous cycle of improvement that can help you to show incremental growth on your next report card.

Is Friction Causing Your Visitors to Bounce?

Landing page friction is a known conversion killer and a major cause of high bounce rates—but what exactly contributes to friction on your landing pages? How do you ensure that certain page elements are not adding friction and causing your visitors to slip away?

Factors that can lead to landing page friction

• Long page load times
• Unexpected video or audio
• Inconsistent use of font sizes & colors
• An imbalance of copy and images

• Long forms
• Relevancy
• Validation patterns
• Long or complex pages

5 simple ways to eliminate landing page friction

Reduce content by keeping the most relevant copy above the fold. Test different layouts for high-content experiences: microsites, tabbed content, and rotators or slideshows are all great ways to organize content in a digestible manner.

Manage form complexity by only asking your visitors for what’s absolutely necessary to convert. If your organization requires many fields for a particular offer, try testing multi-step forms or using progressive profiling forms for longer buying cycles. 

Create highly-targeted experiences by ensuring a tight “message match” between your ad copy and landing page. You can also test dynamic content substitution on your page by substituting dynamic variables for keywords or location. 

Keep your visitors focused by using visual cues that direct attention towards your call-to-action. Eliminate any micro-conversions that distract from your primary conversion goal, and instead delegate these links to your confirmation page.

Keep it simple by building intuitive landing experiences and reducing the number of clicks needed to convert. While complex widgets can be useful in certain circumstances, in general the simpler the interactivity, the quicker you’ll gain a response.

Because so much of the relative success of your online marketing campaign is dictated by your visitors’ experiences with your page, it’s important to keep friction top-of-mind when you’re creating and launching new landing pages. Be sure to test your forms, copy, and overall layout to optimize your landing pages and boost your conversion rates by lowering visitor fatigue. 

3 Elements of Effective QR-Enabled Campaigns

What’s black and white with dots all over? Your leading mobile traffic source, of course!

QR codes are a great supplement to your direct marketing campaigns because they facilitate the transition of offline experiences—like mail pieces or flyers—to rich online content, giving you the ability to both capture leads and create memorable experiences as part of your overall direct marketing strategy.

If you’re thinking about using these funky little boxes to catalyze your next direct marketing campaign, consider these three tenets of highly-successful QR-enabled campaigns:

1. For every QR code, a great mobile landing experience

As you begin to frame your QR code campaign, briefly put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and consider the possible ways in which visitors are arriving on your landing page. Context plays a key role in determining how information should flow from your collateral to your landing page. For example, if your visitors are scanning a code on the side of a bottle or food package, try directing them to a mobile page that serves popular recipies using your product.

Also, consider the implications of the type of landing page that you’re sending your visitors to. A content-rich landing page with large heroes and streaming video may be appropriate for desktop microsites, but might be difficult to render (or take a long time to load) on a mobile device. Because the success of a QR-sourced landing page hinges on the behaviors of mobile traffic, a ‘less is more’ layout with a carefully-designed mobile interface may be the most appropriate (and highest converting!) choice for your visitors.

2. Monitor performance in real-time by using landing page analytics.

It’s every aquisition marketer’s greatest fear: despite giving your page considerable thought and following some common landing page best practices, your landing page performance (or lack thereof) leaves something to be desired. 

If your landing page solution combines conversion metrics with actionable real-time analytics, you can monitor visitor behavior virtually as it happens and defer traffic to alternative pages if performance begins to sink.  Pay close attention to these measures:

• How many visitors are segmenting, sub-segmenting, and converting
• Which mobile devices brought in the most traffic
• Which QR campaigns kept visitors on the page for the longest time

3. ABT - Always Be Testing

QR codes have been rendered in all sorts of creative applications—from parts of larger images to even typography, QR codes represent a new creative frontier for online marketers. Be sure to proof your QR code (scan it!) and optimize for the right print size and material. 

Next, design a mobile landing page testing strategy and A/B test your creatives against one-another. Once you’ve found a winner, use multivariate testing to find those winning combinations of mobile page elements.

Do you use QR codes as part of your direct marketing strategy, or have a creative application for QR codes? Share your ideas in the comments below!