A Social Thank You: Customer Value After Conversion

This is a guest post by Caleb Levell. Caleb is a Search Marketing Consultant at Hanapin Marketing. His interests include search and social marketing, online collaboration, and social media for business and non-profit organizations. He blogs at PPC Hero and SEO Boy.

Perfect, another conversion! By all means, be proud of the success and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. 

It isn’t easy setting up a successful PPC or SEO campaign. Timeliness, relevance, and quality all play a part in appealing to potential customers that are finding products or services through search engines. Even more challenging is these hard-to-get customers have the shortest of attention spans, fueled by the rapid and overwhelming availability of information to meet any buyer’s specific needs. So, like I said, consider this lead an accomplishment and give credit to your online marketing strategy, enticing PPC ads, and well-optimized landing pages for attracting another valuable customer.

And there’s that. After purchasing, signing up, or leaving you with their contact info, drop the customer off at your thank you/ confirmation page and tell them you will be in touch shortly. Sadly, it all just seems so cold. 

Marrying Search and Social

That’s why at Hanapin Marketing, we are exploring life after conversion. We are so proud of our clients’ conversions that we not only want to keep these valuable customers around for the next purchase, but we want to hear their opinions on product, brand, and service. Fortunately, many of our clients are beginning to ask similar questions. For example: “How can we get more value out of our search leads” and “What should we do about Facebook, Twitter, etc.? 

The truth of the matter is many small businesses are entering social media and separating social media marketing from their already established search engine marketing. While in some aspects this is necessary, the two marketing strategies can actually be integrated quite nicely.

One of the best places to begin integrating your social and search marketing strategy is on the thank you or confirmation page shown to the customer immediately after they have completed a goal from your search engine marketing (i.e. filling out a contact form, making a purchase, etc.).

Thank you and…

The thank you page is too often thought of as the end of the interaction between company and client in search marketing; however, as brands become more transparent online, the thank you page instead should be considered the beginning of a social marketing relationship.

My recommendation: Promote your company’s digital personality by inviting your most recent customers to “Join in on the conversation at Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter for exclusive deals.” Most likely, these will be some of the easiest fans and followers to obtain and more importantly, these recent customers should have a high potential for reflecting positive sentiment on your social media profiles.

Best Case Scenario

Imagine a searcher enters a luxury resort website via PPC advertising and books a room for Labor Day weekend. Upon booking the room, they are sent to a thank you and confirmation page that not only relays the traditional static response:

 “Thank you for booking a stay with us. A confirmation email has been sent to your provided email address.”

But also includes a simple call to action that says:

“Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter”

It doesn’t have to be much, but there is great value in this opportunity, especially if the customer has had a satisfactory booking experience. What follows is a chain of events very favorable to the company.

Perhaps the customer “likes” the luxury resort fan page on Facebook. Then, she posts a comment on the wall and thanks the resort for having such an easy process for online booking. The same customer revisits the page a couple weeks before her family’s stay and asks other people who “like” the page for suggestions on the best places to eat at the resort or other family restaurants around the resort hotel. Finally, after her stay, she posts a review of her experiences at the hotel and provides a few pictures of her and her family enjoying the resort pool.

Obviously, my example above is an extremely optimistic prediction of what could happen. However, I hope that it highlights a kind of interaction that is not highly unlikely, especially when reaching out to recently converting search engine traffic.

Wrap-up

Thus, let this be inspiration for ways to creatively integrate your search and social marketing strategies. If nothing else, I hope that you take some time to optimize your confirmation and thank you pages to better meet the needs of your social campaigns.

I’d also love to know: Is anyone else getting creative in integrating social and search marketing? What are some of your strategies and optimizations?

What B2B companies can learn from Facebook landing tabs for feature films

It seems like every movie trailer I see on TV ends with, “find us on Facebook” followed by the movie’s Facebook URL. This makes a lot of sense to me for a few reasons:

• Before the Facebook URL trend started, movie URLs were starting to become really long and unmemorable. We were seeing things like www.thegreatscarymovieof2010boo.com (not a real link)
• Creating hype – fans of the actors, director, genre, etc. can all gather and chat about the movie before it premiers, and then of course discuss the film afterwards.
• Meeting fans where they already are (on Facebook) means more interaction. On a Facebook page, fans can not only chat about the movie, but upload their own pictures or videos, which generally isn’t easily done on a regular website.
• Visitors are interacting and making plans with friends on Facebook. Why not encourage them to make plans to see your movie?

How can movies get fans to “like” their page before the film premier? Adding apps, encouraging fan comments, adding unique content such as video interviews with the stars, and so on are all great options

The films should also make use of Facebook’s ability to create a landing tab.

When sending TV viewers to a Facebook page, the set up of a landing tab with key benefits of “liking” the page can increase conversions and ticket sales (the all important factor).

Here are some current films making great use of their Facebook landing tabs, and Facebook pages in general.

Eat, Pray, Love and Scott Pilgrim have built into ways to purchase movie tickets right into the landing tab. Others have built in games and other fun apps to encourage visitors to interact with movie characters and themes, building an emotional connection that will draw visitors into theaters.

What B2B companies can learn

• Have a Facebook landing tab that shows the visitor immediate value in “liking” your page
  • For movies this is ease of purchasing tickets, reading interviews, watching trailers and video interviews, etc. For you this might be interviews with your CEO, interviews with industry thought-leaders, etc.
• Offer a way to connect with a sales person (for the films this is usually Fandango, for you this will be a live sales person), but also a way to receive information for those not yet ready to go to sales
• Create hype around your solution by allowing others to discuss your offerings on your page. Don’t  delete negative comments, instead  respond to them publicly
• Have your own trailer - maybe it’s a video of your CEO or other spokesperson talking about your company/solution, or maybe it’s a very short video demo of your product. 
• Oh, and please have a friendly URL. You’ll need to get 25 people to “like” your page to create a friendly URL. Ask your current employees and customers to help you get here immediately. 

Remember, the main point of a Facebook page for films is to draw in viewers, not to just get the “like,” and your B2B Facebook page is no different. Getting the “like” is an important micro-conversion, but moving that network over to your Website, to a sales person, or to some other point in your sales funnel is very important.

Have a strategy that leads to conversions, but have a little fun along the way. After all this is your Facebook page not your corporate website. Let your hair down and get social with apps, comments, and fun videos!  

10 tips for higher converting lead generation landing pages

The truth is landing page optimization is not rocket science. There are certainly best practices to follow, bad tips to avoid, metrics to analyze, and times when you should throw caution to the wind and go with your gut - but for the most part landing page optimization is something any good marketer can do with the right amount of time, tools, processes and advice.

Here are ten tips you can use to start creating high converting landing pages for lead gen:

1. Use landing pages to capture leads
   When a viewer is sent to the home page of a website, he or she can “go anywhere, from anywhere.”  This puts the burden on the viewer to find the info he or she needs. Instead of placing this burden on a potential customer, use a landing page to roll out the red carpet by offering up only hyper-relevant content based on the ad clicked. 
2. Message match ads & pages
   An ad is not complete without it’s matching landing page, and vice versa. Think of the two as peanut butter and jelly; one wouldn’t be right without the other. Whatever you promise in an ad, should be directly fulfilled in the landing page. Visitors will “land and leave” if your page doesn’t fulfill the promise.
3. Simplify
   Clutter leads to low conversion rates. Make your landing pages a no-brainer by only providing what is essential. You may be tempted to include paragraphs of information, your logo, a form, a product shot and so on, but through testing you can learn exactly what you need and what you can leave off for later.
4. Improve your content and copy
   Remember, landing pages are supposed to pitch, not inform. Make sure your copy sells. 
5. Check your forms
   Don’t drown your users in long forms. As a marketer you see form fields as a way to collect good user data; however the viewer sees the form as a hurdle to getting the information behind it. If you’re looking to generate a lot of leads, ask only for a name and email address. If you want to generate high quality leads, than you’ll need to include more specific form fields. This is always a balancing act, and you need to find what’s right for you to generate leads and maintain quality. Just cut what you can.  
6. Test
   To get started, you should probably begin with a few A/B tests (this is where you compare apples to oranges). For example you might test a page with a product image vs. a page with a product video. After you find your champion, and have achieved statistical significance to support that, you would then test small changes on the champion. And repeat. Then repeat again. And again. You get the picture!
7. Think beyond the page
   Think beyond cookie cutter pages, and grab your visitor’s attention! You need to craft conversion-focused experiences. You may want to experiment with pre-conversion segmentation, or tabs or small micro-sites even. Multi-page experiences can be just as conversion-focused as a single page, and they are often a better user experience.
8. Segment visitors
   Web surfers often develop a click rhythm while they’re flying through pages. Keep them in this rhythm by offering a simple choice on the landing page that filters them into segmented buckets. In just one simple click, you are able to filter out unqualified leads, offer hyper-targeted information, and gain user information that you might otherwise have to ask for in a form field. A good example of segmentation would be offering the choice between small business vs. enterprise level, or personal use vs. company use and so on.
9. Video, flash, social, widgets
   Visitors expect this! They want to see you, and interact with you, and it’s really to your benefit to meet this expectation. For many viewers just the fact that you have the confidence to show your product in a video is comforting … so much so that they may never even watch it. You can use flash and other applications like it to create tabbed viewing, and you should use social proof as testimonial that your solution works!
10. Kick it up a notch!
    Get targeted to boost conversions. Be relevant, geotarget clicks and use the longtail to get specific with your viewers. The more personal you can get, the better your chances are for converting clicks into customers.

These ten tips are certainly not the only ones you can follow, but they provide a base for review of your current pages. Landing page optimization is not rocket science, but knowing the science and art behind best practices does help.

9 landing page tips to avoid

It seems like new landing page experts are cropping up daily. We’ve seen and heard it all. Here are 9 really bad landing page tips you should avoid like the plague, and also 9 good tips you can start implementing into your testing program today.

1. Bad Tip: Send all ad campaign traffic to the same landing page.
   Correction: Send campaign traffic to matched campaign-specific landing pages that take into account: concept, message match and theme.
    
2. Bad Tip: Only write in first person.
   Correction: Hooey. Don’t be afraid to write in the second person; use “you” and “yours” to speak to the visitor in a direct voice.
    
3. Bad Tip: Create long forms to collect as much user data as possible.
   Correction: Use as few fields as possible (only collect what you absolutely need), and auto-populate fields when you can.
    
4. Bad Tip: Including multiple calls-to-action makes it more likely a user will convert.
   Correction: Limit your calls-to-action. Multiple calls-to-action compete against each other, and will distract the user from converting at all.
    
5. Bad Tip: It’s your landing page, you don’t need to conform to industry standards.
   Correction: Conforming to web standards will reduce confusion for the user. 
    
6. Bad Tip: It’s ok for a page to load slowly as long as the images, flash and video on it are awesome.
   Correction: Your load time should be 3-4 seconds max. Anything more and users are likely to move on without looking at your page at all.
    
7. Bad Tip: Include navigation so the user can get to the rest of your site.
   Correction: Navigation is very distracting to the visitor; moreover, once they leave the landing page they may never find their way back into the funnel.
    
8. Bad Tip: Videos belong on YouTube, not landing pages.
   Correction: Video converts well; use it for product tours, testimonials and reviews. 
    
9. Bad Tip: Landing pages are personal experiences, not social experiences like Twitter.
   Correction: Integrating social proof elements into a landing page is a great idea! Letting potential customers see that others are successfully using your solution will make them more likely to start using it themselves.

What are some other bad or good tips we should add to this list? Leave a comment, or tweet us @ion_interactive.

More than Just a Landing Page

A textbook landing page: Headline, subheadline, bullets, form. Ho hum. When it comes to landing page design you’ll want to follow best practices, while also thinking outside of the box. How do you accomplish both at the same time? 

To add a little sparkle to a ‘textbook’ landing page, you might consider adding interactive features such as real time data feeds, video, and/or social engagement items (which coincidentally add social proof, another plus). 

Also, consider tracking micro-conversions. Sure you need to know how many people make it all the way through your funnel, but you also need to know where they stop along the way. Do they watch one of your webinars, or read a white paper? Checkout totally different product categories? Analyze at what your users are clicking on, and what they do post-click. The deeper you dig, the more likely you are to turn up some sparkly gold information that helps improve the quality & quantity of your conversions. 

Remember a landing page can be used for so much more than tracking how many people complete a form or make a purchase.