In professional football, the team with the highest conversion rate wins more games, sells more tickets, and pays their players more than the team who does not convert.

The same holds true with marketing. Marketers who convert at a higher rate have more job security, are paid more and are more recognized for their achievements than those who do not.

So, what is the secret used by marketers to increase their conversion rate?

Answer: Personalized Landing Pages

What is a landing page?
According to the web’s free encyclopedia, a landing page is “the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link”. Landing pages usually prompt a certain action or response. Seth Godin states that landing pages can only cause one of five actions:

• Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s)
• Get a visitor to buy
• Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.
• Get a visitor to tell a friend
• Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback

Uses of Landing Pages
Chances are that if you’ve responded online to an advertisement, a landing page was presented to you. Places you’ll frequently find landing pages are the interaction after responding to one of the following marketing mediums:

• Search Engine Advertisement
• Outbound Email
• Banner Advertisement
• Direct Mail
• Print Advertisement
• Social Media Post
• eNewsletter

For many marketers, landing pages are the mechanisms that tie offline advertisements with an online interaction for a richer user experience. According to the DMA, nearly 33% of people respond to direct mail by going online.

Personalization Increases Response Rates
The purpose of deploying landing pages is to provide respondents of your advertisements and marketing efforts a more personalized experience. By presenting relevant content, the visitor does not have to waste their time navigating through your entire website to find what interests them. A recent DMA study concluded that campaigns employing Personalized Landing Pages are reporting a 20% to 30% increase in response rates.

How do you Determine Lading Page Effectiveness?
The success of your landing page is measured by its conversion rate. A conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who complete the desired action intended by the marketer, advertiser and/or content creator. For search engine and email marketing landing pages, MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook reports the average conversion rate as 3.84%.

With direct mail, our experience has been much higher 60% to 80% depending on the offer and how much information is asked of the visitor.

Focus on the Fundamentals
To end with our football analogy, one of the most recognized professional football coaches, Vince Lombari, once said “Some people try to find things in this game that don’t exist but football is only two things – blocking and talking.” With your landing pages there are three fundamentals – the offer, copy, and layout/design. To optimize your landing page conversations, make sure to test variations of the three fundamentals and share your results with us so we can recognize your success!