Make Money Work At Home - Customer Acquisition Through Custom Landing Pages

The shopping cart, or even find, i hate when I have to jump through hoops to get to. I love being able to type in what I want and buy it in just a few steps. I have a love/hate relationship with shopping online.

What confounds me is how companies pay to be in the sponsored results but never seem to send me where I want to be. It is fairly easy to type something into Google and land at the appropriate product page in the natural results. It's truly amazing how few companies do it right. Being in the Internet marketing field makes me intensely critical of ecommerce Web sites.

Only one of them actually took me to a page with DKNY coats on them, out of the top 5 paid search results. I was recently shopping for a DKNY coat so I typed it into Google, for example.

The others need to go back to pay-per-click 101. Obviously Nordstrom understands customer acquisition. It went right to a page where I could add it to my shopping cart, it provided pictures of 6 coats and when I clicked on one. That one site was Nordstrom.com.

Few marketing people grasp: the concept of custom landing pages, what seems like common sense to me. It's online advertising in general; it's not just pay-per-click that so many companies mess up.

Directs them deeper into my site, or when necessary, it targets specific audiences and leads them directly to a sale. This landing page is a stand-alone page to which I send my customers that drives them to action. I create a unique page designed especially for that campaign, when I develop a marketing campaign intended to take someone to a Web page.

It's a simple customer acquisition engine. It's not even brain surgery. It's not rocket science.

Getting Them There

Oftentimes home pages have too many options and no clear path to follow. Television and print advertising should not lead customers to your home page, email, direct mail, promotions, banner ads, various marketing methods such as search engine optimization.

" Landing pages provide limited information with two options: "buy now" or "learn more, at their simplest level. It is typically more focused than other Web pages. A landing page is a more effective marketing tool than a regular Web page because it is specifically designed to highlight one or a few products or services.

The Call to Action

This receives prime real estate and a prominent graphical treatment on the landing page. Or whatever you decide leads to "conversion"), the primary call to action is to buy now (or sign up. The singular purpose of a landing page is to make someone do something.

Allowing those customers who are ready to buy to act and providing those customers who need more information with the resources they want, this streamlines the conversion process. But is still highlighted somehow on the page, the secondary action to learn more is slightly less noticeable.

This page then has a buy now link to the acquisition page. The learn more link goes to the individual product page where customers can read about a specific product. Whether that is a shopping cart or a registration page, the buy now link leads customers to the acquisition page.

Landing pages are all about customer acquisition. But the calls to action all eventually lead to the same place: the acquisition page, an effective landing page may have two options.

Navigation

Make sure the navigation is clear and simple, whatever you choose to do. It's better to leave it off, if it confuses the customer and detracts from those calls to action. The landing page can survive without it, while it follows usability best practices to have global navigation for your site on every page. Landing pages are unique in that they are merely means to an end and therefore do not have to follow the same constructs of a company Web site.

Landing Page Guidelines

Certain guidelines should be followed to make it as effective as possible, when building a landing page.

Your landing page should graphically match your advertising campaign. 1.

They'll see your corporate brand when they land at the real Web site. Don't concern yourself as much with branding the landing page to match the company. Direct mail piece or television commercial, create your landing page to reflect the look and feel of your banner ad.

The action you advertise should be available on the landing page. 2.

Get it right up front on that first landing page so conversion is as easy as possible. Don't send customers on a wild goose chase to perform an action. Make sure the landing page provides the means to do that, if your advertisement is all about saving 20% on your product.

Show only the product(s) you're advertising. 3.

Making it harder for them to make that snap decision, you give your customer too many options, otherwise. It's best to stick to the bare minimum, while you may want to include related products on a landing page. This is a tricky one.

A custom landing page is vital to maintain a sense of consistency and ease, whether you're running a direct mail promotion or pay-per-click campaign. You need to predict what your customers want and then give it to them in as few steps as possible, when it comes to Internet marketing. Customer acquisition on the Web requires simplicity and easy maneuvering.

And your customers are doing the same, i judge Nordstrom by their Web site.