Innovating Email List Marketing

Many companies today have made major investments in search engine marketing (SEM), yet experienced only marginal success as a result. Marketers focusing on SEM often spend a tremendous amount of energy identifying the right keywords, setting the bid, and creating compelling content only to find that their leads haven’t increased. A number of reasons can be cited—a main one centers on the landing page associated with the ad campaign. Here’s what I mean:

A good search engine ad has three components:

• A compelling title that relates directly to the keyword
• A unique differentiating statement—one that addresses the question: “Why do I care?”
• A call to action. A CTA proposes to the viewer what steps he or she should take next. For example, “Book now,” “Buy now,” or Click here.” It sounds obvious, but it’s important to establish what the viewer should expect when they click on the ad. The problem is what happens on the other side of the click.

Too many times, a company will send the viewer to the home page of its website. This is the death knell for most SEM campaigns because the visitor hasn’t received “click satisfaction.” Click satisfaction is the emotional reward you receive when you click on an ad expecting a specific response (information, an offer, etc.).  You’d be amazed at how many ads send a visitor to a company’s home page—often an old page with outdated or irrelevant information. All too often, this is a case of bait and switch.

Your conversion rates will increase significantly when you tailor your landing page to the specific offer you’re ad promotes. This could prove difficult given the opportunity to create so many different ads and ad groups on the SEM networks.  I have one colleague who manages 20,000 keywords across 50 ad groups and 6 ad campaigns. With over 100 ads being displayed at any given time, tying landing pages could be tricky. This approach gets more complicated when you introduce dynamic text (which further customizes your ad to the searched keyword).

Here are two strategies for increasing your conversion rates:

• Link to a specific sub-page:  If your keyword is promoting your “new optimization software,” then link right to that page within your website. If the page isn’t perfect, consider customizing it to the keywords that are attracting those customers to you. If you don’t have a down-level page that makes sense, then question your keyword strategy. For example, if you sell mountain bikes, don’t necessarily buy the keyword “weight loss.” It may sound logical because you sell an item that may lead to weight loss, but you will receive a lot of click-throughs from people expecting to read about the latest diet.

Please note that this is impossible for pure flash sites. If you have a flash site, either throw it away and develop it in a more flexible programming language or consider the next strategy.

• Create unique landing pages: An alternative to modifying your existing website is to create keyword-specific landing pages. These are very targeted web pages with no more than 1 or 2 pages of content.  The idea is to create one of these for each group of keywords. If you sell mountain bikes, scooters, and rollerblades, then you would have a landing page for each one. The style of each site should match your brand. Once the initial template is done, it can be used to replicate multiple landing sites, significantly reducing your development costs. The content, however, would be perfectly tailored to each keyword group. This type of micro-site will drive greater relevancy to your SEM campaign and should increase your conversions.

All major search engines support these strategies. For each ad you can set up a display URL that is different than the real URL. So if you are linking to a web page like “www.mikebikes.com/rollerblades/cfg8833.htm,” you can display it simply as www.mikesbikes.com.

With so much money being spent on search engine marketing, it’s important to ensure you get the biggest bang for your buck. Your precious marketing dollars have to go a long way in this economy, so it’s important to ensure that you’re thinking about click satisfaction. At the end of the day, it’s about conversions, not clicks.

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Call To Action, Conversions, CTA, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO