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One of the most important elements for the success of your digital marketing plan are landing pages, especially if you are using paid traffic campaigns such as PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. A Landing Page is a page created for users to carry out a very specific action (an email subscription, a sale, etc.), which –well designed- helps to greatly increase your conversion rate.

Designing a landing page is pretty much as designing an ad. And to design landing pages that convert is your responsibility. Here you have the opportunity to tell your customers why your product is awesome and why they must convert.

There are some key elements that will help you to design killing landing pages as a Marketing or Ad expert:

1. Unique call to action: Make sure the landing page does not have competing call-to-actions. Focus your landing page in a single and clear action on the top of the page –avoid scrolling down-. Keep it simple for customer and drive them to take the action you want without overwhelming them trying to sell many things at the same time. This is not the moment to confuse customers with too much information. Communicate clearly what you want them to do and why.

2. Give the customer an enticing reason to convert, now: Incorporate a unique and convincing selling proposition (USP) that clearly communicates why the customer must convert.

3. Avoid links that may distract the customer: You are bringing traffic to the landing page with a very clear objective. Do not distract your customer with links that might drive them to other sites. Not even to your home site. Although the visitor might not be familiar with your brand and/or products, you have to design the landing page ready to convince the visitor to convert in a single shot.

4. Consistent message. The selling proposition message of the landing page must match the text of the PPC, ad, tweet, email or wherever is the traffic source from which visitors will come from. What you say in your ad must match what customers see in the landing page. So if you ad is offering “Save up to 10% on every antivirus software”, make sure that your customers will land in a page with the same offer. In the case you have different campaigns or offers running at the same time, create a unique landing page for each of them.

5. Reinforce trust. Include elements that communicate and reinforce trust and safety to consumers. In this sense, it is strongly recommended to incorporate trust buttons like Verified by Visa logo, BBB badge, antivirus logos or any other industry certifications or awards near the conversion form. Build even more trust by including customers’ testimonials and reviews. Genuine testimonials from respected people in your industry can boost your conversion rate.

Trust buttons

6. Don’t forget SEO: Create unique landing pages only accessible from its coming PPC ad or email campaign and include a custom and descriptive URL using your hottest keywords.

7. Plan a tracking method and test. We always insist on the importance of testing all your digital marketing actions. You must test your landing pages specially those coming for a PPC campaign. You are creating landing pages because you want them to convert plus you are paying for this traffic. As you create custom and individual URLs for each landing page inaccessible from your main site, you can easily track its efficiency in terms of views and conversions. Google Analytics and Google AdWords give you valuable data about consumer behaviour that you can use to modify and adjust your campaigns. If you are not sure about which design or selling proposition will convert the most, create different landing pages for the same campaign and modify texts, pictures, composition, colours, etc.; Google will tell you which model is selling more.

A/B test

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Coupons are widely used in the offline world, but they also are a great ecommerce promotional tool that can boost conversions in your online store.

There are many good reasons to use online coupons. You can use them to:

• Capture or maintain clients
• Clear stagnant inventory
• Seduce customers with accessories or complimentary products
• Introduce a new product
• Open a new territorial e-store or
• Target a new segment or boost sales in a specific period.

However, be careful to avoid common coupon pitfalls…

Shopping cart abandonment is a challenge that all digital ecommerce merchants face. In many cases, the problem stems from the checkout page itself. A coupon code box in the checkout page often invites the customer to search for a better deal. When this happens, in the best scenario, the customer will come back with the discount code – so he/she won’t pay full-price, but you still make the sale. Additionally, if the customer found the coupon through one of your affiliates, you will have to share your profit. In the worst case, the customer you invited to abandon your e-store will never be back.

There are, however, good solutions to avoid this problem and create an effective coupon campaign. First, consider removing the coupon code box from your ecommerce site. Instead, create a specific landing page for each coupon where the offer is automatically applied. This way, you will boost the natural flow from coupon to checkout page instead of vice versa. Landing pages also offer great options for customization of message and call to action, as well as targeted conversion tracking.

Coupon Code Box

If you still want to keep the coupon code field on the checkout page, but want to prevent the off-page hunt for the coupon, consider including a “How can I get this?” link that leads to a voucher page on your site. Such a page can provide the essential coupon code info and quickly send the shopper back to the checkout page. This will reduce transactional friction for your visitor, keep them on your site, and let you avoid affiliate fees.

Time to plan your campaign:

The final purpose of the coupon has to be to generate traffic to your ecommerce store and convert, convert, convert. As with any other marketing tool, you need do some homework first:

• Does the coupon campaign fit your general marketing strategy? Coupons can be associated with low-quality products. Discount hunters have a low brand loyalty. Remember, a coupon campaign is a short-term tactic! If you train your customers to always expect discounts, it is very hard to untrain them. Your full price could be gone forever.

• Define your clients profile based on accurate data. Do not make assumptions and conduct tests to understand your consumers’ behavior to make sure whether they will respond to a coupon campaign. For example, we were very surprised when we read this survey and found out that coupon lovers are more likely to be high household incomes and college-educated. If you know what your customers want, you can match it up! Specify an objective: increasing sales, getting customers to spend more than the average, building an email list, attract followers to your Facebook page, boost the sale of a software product before launching the next version. Goals set upfront will help you determine the campaign’s success post mortem.

• Decide on your target. You have basically three options: private, public and group coupons. If your aim is to get new customers or build an email list, you’d rather target a massive public through public or group coupons. But if you want to gratify the customer, get followers or improve affiliates’ loyalty, private promo codes –-distributed directly — is the smartest choice.

• Do the math. Set your budget (and stay there!). A coupon campaign will cost you some money (designing the coupons + landing pages, distribution and promotional costs, human resources, discount offered, etc.) The goal is to earn money so if you don’t carefully calculate costs, the campaign will quickly eat your profits.

• Measure the results of the campaign. It is essential to confirm the success or failure of your campaign and learn to improve future ones. Some indicators of success are: ROI, conversion rates, number of new consumers, web and social media traffic and interaction, emails collected, etc.

“Ok, I’ve prepared the strategy, I’ve checkout the things-to-do-before-launching-a-coupon list above, but what can I offer?” Of course, you want to offer those deals that convert best, for example:

• Money or percentage off coupons (Discount must be tied to a minimum number of items acquired or to the minimum amount spent which should be higher than the average).

• “New customers save X$ on any order over Y$ if you place your order now” or “Save X$ if you buy now” (evoke a sense of urgency).

• “Deal of the Day Promo” (Must be a real bargain to be effective).

• “Exclusive Coupons to Selected Affiliates” (exclusivity will attract your affiliates and motivate them to distribute your coupon).It is important that you set some redemption requirements, like ensuring that the customer spends more money than the average.

However, the holy grail of your coupon campaign will be returning customers. Craft a customer retention strategy integrated to your coupon campaign by following-up and having more products worthy to return for.

By the way, don´t forget to test your coupons and make sure that the links work and the promise is applied!

After spending many years in different industries, one of the prominent issues that I have noticed that seems to be affecting businesses is retention. Businesses that are struggling to keep their current customers have to look for new and innovative ways of operating. This means incorporating new ideas and services into their daily practices to maintain their clientele.

Customer Retention:

Some of these practices are communicating a “Sense of Urgency” and “Professionalism” when it comes to resolving their individual issues that are communicated. These are key practices when handling clients to let them know that they are valued and not just another customer. A very highly regarded practice to keep in the forefront is the detailed communication between the key individuals and the client themselves.

Sense of Urgency: by treating each issue as a priority to maintain the level of importance for each and every client. This gives them the respect and satisfaction of knowing their concerns are being handled in a professional manner.

Professionalism: discussing each and every concern in a professional manner without using counterproductive phases or idiomatic statements that can be considered a cultural or social offense. Discuss each topic of concern and address each issue the customer is communicating.
Another respectable practice is to minimize the number of contacts or channels that they must go through to achieve a pleasant outcome to their issue. By maintaining this practice, there is less confusion and a sense of personnel attention is given to the customer.
Just by initiating a few simple business practices the overall customer service is improved and the ratio of the customer retention is increased. By maintaining satisfied customers, the feedback and the word or mouth advertizing will also improve.

Employee Retention:

On the other front, the employees that have contact with the customers and the internal working of any business must be trained and developed to properly handle the customers or end-users of the product or service. One of the most important costs to any company is the training and education of their employees, and once an employee is trained and skilled in customer relations he/she becomes a valuable asset to the business.

With these points made, it makes more than enough sense that a company trying to retain, expand their client base should put reasonable efforts into employee retention. This step is an integral part of public relations as well as customer relations, cost savings and by reducing the costs of continually training new people to interact with the customers.

Today, numerous companies overlook the fact that hiring a lower cost employee rather than providing the incentives to retain present personnel does not always save money. The constant replacement of people keeps the training investment and time involved at a higher level and creates an imbalance in the service to the customer by changing the personnel that they interact with.

The seasoned employee develops a certain relationship with the customers after time, this make the business transactions more comfortable for both parties involved. Businesses that are capable of developing this type of comfort zone with their customers have a better client retention rate than those whom continuously exchange personnel that are working with the customers.
A measurable result of these practices is an increased employee sense of worth, higher work place morale, and improved on the job performance.  These benefits alone make a noticeable difference in the daily productivity of any work place and directly impact the profitability.

Dennis Michael Gannon
Marketing Communications Manager
www.g2s.com