Creating the Best Personalized Landing Page
September 03, 2008
What Does It Take?
By Frank Defino Jr.
The whole concept of personalized URLs (PURLs) and landing pages is still rather new and exotic in the world of cross-media marketing. For those who haven't experienced one, a personalized landing page is best described as a "mini Web site" that includes your customer's name, relevant customized information and reflects his or her personal tastes and interests.
The best thing about personalized landing pages is that they can be interactive, inviting your customer to ask or answer questions, sign up for announcements of future events or even request a sales call. For marketers, they provide yet another avenue for establishing a relationship with the customer, as well as having the ability to closely and accurately track responses to a specific campaign or offer.
What Can a PURL Do?
Connected with a marketing campaign, PURLs and personalized landing pages function as one aspect in the call-to-action stage to effectively engage customers. Typically, customer Joe Smith for example, will receive a direct mail postcard or other initial communication that includes his name spelled out as a URL address—such as joe.smith.abccompany.com. Depending upon the products and services that ABC Company has to offer, and Joe’s interests, he might find he is requested to visit his PURL address as an invitation to sign up for a baseball newsletter, coupons for pet supplies and training programs, information on adventure travel packages, etc. Will Joe go to that page? Most likely yes if his name was part of the URL. Will he buy? He might, if he finds the initial offer appealing, and if he's willing to answer the call to action presented at the personal landing page.
So how can marketers make this happen? By following three basic considerations:
1. The personalized landing page must have a professional look that includes text and graphics similar to those used in the initial communication—the direct mail postcard, sales letter, brochure, etc. This signals to Joe that he has arrived at the right place, that the site is trustworthy and gives him a cohesive marketing experience.
2. The personalized landing page must be relevant to the information you have on Joe. Customers who actually go to the landing page are typically a highly targeted audience. They expect, and deserve, an experience they regard as planned just for them. They should find useful information at the site, or an offer that is designed to appeal to them based on what you already know about them as customers or prospects. The data you have on your clients must be up to date as well.
3. In terms of nuts-and-bolts, the personalized landing page should load quickly and deliver on its promises without making Joe scroll down endlessly or drill through additional menus, pages, or through other web sites. This means that text should be brief and to the point and offer contacts for more information. The graphics must also be relevant and useful—for example, providing additional photographs of a product or how to use a product.
Driving Your User to the Site
As with any marketing campaign, you should begin by thinking through the following questions:
• What is your business?
• What is the purpose of this campaign?
• Who are you trying to reach?
This type of planning and strategic thinking defines the campaign's goals and audience, and it can suggest specific approaches and themes for text and graphical content. And, although you may have a fantastic idea for a personalized landing page, the biggest question still remains: How do you get people to go there?
Direct mail is often the means for driving potential customers to personalized landing pages and it also lends itself easily to geographic and demographic targeting. Additionally, software that creates the PURLs can employ the same level of customization on the landing page that is displayed on the direct mail piece. However, a challenge that marketers likely will confront in putting together any cross-media campaign is coordinating all of its different components while maintaining enough control to ensure consistency and timeliness.
While some suppliers offer parts of the whole—such as PURL hosting and capabilities only, or design only, or printing and mailing only—it is most efficient to seek out a supplier that offers the whole multimedia package in a one-stop-shop. It makes it easier to control the most important part: accurate reporting of the data. The real key to success is the ability to collect and process the information garnered from personalized landing pages and then determine exactly what you’re going to do with that information. In some cases, customer responses at the landing page can serve as triggers to further action—including sales calls, sending out a catalog or launching a subsequent step in a broader relationship marketing cycle. It is important to ensure that all of the reporting and processing elements are in place before you begin. The only thing worse than a poor response would be to delay or fail to deliver whatever the landing page offers.
Frank Defino Jr. is vice president and managing director of Tukaiz, a results-driven marketing communications service provider based in Franklin Park, IL. Tukaiz provides in-house consulting, creative, interactive services, data applications programming, and high-quality print production capabilities for a variety of industries and vertical markets. He can be reached at fdjr@tukaiz.com.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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