Landing pages and evaluating strategies (For merchants)

[David Tan]

Guiding site visitors across channels with landing pages [dmnews.com]
In short:-

1) Rather than lead visitors who clicked on a product specific banner to a generic homepage. Why not make sure that every banner targets specific products/services and leads visitors to specifc webpages/landing pages that mainly followups on the banner's message and talks about the targeted product/service.

2) These landing pages, though informative of the targeted product/service MUST have a persuasive call-to-action.

3) Evaluate which marketing message/strategy works best by getting different visitors to visit different landing pages that uses the different strategies. Example given was that would more sales be generated if the price is stated straight away in the first page or if customer had time to read the content and then take the trouble to click to a second page with the price info.

[Tephus]

Interesting. But it's not always an option to link to a specific product because not every program comes with a datafeed. So most of the time traffic is directed to a generic landing page. I think the only way to counter this is to have all the relevent info and call to action on your site first before linking them out.

[David Tan]

Originally Posted by Tephus

Interesting. But it's not always an option to link to a specific product because not every program comes with a datafeed. So most of the time traffic is directed to a generic landing page. I think the only way to counter this is to have all the relevent info and call to action on your site first before linking them out.

Affiliates should mainly do the preselling but if they step into the area of actually 'selling' the product by providing too much info and then leading the user to a generic page, it's gonna be a huge letdown as the momentum is halted.

Ideally, rather than having many affiliates repeat an action, it's better for a merchant to provide the landing pages. True, that it's more work for the merchant but the efforts translate to multiplication of results as affiliates' efforts to refer will provide higher results. Plus, it's more achievable for one man to do the job than to have 100 person to put in 100 times the dedicated effort and still come up with the same results.

For a merchant, it's that as much as we want affiliates to be more active, we have to consider more of how much more we are able to do to make the program more effective.

[Tephus]

As an affiliate, I'm fine with doing my own creatives. But if the merchant supplied good ones I would be more than happy. There are many things they can give us, like search boxes, video boxes, etc.

Banners and text are getting old.