Response Capture

We all have access to more information that we can even fathom. In the last few years, twitter alone produced 37 times more data than all bills that introduced to congress since the 1950′s! We perform 3 billion searches every day – 85% of which are through Google. And, above all, we are spoiled rotten by just how quickly and effectively we can filter and access relevant information. When we type something into Google *poof* we expect the results to magically appear.

We are easily frustrated if the results are not immediate, relevant and personal. If I ask the magical Google for a sparkly purple bicycle and find myself on a page with mountain bikes, my mouse suddenly becomes a homing device for the back button. Nothing erodes confidence in a website or company than arriving at a page, feeling like they are wasting my time with loads of content that is not pertinent to me. Google has taught us to expect exactly what we want the moment we want it.

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I received a door knob flier the other day from a coworker. A window company was soliciting his neighborhood for window replacement. Aesthetically, the ad is a very nice professionally produced promotional piece—a 6”x12”double-sided full color ad on card stock. The ad attempts to create a need, by mentioning the rise of home energy costs and substantiates the claim with a qualitative fact: “Old outdated windows lose 60% of your home’s energy” But does it really matter how “pretty” an ad is, or even how well it is written? I would argue that neither of these very important aspects of communications matter, if within the first couple of sentences of copy you start questioning the validity of a company’s claims.

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In today’s era of marketing message onslaught, marketers are searching for ways to get through the clutter. Using messages that are relevant to the prospect is not a new, secret love potion. However, few marketers have mastered offer testing and personalization strategies as part of their effort to initiate more responses and grow their prospect funnel.

In this relationship, it is all about being right

It has been said that delivering the right offer to the right customer in the right channel at the right time gives you the best probability for marketing success. For some of us, the thought of trying to determine all the appropriate variables can seem overwhelming.

Yes, there are also costs associated with testing and it takes more time before you can roll out your campaign. But, there are even greater costs associated with not testing at all.

And with a strong opportunity to significantly increase your return on marketing investment (ROMI), it’s no wonder that, according to an Offer Optimization report by Aberdeen Group in October 2009, offer testing is now playing a key role in campaign optimization.
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Before we get into revealing why you need a Landing Page, let’s first define a Landing Page.  Let’s take a minute to walk down a grocery store aisle.  Trust us, it will all come together!

A grocery store carries several thousand products, but if you want your product to “communicate” with more potential customers, you showcase it on the end-cap. The end-cap is prime real estate and companies pay big bucks for this space to give their products better visibility and not have it drown in the aisle noise.

Instead of the customer walking down the aisle and finding an endless selection of similar products, the end-cap provides you an opportunity to engage the customer, highlight the product features and perhaps offer a discount. Voila! Highly targeted and extremely effective.
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If you are a marketer, chances are you’ve already faced this dilemma on at least a couple of occasions.  It’s a question that has all marketing folk debating over best practices and which is better to use on their landing pages.  So, for what it’s worth, we’ll explain why Personalized URLs or PURLs are gaining popularity, your users’ responses and their marketing dollars!

PIN vs. PURL: Personalization

Since PINs are a randomly generated individual number for each individual target you’re marketing to, each one is unique.  But, there’s really nothing “personal” about them. They are an alpha-numeric gobley-goop of characters and numbers, assigned to the user by an algorithm that couldn’t tell apart apples from mangoes. 
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Drive fast all the time and you’ll end up getting tickets.  Eat a lot of fatty foods and it catches up to you eventually.  Burn enough bridges and you’ll find yourself on an island.  Launch marketing campaigns without an effective way to measure results or a strong focus on driving ROI, and you’ll eventually drive your career into a ditch.  

Have you ever received a ticket on the marketing interstate?  Your marketing budget isn’t unlimited so having accountability riding shotgun is a surefire way to keep you from becoming a statistic. 
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