1-2-3 Knockout Punch Growth Formula: Landing Pages, Response Attribution, and Onboarding

The crux of any web-based marketing initiative should be leveraging a variety of  messaging channels to drive prospects to a web destination.  Once there, savvy marketers do  everything in their power to understand what visitors do or don’t do.  The process repeats over and over depending upon whether a registration has been secured as well as the actions taken/not taken.   We first discussed these mechanics in our post,  “You Build It. They Come. Now What? Part 2” (take a look at ‘step 4’ in particular).

In this post we will deep dive on some of the key methodologies that must combine to make it all possible.  Get ready for an important, but wonky, post on the meat and potatoes of building your market. Today’s topics:  Landing Pages, Response Attribution, and Trigger-based Onboarding.

Landing Pages

The monumental task associated with  getting people to visit your site is only as good as your ability to convince them to do what you need them to do to when they arrive.    We turn to Hubspot’s recent post, “Why Landing Pages Are an Indispensable Part of Marketing“, to get to brass tacks on landing pages– the place you should be directing your new traffic.

Any savvy inbound marketer “gets” that once you’ve done all that hard work to get visitors to your website, the next big step is to convert them into leads for

  your business. But what’s the best way to get them to convert? Landing pages, that’s what!

Unfortunately, there seems to be a major disconnect between the importance of landing pages and their use by marketers. According to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business’ homepage, not a special landing page. Furthermore, of the B2B companies that are using landing pages,62% have six or fewer total landing pages.

While we can’t put our hands on data telling a similar story for B2C ventures, our personal experience is similar:  most sites attempt to corral the all visitors in the same manner… usually through the home page.   The reality is this:  whether B2B or B2C, the more you segment your audience into unique, discrete cohorts, tailor the value proposition to meet those specific needs, and UNIQUELY DELIVER when they hit a custom-designed/messaged landing page  (just for them), the higher your likelihood to convert them.   If you are new to this game, the Hubspot piece does a nice job defining the basics:

• Get an in-depth definition of landing pages and how they work
• Get 6 compelling reasons to use landing pages
• See a great list of the critical components every landing page must include
• Learn why, when it comes to landing pages, less is not more!

    Click to see the post.

Response Attribution

Business builders know that it’s impossible to manage what you can’t measure.  Increasingly, New Market Entrepreneurs are turning to technology platforms to help them track and attribute traffic to their websites and campaign-specific landing pages.  Companies like Hubspot, Eloqua and Marketo offer such services at modest price points.

Here’s a great piece that describes the various methodologies for measuring attribution and the fact that most attempting to do such measurements are falling prey to common pitfalls.  The piece, from eMarketer, makes the claim that first- and last-click attribution methods are least effective at measuring multichannel influence.   It offers some handy charts describing stats on the most widely used methods, like this one:

According to the piece, both first- and last-click attribution models the least effective. Linear models and models that customize by channel were considered most effective by client-side marketers.

But note, no magic bullet as the “very effective” percentages for even the highest rated attribution methodologies are under 30%.

Onboarding

While attribution is important, we wanted to point back to the message of step 4 in the  “You Build It. They Come. Now What? Part 2” post.   Having the ability to track and manage the clicks that take place at the individual level and mapping them to a series of pre-established conditional, automated, triggered email messages is at the heart of the onboarding process.  Your early-stage visitors are prospects that must be moved through an automated sales funnel.  Triggered email and in-app messaging based on conditional rules you establish can do wonders to enhance your conversions.  We believe this conditional nurture or drip marketing is a key linchpin to any successful user-acquisition and engagement initiative.

Vendors like those mentioned above (Hubspot, Eloqua, Marketo) offer such functionality.  Click here for an example of Hubspot’s “How to set up marketing automation email rules in HubSpot”

We will be sharing much more on this art and science of conditional messaging as part of the visit conversion process in the future.   We feel it has the potential to be a game-changer for New Market Entrepreneurs.     For a good philosophical primer, check this post  (written with a B2B slant, but holds true for B2C as well).

The 1-2-3 Punch

When combined, solid landing pages (and, while beyond the scope of this post the sound multi-channel discrete cohort messaging that drives prospects to these landing pages), great response attribution analytics, and thorough conditional, trigger-based nurture/onboarding messaging consist of a 1-2-3 a knockout punch growth formula for New Market Entrepreneurs.

Please share your success stories and preferred vendors/platforms.  We’d love to hear from you!