You have your snazzy site, you've search optimized your content, and finally see some traffic coming in. That is a good start - but where you really want to get to is a point where you can measure and see an improvement in the number of people who click into your site and are converted into customers. Much like a brick and mortar store, you want to make sure the "window shoppers" actually shop or may shop in the near future, and that is where post-click marketing comes in.
Do you have surfers or sales?
In Minding the Gap Between Click and Conversion this ecommerce times post gives a good idea of how things look on average:
As an industry average, only about 3 percent of the people who click into your funnel make it all the way down to conversion. Your mileage may vary, but odds are that your funnel is pretty darn narrow at the bottom, and you face constant pressure to increase the number of conversions flowing out of it.
Anna Talerico's post on The Seven Principles of Post-Click Marketing
examines what makes a successful post-click marketing effort. But what else can post-click marketing do for you? One thing that you can fold into your campaign is online house lists to help you strategically target prospects. Melissa Data's Building House Lists Online with Post-Click Marketing has this to say on building online house lists:
Building an internal list of prospects can be one of the most valuable things a marketing department can do. It can also be one of the most expensive. And frustrating...In order for a sizable house list to be a tenable goal, it must be cost effective and of high quality. Traditionally those two characteristics have been at odds. You could generate a big (cheap) list or a higher quality, small (expensive) list. But 'traditionally' doesn't apply in 2007. When you focus on what happens after your prospect clicks on your online ad or email, you can reduce your cost per acquisition and raise your overall lead quality
Post-Click Marketing: Designing for Conversion has practical recommendations as well as an insightful comment from Scott Brinker about the importance of simplicity in your site design -
We've run a lot of experiments comparing heavy vs. light pages in post-click marketing landing paths, and 9 times out of 10, the "lighter" strucuture (less copy, simple/relevant images, only asking for the necessities to deliver what the customer is looking for) wins, hands down.
