 It's true, online marketing, especially email, is well on its way to overtake direct mail in terms of annual ad spend. While some people may be predicting the end of print media in general, I see online marketing as the evolution of direct mail. But don't fret! There's no reason for marketers to feel like we have to reinvent the wheel. In fact, there's much we can learn from direct mail to help us succeed with our interactive advertising efforts.
Landing pages are response mechanisms.
There are 3 key elements of a direct mail package: outer envelope, sales letter, and response form. In email marketing, the "outer envelope" includes your "From" line (return address), subject line and pre-header/snippet text (teaser). These are the first things people read before they decide to even open your email. The "sales letter" is the email message itself. So that means that the landing page is your "response form" or "business reply card". In fact, in some cases landing pages have even replaced BRCs as the response device for traditional direct mail because they’re easier and more convenient.
Just like direct mail, you only have two seconds to convince people to open your email and read further rather than throw it away or delete it. You need to make your teaser copy enticing enough for people to open your email and read on, and your email content needs to be persuasive enough to make them want to click through on your call to action bringing them to the last thing they’ll see before they convert from a prospect to a lead or customer, which is your landing page.
The landing page is the means by which readers can communicate their needs to you. In B2B marketing, this typically involves filling out a Web form and submitting their response to you (i.e. to register for an event, download a white paper, book a product demo, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.). Thus, the Web form helps you collect information from people who are at different stages of the purchasing process. On the other hand, in B2C marketing it’s about making the sale – getting people to fill their shopping cart and check out. For both B2B and B2C marketing, the landing page is the most important element, just like the response form is the most important part of a traditional direct mail package.
Landing pages must stand on their own to make the sale.
It is important to summarize the offer and key benefits on the landing page. Some savvy direct mail recipients go directly to the response form to find out what the offer is. Likewise, some email recipients may be click-happy and skip the email completely, jumping right to your landing page. They may even forward the landing page URL to a friend or colleague who may never see the original email message.
 Alternatively, you may even decide to use your email message as the teaser with a CTA link to a full sales letter on the landing page, as shown in this example from Michael Stelzner, founder of WhitePaperSource.
This short email contains no information about the offer, but clicks through to a novel-sized landing page detailing all of the benefits at length with at least half-a-dozen CTA links to the shopping cart. (more information: Anatomy of a Novel-Sized Landing Page Part 1 & Part 2, by Kim MacPherson, MarketingProfs).
Or in the case of search engine marketing, people go straight from a 35-character text ad directly to your landing page. For this reason, the pay-per-click landing page is usually longer than one used to convert people from an email marketing campaign (500 words versus 250 words), acting both as the sales letter and the BRC.
However, in some cases, as experienced by Lyris’ own search marketing manager, if the offer in your text ad is clear and persuasive enough on its own, it may be sufficient to simply reiterate the offer on the landing page (for relevance and to assure people they’re in the right place), but not necessarily to go into a lot of detail about the key benefits. Less can be more. This is definitely something worth testing to determine what works best for your SEM campaigns.
The point is, the landing page has to be capable of making the sale on its own, by telling people how to take action. That’s one of the main reasons why you don’t simply want to direct people to your home page or product page on your Web site. You’ll lose them if they have to search around to find the right path to get what they need. In fact, the landing page may be the first page people see before they ever get to the home page of your Web site.
So that is the theory behind direct mail response forms that you can apply to your landing page strategy. Stay tuned next week for more practical application of direct mail techniques that you can use as well.
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About the Author
Lori Gariepy is a marketing communications manager at Lyris. She is the editor-in-chief of http://LyrisHQ.Lyris.com and of the company's Inside Lyris HQ newsletter, and manages social media and online communications. Connect and converse with Lyris on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
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