4 Tips to Maximize Your PPC Campaign Investment, Post-Click

by redembermarketing on June 3rd, 2009

So you’ve been refining and adjusting your PPC campaigns for a while now.  Cost per clicks are coming down, bid management is under control, you have strong offers and optimized landing pages.  Conversions are up, and leads are coming in.  Sounds like lead gen uptopia, right?

Well, almost.  PPC campaigns are feeding information into the very earliest stage of the sales funnel.  What are you doing with that information to work newly discovered leads down the funnel, identify the hot prospects and close more deals?

Here are 4 tips for maintaining the momentum of the lead gen and sales process once someone has clicked on your ad:

CREATE A SEGMENTATION “LANDING EXPERIENCE”
You’re probably familiar with landing pages, and perhaps you’re even experimenting with optimizing them to maximize conversions.  But do you ever get the sense that not all of your traffic is exactly what you were aiming for?  Perhaps you’re products or services span several verticals or customer demographics and there’s some overlap in your campaign generated traffic.

To help make sure the right visitors get to the right pages and see the intended content, consider directing traffic to a segmentation page that makes it easy for visitors to self-identify themselves.  Two large images with short simple text can help people identify which group they belong in, at which point, they are served the correct information.

This is the start of a “landing experience” – a microsite if you will that visitors interact with before submitting their information or making a purchase.  This can actually help increase conversions since your leads are served more appropriate, targeted information.

SAY THANK YOU, PERSONALLY
Are your leads or new customers being taken care of once they’ve converted on your site?  Conversion might mean submitting a form, watching a video, or making a purchase, but are you taking them to a thank you page after conversion that introduces them to the next step in the conversion funnel?  The landing experience doesn’t have to end once someone has converted on your site.  Put some additional thought into how you say thank you and increase return traffic and repeat customers.

You could provide them with a special offer related to the offer they just took advantage of or the purchase they just made.  Of course, the thank you / follow up email is also a great opportunity to provide the customer with well-targeted offers since you now know more about them.  Test the timing of follow up emails to see when the optimal time is to send those messages.

DEVELOP A PROSPECT PROFILE
Depending on your budget, it may be harder to develop a well defined prospect profile without special software or technology installed on your website to track visitor behavior, notify sales when specific pages are viewed, etc.  But you can still come up with ways to learn more about your prospects.  They’re in your database, so you should know something about them (especially if you’re list is opt-in, right?).  The important thing to identify is what you don’t know about them and come up with ways to fill in the blanks.

Surveys are great for this.  You can develop a customer satisfaction survey, preferences survey, a contest, etc. that blends important and not-so-important questions together so you can extract useful information.  Let’s say you’re a florist – you can have prospects vote on a series of arrangements that will be offered in the store.  The results from the participants are invaluable to you!

Or, perhaps you’re B2B -  a software company – you can create a survey that not only collects information about your prospects so you can market to them better, but the results could be turned into an industry report and picked up by the media.  SEO score!  [Consider having a credible third party assist you with collecting the data / creating the report so it's a bit more objective]

NURTURE LEADS APPROPRIATELY
For some prospects, your special offer on the thank you page won’t prompt additional action, and in many cases your thank you / welcome emails may appear to be falling on deaf ears, but don’t stop nurturing.  No, I didn’t say keep spamming them, nurture them.  Change up the offers that are being presented until something prompts a response (preferably a purchase or a call, not a Spam Report).

By timing nurturing campaigns to spread messages out over days/weeks, you’re less likely to annoy someone and catch them in a different mood/business position.  This takes prep work ahead of time, but it’s worth it when you know that inactive leads or dormant customers are receiving targeted content that you crafted and should work…  Eventually.