Landing page management or optimization was mentioned as one of the top 10 trends in e-marketing at the InnoTech luncheon here in Austin last week. I’ve been giving landing page mgmt some thought here, and have already gathered a ton of requirements from both clients and vendors of other related products (such as email list management, email blasters, etc). Special thanks to Diana Arney at Hart and the good folks at eROI for giving us time to bend their ears.
Here’s a use case for what we think is a feasible system. Please comment if you want to add any other requirements.
Josephine Marketing Manager is creating a very expensive ad campaign consisting of a TV ad that talks about the company’s wonderful ginsu product line. She logs into our system and creates a Ginsu Group and assigns a start and end date for this group. She knows the ads will appear starting December 1, so she wants the group to be live then, and run until December 31.
Then she assigns two urls to the group, /ginsu and /ginsutv.
Then she creates her first page inside the group, pasting in a bunch of HTML and images provided by her creative team. She then makes sure that the page will be live during the dates of December 1 thru 31. Satisfied, she goes home for the night.
The next morning, she sends out an internal email for folks to review what she has. The salespeople love the page but want to know if there will be an alternate page with slightly different copy. Josephine understands the power of the system at her fingertips and asks if there will be different layouts or merely different text.
The salespeople want her to illustrate the difference, so she decides to create a headline variable and a price variable for the first page she created. For the headline variable, she puts in the following possible values:
How to Speed up Your Time in the Kitchen
Blaze Through All That Kitchen Knife Work in Half the Time
And for price she puts in a cost of $89, $99, and $109.
Then she demonstrates to the sales department that each time she visits the page she has created, that different values appear for the headline and the prices. She can also show them on the dashboard part of the system that these choices are being recorded. When she clicks through any link for the purchase, she can show that the traffic to the checkout page has been recorded. She then tells them that it would be very simple to add a snippet of code to the final checkout page to record on her system who actually paid and at what price. She can even give them the code that will reflect the price value she stipulated in her variable for price. (We can do this all with hidden variables to enforce good integration with most shopping carts)
Of course, the sales guys love it, and tell her that they have a couple more variables to throw at her, like opening sentence of the offer after headline and perhaps a free add on, like a free subscription to Ginsu magazine or a free cutting board.
They not only want that page, but they want an another page drawn up, with the same text and variables, but in a two-column layout instead. So she clones the first page and all its variables and then has her HTML guru move everything to a two-column layout.
Now when she tests the system, one layout and then the other is displayed in roughly equal portions, with the variables cycling through its list of values.
Josephine can now see how much traffic is coming through to each landing page, from where, how often, and what happens after they read the copy on the page. She will know if the one- or two-column layout is most effective, and she’ll know which headline and offer combo is the most effective for clickthrus and sales.
And she’ll know in hours or days, not weeks or months.
Feedback? Ideas? Comments? Questions?
