Direct mail is one of the oldest marketing tools in the book. As soon as the postal service allowed people to send mail back and forth, marketers were utilizing it to send advertising messages. Over time, the quality of direct mail has eroded to the point that it’s been labeled “Junk Mail” by most people. Internet marketing is following the same path, with spam plaguing e-mail in boxes and Twitter feeds. But if you want to have success you need to be targeting the right people, making your offer as personalized as possible, and then optimize your campaign on an ongoing basis. People are bombarded with advertising messages every day, and they have developed powerful blinders to ignore most marketing messages. By looking at some areas where direct mail fails, you can take away some lessons to make sure you don’t become just another ignored message.

Targeting

The first rule of direct mail is target, target, target! The most important factor in a direct mail piece’s success is the proper targeting of prospects. For direct marketers, this means renting the best lists they can get their hands on. Political campaigns have also honed the science of direct mail targeting by getting into granular details like demographics, sometimes even to the individual household level. Unfortunately, over time direct marketing in many cases has been untargeted which has resulted in the term “Junk Mail”. For internet marketers, trying to do the same thing would result in disaster. You and your business don’t want to be labeled SPAM, do you? Targeting potential customers is very different than with direct mail, but offers much better results. Rather than renting lists and hoping people are intrigued by the offer, internet marketers can use services like Google’s AdWords to target prospects as they search for keywords relating to your business.

Here is where targeting for the internet marketer comes into play. Let’s say you sell project management software targeted to small and medium size businesses. You have perfected your landing page, you have a great product, and you’re starting out a new AdWords campaign today. When you go to select keywords, you choose things like “project management”, or “project management software”. After a couple of days you start to realize that your conversion rates are terrible, but you’re getting a lot of people to click on your ads. What’s the problem? Your keywords aren’t targeting the right prospects! While the term “project management” seems to be in your sweet spot, people could be searching for that term for a lot of reasons other than looking for project management software for small or medium sized businesses. You’re getting curiosity clicks, not interest clicks.

Takeaway: Just as direct mail has been labeled “Junk Mail”, your message can deliver bad results if you don’t target prospects well. When you market on the internet, be sure to target “long-tail” keywords that are very specific. You won’t get a lot of people seeing your offer, but they will be infinitely more qualified and people actually want to see your offer.

Personalization

Direct mail is in theory inherently personalized (in most cases). It has your name and address on it, it’s mailed right to your door, and in many cases it’s been targeted well. But we’ve all seen the junk mail directed to “Our Friend at <insert address here>”. Internet marketing is inherently NOT personalized. But in order to find success you should do everything in your power to make it seem personalized.

There’s a lot of ways this can be accomplished. You’ll never have the name and address of new visitors to a landing page, but make sure that when they arrive they are going to the right landing page. If you have a PPC campaign, make sure that visitors are being directed to a specific landing page for that ad and not just to your home page. Another interesting technique that can be used with AdWords is the personalization of your ad depending on what search terms were used. (Learn more about this technique, known as dynamic keyword insertion )

Takeaway: Internet marketing may not be as personalized as direct mail, but in many ways that isn’t a problem. After all, your prospect is coming to you rather than the other way around. But there are many ways that you can make potential customers feel like it has been personalized towards them. Focus the right landing page towards the right prospect and you’ll see success. Your goal should be to give your prospect the feeling that your landing page was exactly what they were looking for.

Optimization and Analysis

The success and failure of a direct mail campaign is easy to quantify. You send mail out, prospects receive it, and if they’re interested in your offer they will respond. And by sending out multiple versions of design and copy, the most effective can be easily determined. Fairly quickly, a direct marketer is able to determine a variety of things like the reliability of the list, and whether or not the design or copy is working effectively.

In this area, internet marketing is a vast improvement over direct mail. While direct marketers can infer that a particular piece was effective based on response rate, they aren’t there as the prospect reads it. But online, there are a variety of tools like Google Analytics or Clicktale that allow the internet marketer to see exactly how prospects are interacting with their marketing materials. As I discussed in my last article you can even record how visitors use specific pages, where they are clicking on the page, and where they tend to click most often. And using tools like Google’s Web Master Tools, you can conduct multivariate A/B testing to try out different copy, forms, and anything else you can think of.

Takeaway: Direct mail is inherently accountable, but the marketer isn’t there as people see their message. But with internet marketing you can see EXACTLY how people interact with your marketing messages. Tools like Google Analytics, Web Master Tools, Clicktale, and many others give internet marketers a powerful arsenal to analyze and optimize content.

Many of the concepts of direct marketing are similar with internet marketing, but there are key differences with how they are implemented. Despite these differences, there is a lot that can be learned from the experience of direct marketers. When you start a new campaign for your business, be sure that you’re thinking of these best practices that have been developed for more than 100 years.

You’ve spent lots of money and countless hours perfecting your web presence. You’re certain that you’ll be immediately deluged with qualified leads. But when you flip the switch and it goes live, it’s not quite working how you expected it. This happens more often than not, and can be discouraging. While there are best practices that you can follow, online marketing and lead generation isn’t quite an exact science. Of course you can use Google’s Web Master Tools to conduct A/B testing on your content, but how can you know what parts of a page are working and what parts are not? Now you can find out by using specialized analytics software that records, monitors, and analyzes how your visitors interact with your website. Continue reading and I’ll tell you about two different tools that you can use to find out EXACTLY how users interact with your site and landing pages.

Clicktale – 4 levels of users starting at Free and going up to $790/month.

Clicktale is a very full featured web analytics package that gets into some of the granular details that are left out of Google Analytics. Some of the key things that Clicktale can help you do is optimize landing pages, optimize shopping cart experiences, conduct usability tests, with the overall goal of maximizing your conversions. Using javascript code that you place on your page, you can get a variety of reports back like form conversion statistics, blank field reports, user click heatmaps, and link analytics. One key differentiator of Clicktale is that you can actually record user’s interaction with your website. By looking at these recordings, you can actually see HOW your visitors are using your site. It totally eliminates any guesswork that might be involved. A very well known software company, 37 Signals, utilized Clicktale to help them redesign their signup conversion pages. You can see what 37 Signals had to say about their results here: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1867-design-decisions-new-signup-form

CrazyEgg – 4 levels of users starting at $9/month and going up to $99/month.

Crazy Egg offers some of the functionality that Clicktale offers, but not quite the whole package. Where CrazyEgg shines is in the user click heatmap, where you can visually see how visitors are interacting with forms. A key difference in CrazyEgg’s software is what they call “Confetti” mode. When you’re in this mode of heatmap, you can track clicks by referral URL. This allows you to see the different ways visitors from an AdWords campaign interact with your site, as opposed to people who came in from Twitter. Another advantage of CrazyEgg is their simplified price structure. Rather than taking away options to offer a Basic service for $9/month, they offer you the full package. The only restriction is the number of pages that you can have your testing on at any one time.

The Verdict: This niche of web analytics is definitely under-served by Google Analytics (their overlay functionality is horrible), and both of these solutions pick up where Google left off. If money is no object, Clicktale is by far the superior product. Their user experience recordings literally remove all of the guesswork from the process. But as you get away from the premium versions, important features start to disappear. If you have a limited budget or a small website, CrazyEgg is for you. I personally have used CrazyEgg with success in the past, and can vouch for its usefulness. Either way you can’t go wrong, because the more knowledge you have about your users the more powerful your site can be for lead generation.

A disease is inflicting a huge amount of damage on businesses all across the world. It attacks them where they can be most vulnerable, the landing page. The disease is TMI, or Too Much Information, and it might be impacting you and you don’t even know it. But don’t worry, its easily cured. Below I’ll show you a landing page suffering from TMI, and then show how it can be cured. Together, we can rid the world of the scourge of TMI.

When your landing page suffers from TMI, your visitors know it right away and it can cause them to immediately leave your site. Too Much Information means that you’re asking for a huge amount of information on a contact form from your potential customer, in most cases before they’re comfortable sharing that information with you. Most people are comfortable with providing basic contact information, and they do so multiple times a day. But when you start to ask very detailed questions, they begin to wonder “Do I trust this company, and do I want to give them that kind of information?”. And trust me, that isn’t the first thing you want your potential customer thinking about you.

Let me show you what I mean, and how you can solve it. Here’s a landing page I recently ran across that suffers from TMI:

On this landing page, they start off fine. They ask the basics, like Company, First Name, Last Name, E-Mail, and Phone Number. But then a visitor is confronted with the horror of TMI.

“What industry is are you in?”

“How many items do you sell?”

“What services are you currently using for your catalog?”

“How did you hear about us?”

As I scanned through this I started to think… is this a landing page or an interrogation? And I’m not the only one, potential customers were thinking the same thing. And if it turns them off they’re going to leave, and end up somewhere that doesn’t ask all of these questions.

Curing TMI is easy, and it starts with removing all non-essential information from you form. On every single field of your landing page you need to ask the questions “Do I need this information in order to begin the sales process?”. Depending on your business you may need to ask certain questions, but your rule of thumb should be less is more.

I took a sledgehammer to this landing page in Photoshop to give you an idea of what this landing page form should look like, and here’s what I came up with:

That looks much better. And most of all, a visitor to this landing page is exponentially more likely to fill out this information. Sure, the sales rep that has to contact this prospect won’t have all the detailed information that they would have with the old form. But in my book, it’s better to have a prospect to contact than no prospect at all. All of the questions I removed from the original form can be asked on the first call with the prospect, which can begin the sales process on a good foundation.

So now that you know what TMI is and how to cure it, take a look at your landing pages. You might be losing business because of it and you didn’t even know it.