Blogs > Three Online Lead Killers
June 12, 2010 Michael Bickerton
“Sometimes when you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember the original objective was to drain the swamp”. This applies to eMarketing Management as well.
The objective is not to get someone to click on something, or to capture another email address. That’s not a lead. When we trick them into giving us their email address, any further communication is at best SPAM Light. Our objective is to convert visitors into customers. Remember, we are doing all this work to increase sales. We must be sure that everything is relevant to the statement they clicked on.
So we must optimize our Sequence of Thoughts, not a landing page. Our landing page should always try to find the money.
When generating our great ideas and clever solutions, we must continually check our thinking against The 3 Online Lead Killers. This means we must always make our choices from our visitor’s point of view. The 3 things they are thinking about when they land on our landing page are:
1) Where Am I? – if our visitor is looking for X, they are likely on a bit of a mission. It’s not really complex – they are looking for X. How we know that for sure, is they found us when they were looking for X. So if our landing page does not deliver on the promise we made to get them to click, they will likely bounce. We should just give them X on the landing page. We don’t have to give them the whole book, just the first paragraph. Info that is so good, they will want more.
2) What Can I Do Here? – we have to make it clear and make it obvious what we want them to do next. Keep it simple. Make it clear.
3) Why Should I Do It? – all 3 of these rules are lead-killers, but this one is the one we see broken most often. People only take action if there is a clear benefit. They arrived at where they are because we said something that made them think we have a solution to their problem. Ideally, we should give them something that educates or informs, bringing them closer to that solution. The rules of engagement are simple – you value something from me (even my email address), give me something I value (more valuable information about why I visited you in the first place).
So much of this comes back to what we promised in the first place. Our headline and first sentence (all that appears in a Google search line) must perfectly match our landing page content.
Maybe be the best way to manage the 3 Online Lead Killers is to adopt a strict NO SURPRISE policy to your online communications.
Michael Bickerton, Raven5, Oakville and Toronto Ontario, 2010