You’re probably used to optimizing your advertising campaigns for pre-click improvements by tweaking headlines, the images you use, the ad copy, and so on. What you might be neglecting is the process that follows later on – post click optimization and landing page optimization are much more important than you may believe.
Why do we focus on pre-click?
Simply because every advertising platform is in the business of selling adverts. They aren’t interested in the results you get from your landing page or website, but only in selling the advert to get people there.
But what’s the use of getting thousands of visitors that you have paid for if they are going to take one look and click away?
Post Click Optimization
Getting a visitor to your site is only the first step. The next step involves getting the visitor to sign up for something, or to sell them a product or service. In order for this to happen successfully, the visitor must feel comfortable and valued, so the content of the landing page should be directly relevant to them.
Three elements are required to make this work.
1. Personalization is the first key to this. Most products have an audience that is quite wide. Take bicycles as an example: You can sell a bicycle to anyone from 8 to 80 years old, male or female, but each segment of that audience will have different requirements and expectations.
Giving the same landing page to everyone won’t work, as the 80-year-old grandma is less likely to be interested in performing wheelies than her 15-year-old grandson.
By tailoring landing pages to each different audience segment, you are much more likely to convert a prospect into a sale – and if you finished off with a custom “thank you” page you’ll keep them coming back for more.
Personalization benefits both you and your customer.
2. Scalability in creation is necessary for personalization to be effective and efficient. A simple means of creating multiple landing pages for different audience segments or buyer types/personas will make it far easier to create a personalized campaign. The alternative is handcrafting each landing page, which will be very labor-intensive for more than two segments.
3. Landing page optimization through A/B testing is also vital. Having variations of the landing page for a segment served to different prospects will show the differences in effectiveness of each page, which can be verified using click-through rates, heatmaps, or any other appropriate method. If one page clearly dominates, continue A/B testing with another alternative.
Always be in the process of learning more about your audience to be able to serve them better.