Direct Mail Landing Pages and Microsites

New research sponsored by the HP and the DMA UK, in their first attitudinal print tracking report, shows that of the top 3 actions that consumers take after receiving direct mail from a brand that they are interested in, 44% visit the brand’s website. While this is great news for those interested in driving traffic to the home page of a brand, marketers who are paying attention realize that most of that traffic ends up lost in the maze of objectives that is the brand’s home page.

A quick glance at the home page of just about any brand (including yours) gives you all that you need to know – all of that traffic, and some pretty valuable, targeted and expensive traffic at that, is looking at a home page that is designed to do everything under the sun, except support the campaign that originated the direct mail piece. Check out some of these examples – all great home pages from great brands, none of which have anything to do with current direct mail campaigns that I’ve received in the past few days:

True Value Hardware         Capital One         Delta Airlines

While there’s no doubt these great brands and the agencies they work with have great ROI numbers to back up their campaigns, do you really think their home pages are optimized to convert traffic from their direct mail campaign into the next step in their marketing funnel? Of course not. So what is a marketer to do? The answer is fairly obvious.

Direct Mail Landing Pages and Microsites

Landing pages (and to a lesser degree, microsites – a topic we’ll dive into in a future post) have become standard practice for various online marketing intiatives (paid media like PPC campaigns, banners ads & online media buys, etc) because they are optimized to convert traffic by supporting the message of the campaign and driving consumers to convert with clear calls to action. They are simple, clear and direct. They don’t require committees or IT approval. They are designed by marketers to support marketing campaigns. Everything the brand home page is not. Direct mail landing pages and microsites are designed to accomplish for direct mail what online marketers have figured out needs to be done – drive traffic to campaign specific and optimized sites – often with personalized URL’s or QR Codes for further personalization and to grab the mobile user.

Building landing pages and microsites (multiple page mini sites that support campaigns) to support direct mail efforts can be simple and easy to execute. We at Boingnet think we’ve got some pretty cool solutions (see our Landing Pages, Microsites, pURL Marketing and QR Codes pages). We’ve been helping extract maximum value from direct mail generated online traffic for several years over thousands of campaigns. The great part about today’s solutions, like Boingnet v2, is that they can add personalization and relevancy based on consumer profile data both inexpensively and easily. You don’t need to be a global brand with massive budgets and teams to build personalized landing pages & microsites – it can be done quickly, easily and on budgets most companies, even mom & pops, can afford. Contact Us to learn more about how we help brands of all sizes generate hosted direct mail landing pages, or do some web searching to find other great landing page solutions. Just stop sending all of your hard earned direct mail traffic to your home page.