MindScape

In our last communication we deliberated on the fundamentals of an effective landing page . While identification of the message based on the target audience is rudimentary to the development of the sales page, it is not all pervasive. There are other factors like page layout and its design, efficacy testing of the respective pages and their technical viability, which augment the marketing efforts and convert those eyeballs to sales.

The objective of each landing page is different, hence, each page merits specific promotional strategy. While the principles of promotion remain uniform, their application would need to be customized. To achieve that coveted edge over the competitors, and to ensure that the visitors do not leave the webpage prematurely, it would be pragmatic to consider the following points while developing the landing page:

Logical sequence of the page: The page should be so designed to ensure that the visitor does not need to navigate too much and the navigation is seamless integrated. Care should be taken to desist from using unneeded elements, such as links to other resources.. The endeavor should be to encourage the visitor to focus on the page and get them to complete the one action on which your landing page is focused.

Page Layout using heading, fonts and color: The aesthetic of the page is tantamount to the presentation of a culinary delight. Not only should it look good but be functional too. The colors should be chosen to be consonant with the theme of the page and should be restricted to three, including black. The fonts could be varied to highlight a particular message.

Length of the page and the details, therein: The length of the page is a function of the product / service, its value, and the duration of the post purchase period. It is an accepted criteria, that more costly an item is, or the more unique it is, the more content will be needed to influence the buying decision.

Use of Images and graphics: A picture is worth a thousand words is a cliché that has relevance in the context of the web page design. However, images should not be used only to enhance the aesthetic appeal of the page, as it may distract to the visitor. The images can be an effective tool to corroborate the message since they are remembered easily and are appealing to the eye. The text can be illustrated by the image, though its relevance and positioning are points, that should not be ignored. Further, it is recommended that the image be placed on the left of the text, since studies in eye tracking suggest that it takes more effort to move the eye back to the left.

Address the check out dissonance: It is imperative that anything that could cause the visitor to change their mind about the transaction, be adequately addressed. It is not uncommon for visitors to abandon shopping carts and forms at the last minute. This could be due to anxiety that stems from the uncertainty, post purchase. To address this point, there should be an effort to put the visitor at ease by ensuring that the sales process is reassuring from the beginning to the end. Reiterating the expected action through the entire process is another way this phenomenon can be arrested.

Also, it is always a good idea not to give the visitors a choice at this stage of the conversion funnel. Testimonials of satisfied clients, would further add to the credibility of the service/product, and help allay the fears of the visitor at the checkout page.

Search engine consideration: It is a well established fact that a well developed Search engine reduces the Cost of Acquisition (COA), by reducing the bounce rate.
A targeted landing page is the best candidate for being promoted on the search engines. The factor that works in its favor, is the relevance of the page to the target audience. Search engine spiders are known to favor landing pages that contain lots of good, keyword-rich test.
However, if the strategy is to create multiple landing pages with cosmetic changes in text, it is advisable that these pages are kept away from search engine spiders. In such circumstances, the general purpose landing page can be made available for indexing, while robots meta tag or robots.txt directive could be employed to exclude the others. This initiative ensures that the search engines don’t interpret this as spam because of duplicate content.
The mandatory test before the Launch: A 360 degree view of the effective landing page is incomplete without the mention of testing. Before the web page is launched, it is always a prudent exercise to test the efficacy of the respective web page. A functional tool for such analysis is the A/B testing methodology. This involves splitting traffic randomly between two pages that are identical except for the individual factor that is being tested. This test allows us the user to understand the variables that work in favor of the website, and the others that would not.

Review, Reform, Repeat: There should be continuous effort aimed to check the bounce rate and the click through rate in the website. It is always a good practice to periodically research the competitor’s web appearance, and analyze the change in target audience, and their behavior.

It is paramount to ascertain a lower bounce rate by keeping the website updated, by catering to the changing needs of the assorted users. The design and development of the landing page is not a one time effort, and needs continuous improvisation, depending on the changing market dynamics, and how the businesses evolves overtime. However, care should be taken that the intended theme of the webpage is not diluted.

The aforementioned points are intended to act as a guide in your crusade to develop that perfect landing page, and capture the interest of each visitor.

An effective sales plan involves prudent selection of the marketing tools complemented with the appropriate Search Engine. While these would catalyze the arrival of the visitors, it may not necessarily facilitate conversion of these visitors to a sale / sign up.

The visitors may arrive as a result of the marketing initiatives like pay per click ad, email marketing or simple keyword based organic search. Brevity and clarity of the message that is being communicated through the respective page, would ensure that the visitor performs the desired action. Further, the message should have enough call for action to persuade the visitor to initiate the appropriate action.

In Marketing parlance, while the marketing initiatives may bring the horse to the well, it may not be adequate to make it drink. The well should be appealing to galvanize the swig!!

Determine the objective of the Landing Page: While designing the landing page, it becomes imperative to identify the objective, that is expected to be achieved through the landing page. A landing page is required to be a highly focused web page. It may be designed to achieve any of the following objectives:

Sell a product.
Provide Contact Information.
Promote a service or an idea.

The landing page demands considerable effort and time, and should be developed after due introspection. Sending your viewer to the homepage is not always a good idea. Doing this would make the visitors search through the site for information proposed (through the email or pay per click link). Consequently, the visitor may leave the page out of dismay. It is always recommended that there should be ease of navigation for the visitor and the visit should be well orchestrated.

It is ideal to get the visitors to an attractive landing page, carefully crafted for the ad link. It should be in consonance with the brief ad copy, given in the email or the PPC link. PPC driven landing pages may be thematically organized for each keyword. Further it is suggested that the look and feel of the landing page is consistent with the email content, as it renders user experience, more fluent and persuasive.

Know the identity of the target audience: Landing pages may be used to target both B2C and B2B contacts, with each having their specific characteristics. While B2B customers seek detailed information, price range and testimonials to facilitate decision-making, B2C customers are more interested in brand names, price tags, discount rates, free offers and shipping charges.

For a B2B customer, the landing pages must establish a sense of reliability and quality for the company’s products and/ or services. Landing pages for B2C must be concise, quick to scan and focused on selling, rather than convincing. B2C pages must sport product pictures with exact price tags, preferably inclusive of shipping charges and other applicable taxes. Irrespective of the type of customer, there should be an attempt to provide a promise of privacy, and the policies of the company must be communicated succinctly.

Gather contact information – The immediate objective of a landing page may also be to obtain some ‘call of action’ for future follow up. It is essential to capture useful contact information of the visitor to facilitate follow-up. However, asking too many questions may irritate the visitor. Hence it is is a good practice to desist from collecting too much personal information. Just the relevant questions intended to elicit appropriate information is usually sufficient.

Technical considerations - Fast loading time of landing pages is absolutely essential to hold and capture the otherwise short attention span of the potential customers. In other words, the landing pages should be vivacious in every sense of the word. Hence, heavy flash images are usually not recommended.

Use of daughter windows is often recommended while opening new content, rather than overlapping information in the same window. This would ensure that even if the landing page takes the visitor to a third party link, the return can be easily accommodated.

Incorporating the aforementioned points while developing the landing page, would reduce the bounce rate of the respective page, and increase the chances of a closure. This would assist in achieving the Online marketing objectives. In other words, this would ensure that the horse drink from the well. Happy closures.

Web 2.0 outlines the latest version of World Wide Web - dynamic, highly scalable and organic in growth. The rampant popularity enjoyed by Web 2.0 design patterns has resulted into companies blindly including the buzzword among their highlight features. Following are the state-of-the-art web design and development patterns that may be looked up in full or in part to determine a Web 2.0 company:

(a) Harnesses the potency of small sites that form the majority of the web content. Web 2.0 reaches out to the masses wide and across Internet, generally utilizing algorithmic data management. For example, Googles AdSense indulges in dynamic content generation by placing least disturbing, context-sensitive and consumer friendly text ads across exhaustive Web Pages possible. Likewise, eBay acts as an automatic intermediary between even highly small-scale single individuals dealing in few dollars. BitTorrent renders every client a server that empowers its network to provide both bandwidth and data. As a result, files that are more popular take relatively less time to download.

(b) Sports forte in handling a specialized and distinctive database. Be it Google or Yahoo or Amazon, all offer specialized database services that lends them an unbeatable niche. Web 2.0 applications are not merely collection of software tools, but applications collecting and managing unique and large-scale data.

(c) Encourages user participation to add value. The highlight of Web 2.0 design is that it is empowered by collective brainpower. For example, Google PageRank is based on the number of links (outsider votes) garnered by a website. Amazon outdoes competition by inviting extensive user participation in various ways, including reviews and ratings. Wikipedia grows organically as it allows any web user to add content to be collectively edited and proofread. Open source software projects may be found on certain sites that let users copy/ add code for mutual advantage.

(d) Builds vital database using a natural architecture of participation. Web 2.0 architecture enhances intuitive networking by aiding selfish motives of the target users. It recommends setting inclusive defaults for assembling data gathered by day-to-day use of the application. Like, Napster by design serves earlier downloaded music that helps user activity and builds valuable database naturally. Open source software projects like Linux, Apache, Perl, etc. also sport well-defined extension mechanism that empowers network growth in outer layers akin to onion.

(e) Keeps fewer restrictions in licenses. Web 2.0 design chooses in favor of least restrictive Intellectual property protection limits to harness benefits of collective adoption. In fact, it recommends scope for hackability and remixability.

(f) Improves continuously. Negating scheduled releases, Web 2.0 recommends continual and consistent upgrading in real-time, without disturbing existing services. The Web 2.0 companies, like Google and Yahoo, may be often spotted sporting Beta logo to mark ongoing development process and real-time monitoring of user behavior by restrictive implementation. They refine the new feature consistently based on feedback received, before its actual pervasive implementation.

(g) Offers syndication and lightweight programming models. Composed of a network of co-operating data services, Web 2.0 applications encourage web services interfaces and content syndication. They favor lightweight programming models that allow loosely coupled systems to the extent of fragility.

(h) Develops device-independent applications. Keeping in mind the scope and access of Internet beyond a personal computer, Web 2.0 design enables seamless incorporation of its services across various platforms, including mobile handsets, PCs and Internet servers.

While DoubleClick, belonging to the Web 1.0 era, recently claims over two thousand successful implementations of its software, Google AdSense, the child of Web 2.0 purely, has already crossed hundreds of thousands implementations. The radical success and growth witnessed by the truly Web 2.0 web designs indeed reinforce the relevance and far-reaching prospects of Web 2.0 catchphrase.

To make any online marketing strategy garner the desired ROI, it is imperative that the right search engines be chosen to get maximum mileage out of the Online Marketing initiatives.

Thus far the obvious choice of most Online Marketers has been the big three Search Engines, viz Google, Yahoo and MSN, besides the smaller regional Search Engines like Looksmart, Altavista etc.

While most of these Search Engines have been successful in delivering relevant results for the searched query, they have lacked in objectivity.

A website can rank well by being Search Engine compliant, however, it may not always be the sought website. Eg. When the keyword oxygen is searched, only one website of the top ten gives relevant result and provides information about the element.

Though the Search Engines were successful in delivering the expected results, however the efficacy of the same appears to be diminishing. The inherent deficiency of the first generation Search Engines has been addressed by the emerging Social Search Engines (SSE).

SSEs like Google or Yahoo, Social Search Engines seek to produce relevant information for end users, but with an element of human mediation. While regular search engines are purely algorithmic, based on link and text-based computations, social search engines attach importance to book marking, tagging, voting, highlighting and other prejudicial indications of relative popularity of content among its consumers.

The Social Search Engine concept gained boom between 2004-2005. Yahoo MyWeb 1.0 (2004), for example, allowed users to save one favorite links and web pages in a searchable and sharable directory. Encouraged by its success, Yahoo introduced MyWeb 2.0 in 2005 that allows the users to form groups and expand their communities by sending invitations to people.

The prominent difference between a social search engine and a regular search engine is the expanse of human opinion that plays a pivotal role in concluding search results. While search engines place more value to the choices of web masters, social search engines organize their choices based on the consumers of the content. It has been established beyond doubt that Content is the King and any website that is content rich will always have loyal patrons who would further act like walking talking billboards of the respective website.

Social search engines also enable web masters to compete better. For example, social search engine Eurekster provides Swikis service that enables empowered websites to control the listings in their search results index to their benefit.
Another advantage that the social Search Engines have over the first generation search engines is that the SSE are specifically more fruitful when finding non-textual content, including photos, videos and music. Google is attempting to address this deficiency by introducing Google Universal Search.

From the marketers view point Social Search Engines offer the advantage of using videos to promote the website, while also leveraging their popularity among the visitors to their advantage.

Human mediated search engines is a rather novel concept that still is exploring its true dimensions. A major limitation that handicaps the actualization of the potential of this concept is its overt dependence on human element. The chief pitfall of human involvement is that it cannot cope up with the rapid pace of Internet propagation. In other words, the social search results cannot be expected to be as comprehensive as the results from regular search engines. Though in terms of delivering dynamic and relevant results.

However, the phenomenon of social search engine holds a lot of promise on the basis of the merit of the concept itself. The phenomenon is anticipated to take off with flying colors in the coming years, probably in conjunction with algorithmic search.

Watch out this space for more on the emerging web 2.0 Search Engines.

The debate over whether PPC (Pay Per Click) is more effective as an Online Marketing tool or is it SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is almost as old as the evolution of the Search Engines.The role of Online Marketing assumes greater importance in the present context, with incredibly large number of websites, 110 million at last count and growing exponentially. With competition in each industry vertical increasing manifold, the endeavor to capture eyeballs in the most cost effective manner is a challenge forevery online business.Out of the various tools of Online Marketing, the two that conspicuously stand out are the Paid Campaign (Pay Per Click) and organic Search Engine promotions (Search Engine Optimization).In the following table, it is attempted to highlight the individual merits and shortcomings of each of these tools on five parameters.

The ideal marketing plan is usually one that is a combination of both the PPC and SEO with the efforts of one complementing the other. The right blend of the two ensures optimal ROI for the marketing spend.To summarize, the decision to opt for PPC or SEO is determined by the specific marketing need of the individual business. It is further a function of the allocated marketing budget, and the respective industry vertical that the business operates in.The appropriate blend of the Online Marketing Tools is recommended to ensure that the website attracts the desired traffic in an effective manner. This becomes critical in view of the new forms of Search Engines that are quintessential of the Web version 2.0. The USP of these new age Search Engines is that these would be human edited and merely bidding for the desired keywords would not get you those elusive rankings.

While Outsourcing stands for giving out a part or certain parts of your business operations to a regional or local distinct business entity, offshore outsourcing implies delegation of the selected business operations to an offshore location outside the country.

The two concepts share some advantages and differ on others. The common benefits of outsourcing and offshore outsourcing include doing away with the burden of mundane business operations that can be easily and skillfully handled at an off-site location, generally for a lesser budget. Outsourcing is a brilliant idea to relieve the business entity from vain exertion and instead pay better attention to ones specialized services areas or may be provide more agile customer care. Also, outsourcing excuses the enterprise from the substantial set up costs, viz. the cost of work space, manpower, stationery, systems and other miscellaneous expenses that would otherwise incur, if the jobs are not outsourced.

While local outsourcing manages just a couple, offshore outsourcing comes with a whole baggage of advantages. The highlights of offshore outsourcing remain the niche economies available at the offshore location, including exceptional professional talent for considerably lower costs. In fact, inspired by the dynamism of offshore outsourcing model in India, not less than 40% of the Fortune 500 companies are already taking advantage of it, including big names like MicroSoft, Motorola, Oracle, GE and Lucent.

Economies of scale is another citable advantage from Offshore outsourcing, as offshore destinations generally conduct themselves as specialized ventures that also take up similar jobs from other companies across the globe. As statistics has it, offshore outsourcing can bring down the costs for you from 50% to 30%, subject to onsite and offshore resources.

Offshore outsourcing also allows you to make a careful choice as regards the standard timeframe on offer, so as to render the effective working hours almost round the clock. For example, IST and EST are complimentary in nature with around nine and a half hour difference. This in turn, considerably shrinks delivery time for US-based companies translating into achievement of business targets well within budget and sped up job schedule.

Moreover, offshore outsourcing can span across wholesome backend business operations; the most prominent of all being IT and IT enabled services (ITES) with a whopping 28% of the entire share. As per reliable reports, majority of IT based outsourcing contracts are already moving to India, in spite of competitive rates offered by China and Russia. India offers wider talent and more purchasing power for US dollar, in turn saving billions of dollars for its US counterparts.

Email marketing is a tried and tested direct marketing strategy that involves marketing solutions through electronic mail (Email). Email marketing may be better understood in the context of offline world, where direct mails are sent to prospective customers, printed newsletters are mailed to subscribers and advertisements are printed in subscription magazines/ newspapers. The only difference is that of the medium in use.

Benefits

Email marketing uses electronic media that renders it much cheaper and faster than any of its possible alternative mediums. It is a dynamic and interactive tool in the hands of the Internet marketers that may be utilized innovatively to create and maintain customers without waiting for an initiative.

With a suitable website tracking software, Email marketing can even be utilized to track down its effectiveness in terms of the number of visitors generated. Solicited Emails are a reliable and smart way to stay in touch with the visitors to your website, who showed enough interest to leave their names and email addresses at your website for future record. Email marketing is particularly effective in reaching out to your business to business (B2B) audience.

Negatives of Email Marketing

The picture, however, may not be desirably pleasant, if the marketing strategy is not implemented with finesse. It is frequently witnessed that Emails are not drafted with much caution, unlike in the case of its offline version. As a result, the Emails are often marked as spam entries in the targeted inboxes without much thought. The worst part is that companies still keep sending Emails to the same Email addresses, thereby running the risk of being blacklisted by the ISPs. The ideal approach should be to build a long-term brand name rather than race to achieve a certain target statistic.

Types of Emails
Double Opt-in, Single Opt-in and Double Opt-out are all solicited Emails, wherein explicit response from the recipient triggers the sending of the Emails. While Single Opt-in Email is sent when a user signs up for an Email subscription, Double Opt-in takes place when he confirms his/ her subscription by responding to the automatically generated Email. Double Opt-out, on the other hand, concerns unsubscribing wherein the recipient first unsubscribes and then confirms termination of the subscription.

Conclusion

Cheaper, interactive and forward-able Email marketing spells nothing less than a revolution in the electronic marketing circles that can be timed and targeted to precision. It is all the way a boon for the marketers, only subject to polished and judicious use of it.

Launched by its developer JJ Allaire in 1995, ColdFusion has assumed tremendous popularity as a preferred programming platform for web development within a rather short span of time. From
JJ Allaire to Macromedia and now Adobe Systems in 2005, exchanging hands between brand names of repute speak about its viability and latent talent as a web development programming language and an application server. Statistics reveal its extensive deployment across the world in over ten thousand organizations, translating into over 1,20,0000 plus servers, including but not restricted to over 75% of the Fortune 100 companies.

To introduce, ColdFusion is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) language that facilitates quick creation of strong and compelling websites. As indicated earlier, ColdFusion is both an application server and a language. ColdFusion is built on a certified Java J2EE platform, rendering it fast, scalable and portable that in turn has amounted to its global popularity and prevalent use.

ColdFusion as a language is compatible with various application servers, including J2EE application servers, to be used on top of them as an alternative simplified (HTML like) scripting syntax. ColdFusion server also supports various web servers on different platforms. To quote a few examples, ColdFusion supports Apache, IIS and NSAPI based web servers and Solaris, HP-UX and Windows for platforms. ColdFusion also supports additional programming languages like server-side Actionscript.

Unlike PHP and ASP, ColdFusion is a commercial product that sports many integrated services not available otherwise. The attractive features of ColdFusion include business graphing, full text search and file upload handling utilities. ColdFusion also brilliantly incorporates Macromedia Flash, rendering it further ideal for web development. It is usually preferred among (data-driven) intranets worldwide.

Another highlight of ColdFusion is its capability to handle asynchronous events. ColdFusion MX 7 Enterprise Edition can handle events like SMS and instant messaging via its gateway interface, providing a web developer a dynamic tool in his/ her hands. Other exceptional value added services of ColdFusion include its capability to concert HTML to PDF, Graphic User Interface (GUI) widgets, database querying using ODBC or JDBC irrespective of the platform, client and server cache management, management of session, client and application et al.
Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 is the latest release of ColdFusion in the market at present. Awaited is the release of its version 8 in the second half of this year. As demonstrated at CFUnited 2006, MAX conferences and CFDevCon 2006 at UK, the future version will integrate with Adobe PDF forms, live Macromedia Breeze presentations and Microsoft .Net.

One of the most common pitfalls while doing keyword research is to pick the keywords with the most search count as shown/predicted by various tools including but not limited to Overture, SEO Book and Wordtracker.

Often you would find that even though you achieve a good rank with the ultra-competitive keywords that you chose isn’t yielding the right right benefits.

There could be various reasons:

• Google’s SERPs change with the datacenter the query is executed on and  also the location from where the search query was fired.
• With the rise of SEO, people competititors researching for keywords often end  up looking for a keyword more than your target customer!

So - what could be done about it?

One of the first steps that you could do is to tweak your Traffic Analyzer to stop accounting for unwanted traffic. For instance, we have tweaked Google Analytics to exclude local traffic from India to give us a true picture of the outcome of the rankings achieved by our website.

Other steps revolve around choosing the right keywords and strategically planning to optimize your website for them.

I would cover them in my next post - until then, the aforementioned may be useful! 

Team Vinove in action.