by Adam Yakish
That Will Heat Up Your Holiday Promotion Pages
Another year, another holiday season, and there’s no doubt plenty of advertisers are planning on fortifying their sales initiatives in the following months with targeted splash page campaigns (and if you’re not you may want to consider it). But don’t waste a great opportunity. Follow these valuable suggestions to help ensure your campaign is a success.
1)      Location, location, location: As it is in the brick and mortar world, location online is incredibly important to the success of you campaign. Do your research and get some bright and fun ads up on sites that your target users are likely to frequent, and link straight to your splash page.
2)      Keep it SIMPLE: A simple, focused, splash page is crucial. Keep the content concise, short, and make sure you include a call to action.
3)      Streamline the Data Collection Process: Just like your content, don’t over-do it. If you intend to place a form on your splash page, be careful about superfluous fields. Understandably, you want to gather as much information as possible, but some information is always better than none.
4)      Don’t be Stingy: Run a targeted PPC campaign to compliment your contextual advertising. Sure, you want to earn traffic from high volume, short-tailed phrases. But invest the extra money in really developing your long-tailed lists, and then bid what it takes to bring your ads into the top three or four sponsored results (and Google isn’t the only engine around, you know [Bing, cough cough]).
5)      Give something away: Include some “thing” for free upon submission of a form or an order or whatever the case may be. And don’t offer something invaluable to the user, like some insignificant amount of money off of a purchase or what-have-you. Try extending a 30 day trial to 60 days, offered exclusively through your promotion. Or provide the user access to information that would otherwise cost big bucks (even if the access is only for a short period of time). The point is, it’s still not an economically pristine space out there; sales this season are going to require more give, and less take.
6)      Maintain Consistency: Keep your messages clean and fluid across the board. Contextual banners, PPC ads, heck, even get a YouTube video up. Whatever you decide, your splash page should mirror the message(s) you are sending in your ads. And furthermore, it needs to be incredibly easy for your user to identify the message(s) as being the same.
7)       Tell It Like It Is: Clearly define your intent and, if applicable, the cost that will be incurred by the user. When it comes time to close the sale, be easy on the up-selling. Maybe in some cases it’s worthwhile to make the user aware of some other stuff you have going on, but for the most part, close the user-intended sale, shake hands, and be happy you have another check to send off to the bank.
8)      Make Your Splash Page Sharable!: Only a few advertisers are picking up on this. But if you’re really running an awesome holiday promo, make it super simple for people to tell their friends and colleagues about it. Sharing features are incredibly easy to incorporate into any splash page; if your deal creates a buzz on facebook or stumbleupon, etc., you can expect a heavy ROI.