From search and display ads to e-mail campaigns, print ads, direct-response TV and even direct mail, direct marketers are driving prospects to the Web in increasing numbers. But who’s building all the landing pages those prospects are pulling up to?
The front end of a marketing campaign can often be put together easily, says Joseph Rizzo, president of Herndon VA-based iNeoMarketing. “A Google AdWords campaign can be up and running amateurishly in about half an hour, or about two hours with a little more care. But a marketer creating a landing page has to go to IT, to the database administrator and to the Webmaster to coordinate all these activities. It’s complex.”
PluraPage, a Web-hosted application from iNeoMarketing, is offering to disrupt that chain of command. For a monthly fee, the platform lets marketers create customized, branded Web landing pages for any campaign on their own, using templates, art and data stored on its servers.
Salt Lake City-based small-business lender Celtic Bank decided 10 months ago to run a nationwide lead-generation program using online media and paid search. Redirect Relationship Marketing, Celtic’s agency, wanted to change out offers on the campaign easily and do A/B testing, offering whitepaper downloads as incentive and integrating leads into a Salesforce.com database.
Redirect managing partner James Roberts says that wish list led to the PluraPage landing page platform. Using that, Redirect generated 10 different combinations of offers and creative for paid search networks and online media, centering on equipment loans for small businesses.
Lead quality is a big problem for online lenders in the B-to-B sector, he says, because most companies only look to the Web for loan advice as a last resort. That made it all the more crucial to get the quality leads to self-select early in the relationship, and then track those leads as they progressed to conversions using the Salesforce.com database.
The landing pages took advantage of PluraPage’s ability to add 15 standard contact questions and up to 70 custom optional ones. Celtic was interested in finding leads for a particular size of business loan and used those options to ask about a company’s financing options and timeframe, as well as its number of years in business.
Self-qualifying customers on the landing page “worked great,” Roberts says. The first two-month Web ad campaign, which ended in December 2006, produced about $8.5 million in loan opportunities for an expenditure of about $13,000, and Celtic closed on about 10% of those opportunities at press time.
Future campaigns may also ask prospective leads to rate their company’s credit rating as very good, good or sub-prime.
And in the B-to-B financial world, success can have its multiplier effect. That first campaign even turned up responses from some companies in the business of equipment manufacture that were also looking for a bank to finance equipment loans to their own customers. “So instead of getting one deal out of the contact, in those cases Celtic got 10 or 20,” says Roberts. “That’s just gravy.”
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