Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages Into Game Changers

If you’re using paid search, email or display advertising to drive traffic, leads or transactions—you need to learn the art & science of Honest Seduction. The most effective online marketers give their organizations huge competitive advantages—5-30x according to research. They do it by moving their focus one step lower in the funnel. They do it by coming to the realization that the click is almost incidental. It’s what happens next that makes all the difference. This is the story of what happens next—told in a way to help you make it happen. Honest Seduction is an extended compilation of blog posts and articles from the people that coined the term post-click marketing. It is both strategic and tactical—providing you with executive and in-the-trenches guidance for achieving higher return on your marketing investments. Scott Brinker, Anna Talerico and Justin Talerico have been segmenting, qualifying and converting online marketing traffic for Fortune 500 clients since 1994.

A trio of digital-marketing experts explains the huge gap between the number of people who visit websites in response to online campaigns and the number who become customers--and offers a well-tested approach to achieve better results.

Early Internet entrepreneurs counted "eyeballs" to determine whether their offerings were successful. Soon, however, online marketers realized that visitors viewing their banner ads and paid search listings were only part of the story--and a minor one at that. Then came the ascendance of "click throughs" as the benchmark for effective Internet marketing. More recently, however, digital marketing has moved beyond merely counting clicks on display ads or hyperlinks in e-mail campaigns. Today, marketers worry about converting those prospects into sales leads or actual customers. That's where post-click marketing comes in and where this informative how-to provides the answers. The authors, all veteran online marketing consultants, focus on methods for improving the dismal conversion rate--estimated at a paltry three percent--of people who click through to the average online marketer's landing page. Their core technique relies on selling paths or conversion paths, which are three- to five-page series of screens that attempt to guide more clickers to become buyers. The difference between a conversion path and a conventional landing page is that, unlike a typical landing page where a web surfer can go in almost any direction, the conversion path presents the visitor with a set of carefully selected options. By offering visitors quicker, simpler, cheaper--or even free--choices, the post-click marketer personalizes and improves the online-selling process. The book consists largely of previously written blog posts, articles and other documents the authors produced over the last decade. While the material could theoretically seem rehashed, the inclusion instead adds genuine-feeling context. This intriguing title is divided into short segments--improving readability--and includes visual aids. Novices and marketing pros will likely find the authors' approach convincing.

An efficient guide to improving the effectiveness of any online marketing effort. --Kirkus Discoveries, February 18, 2009