This interview with with Mitch Lapides of FulcrumTech is part of the Convirza Webinar Series. The following is the Q&A portion of the interview.
McKay: Awesome. That’s fantastic stuff Mitch. We appreciate it. We do have a couple of questions. So let’s cover three of those. In terms of landing page forms, do you prefer having, asking for all of the data in one whack or having multi-step forms?
Mitch: That’s a great question. So okay, so this is definitely something that needs to be tested and we have seen landing pages that do extremely well with just a single form and not going to a two step process, because you will lose people by having to go to that second step. But the benefit of having the two step process is if you are capturing just the e-mail address in that very first form field and then take them to the next step, then you have the opportunity of re-marketing to them later. So you might have fewer completions, but you might actually end up with a stronger set of conversions on the other end, so it’s definitely something that we’ve seen great performance in both sides, but you’ve got to test it. As I always say, it comes down to the testing.
McKay: Okay that’s great. And then for a landing pages specifically, because you did talk a little bit about that, what’s your sense of this question that when that Gwinnette asks, and she says, I’ll just read you the question that she asked. She says, “On landing pages, do you use a different URL for each one? Meaning do you assign a different page from your existing domain or do you purchase a new domain name just for that landing page?” Do you have a thought on that?
Mitch: Yeah. So a lot of times landing pages will have double duty in terms of different campaigns and so forth. So number one, if you expect your landing page to be found by the search engines and you want it to perform well, likely the page rank of your website is going to give clout or give credibility to that landing page in terms of being found by the search engines. So from that standpoint, I would definitely use the domain name of your primary site. Microsites is where you would maybe use a different domain name.
So if you were trying to go after a very narrow market place and there’s a term that’s used and you can actually buy that domain. It might be okay for some vanity and so forth in terms of people remembering the name and being able to go it later, but of course, you could use a lot of re-directs for that as well. But generally we will put landing pages on the primary domain of our clients because it’s going to be easier and tighter and more easily re-purposed as well.
McKay: Great. And then the final question: how would you suggest a company and this is very
it’s going to be specific to their industry and to this company’s situation. When do you know it’s too much of your resources? What percentage of your resources is too much to be putting into any one thing, whether it be SEO, or website design perhaps, or banner ads. Do you have a sense of the breakdown between those channels, or does it really just depend on the industry and the business world?
Mitch: Yeah, that’s a great question and we get that one all the time. I like to think about a marketing as an infinite budget in some ways, because if you are generating a positive return on investment on the marketing that you are doing, then your company should continue to spend and spend until you see diminishing return on that. But in terms of the breakdown across all of the many different tools, it really is going to depend wildly on your actual business. I would say that if you are online retailer, you are going to spend far, far more on e-mail marketing then you would, let’s say, certainly on direct mail, unless it’s got a strong direct mail channel.
Its so expensive, but if you are doing direct mail, direct mail will dwarf the budget of everything else altogether because of postage. We see email marketing as easily 30, 40, 50% of a company’s marketing budget, but the website is often a huge part as well. It’s really hard to say what is going to be best for any individual company without seeing the ROY tied to that. I’ve gone into companies before, and I’ll do a breakdown of all of their different marketing, because we want to understand their marketing channels all together, and we will want to see exactly what the return is on each, and then I’ll have a very specific opinion on where you should be spending your dollars.
McKay: Okay, and then the final question so tell me what you do about
what do you call it, e-mail fatigue or whatever it might be where your open rates are sort of dropping, not precipitously, but over time. Maybe people are just getting tired of seeing e-mails. Is there any remedy for that or is it just a matter of making sure your list is always fresh and new? Making sure that your subjects stay fresh. Do you have any sort of advice on that situation?
Mitch: Yeah. I love that question. It’s a huge topic. First of all, with an e-mail list, the more that you can at least create broad buckets and segments, it gets back to understanding your market, so if you can start to break that list down into the segment of users who would have an interest in certain types of classes your products, that’s the first thing you want to do. List fatigue happens when you continue to mail over and over and over again to those individuals, and they have lost or they never were interested in your product or service, so they stop paying attention to you, and they go into what we call inactive status, which is, like they haven’t opened or clicked in x number of months.
So how do you keep that from happening? Number one you have to add to that list all of the time. Twenty five percent of a list per year will go inactive or you will simply lose tuition from unsubscribes and bounces. So adding to that list every year is critical. So if you don’t add to the list, or if you don’t take the people away who are inactive, then it’s going to look like your list is faitguing. Right? Because it’s just, mathematically speaking it has to happen. So you do re-engagement campaigns to try to get those people re-engaged with really exciting offers.
You want to try to segment better to make sure that you are giving them offers that they care about or are interested in. You want to look at behaviorally where they’ve opened or clicked on historically, and use that to try to keep that list healthy and strong. I could talk about that topic for an hour. So whoever asked that wants to reach out to us afterwards, I would be more than happy to provide more insights and resources related to that one.
McKay: Great. Well alright Mitch, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it. We want to invite everybody again to contact Mitch directly if you have any questions, or if you have any questions about e-mail marketing or marketing in general. I know he can help you out directly. So feel free to reach out to him and feel free of course to sign up for our future webinars https://www.convirza.com/webinar, and we’ll continue to have good webinars every Thursday.
The only other thing I will mention here is in terms of the availability of the slides and of the presentation, we’ll make that available on https://www.convirza.com, and you will also get an e-mail that has the link where you can locate the slides as well as the recording. So thanks for coming everybody and Mitch, thanks again. Any last words, sir?
Mitch: No, great. McKay, thanks so much to you and Convirza for having us today. This is a topic we are really passionate about, so anyone on the call if you have more questions or whatever feel free to reach out to us. You can see my e-mail address there mlepedus@fulcrumtech.net , or our phone number.
We’d love to hear from you. We’d love feedback — positive or negative, we will take it. We love the constructive feedback. So thanks again for joining us today and have a great day and good luck with your lead gen.
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