What is Post-Click Marketing?

One of the main goals of every company’s website is to attract visitors. The more eyes viewing your site, the more impressions your bound to make, and the more potential customers you’ll inevitably find.

But once you get the visitors to your site, what do you do? Companies need to continue to interact with those visitors and track where they came from. The answer is post-click marketing. It’s the process of interacting and engaging with your website’s visitors once they’ve clicked through to your site.

Those visitors may come from your pay-per-click advertising, newsletters, or content marketing, but the goal is the same regardless of where they came from: convert them from interested visitor to paying customer. Ion Interactive put together a great framework to follow with its post, The Seven Principles of Post-Click Marketing. Here’s a brief synopsis of each principle:

Conversion Paths

The main idea of conversion path marketing is to consider the place from which the visitor came and tailor a custom marketing message to suit that information. The path that the visitor takes is important and says a lot about their needs or wants.

With post-click marketing, companies can gather important information as the visitor moves along the conversion path. That information can be used to qualify visitors and score their potential as an opportunity. Following the conversion path can tell you a lot about visitors that don’t convert or abandon the site, too. Here’s a great article that discusses how you can leverage conversion paths to improve your post-click marketing results.

Message Matching

Your website’s visitors came for a reason and it’s usually the pre-click marketing message that was delivered to them. With post-click marketing, you can match the message that the visitor received pre-click and maintain it consistently throughout the path. This form of marketing rewards the visitor’s “investment in the click” by match their needs with your solutions.

Segmenting

A visitor or respondent is often attracted to your site by some small hook, whether it’s a banner ad, a keyword, or a newsletter item. Because the visitors to your site can come from many different places and for many different reasons, you can’t treat every respondent the same.

Segmenting allows you to match the path and its messages to the segment each visitor corresponds to. As you learn more about the different segments that are visiting your site, you can further tailor your conversion paths and marketing messaging to their needs. Lee Odden does a great job explaining the importance of segmentation in online marketing — including post-click marketing — on his blog.

Qualification

Not all visitors are created equal. By using qualification techniques, companies can score and qualify each visitor to their site. With post-click marketing, every visitor is assigned a score as they move along the conversion path. Scoring can be affected by several variables, including downloading a file, clicking through to another page, or the domain that the visitor originated from. Qualifying and scoring your visitors will also help you better understand your most effective traffic sources.

Conversion

This is the last step of post-click marketing and it’s exactly what it sounds like. A path can have several different ways of converting a visitor, including having them fill out a form, download a specific file, or clicking through to a final page.

Conversion rates measure the percentage of visitors that began on a particular path and finished at the end point you’ve designated for them. Clicks are just the beginning. Post-click marketing will help you convert more clicks to qualified leads. Ion Interactive has another article on its site that lists 15 Killer Conversion Rate Optimization Resources.

Testing

Once companies have some results to analyze, they should test different ideas to see which paths and patterns work best. Comparing different paths will allow you to better understand which ones are providing the most value and which ones aren’t delivering convertible visitors. Ion Interactive suggests testing an image-heavy path versus a content-heavy path, gauging which one produces the most favorable results.

That experimentation will give you a better understanding of successful patterns and allow you to tailor paths to specific markets.

Analysis

Marketing optimization is an analytical game. You have to make sure that you’re executing fact-based optimization, which will ultimately allow you to make better decisions on where and how to spend your marketing dollars.

The ideas and principles above provide a fantastic framework to execute post-click marketing. Ion Interactive produces a very useful newsletter that I recommend subscribing to as well.

The most important thing to remember is the importance of following through on every click. Your lead generation services and content marketing teams spend a lot of time enticing visitors to click through to your site. Once those visitors click, you want to be ready with a great knowledge base of best practices to optimize the post-click marketing process.

For a little deeper reading on how to do that well, take a look at Ion’s article, Conversion Optimization is All About Agility.