Product Information: Why Use A Landing Page?

Who should use landing pages?

Leadcleaner is for direct marketers (direct mail, direct email, direct response advertising) who want to qualify respondents as good sales leads. Any time you're engaging prospects in a discussion about your product, you need to provide a call to action. While for retail products this might just be "check your local grocer," more expensive or complex products typically require a sales cycle which includes a dialog with salespeople. Your job, in part, is to make it as easy as possible for the prospect to initiate that discussion.

A landing page is a response channel for DM campaigns

Any direct marketing campaign needs one or more response channels. These typically include business reply cards to be completed and mailed back, toll-free telephone numbers, and/or Web forms where the respondent can provide his or her information.

Landing pages help qualify sales leads

If you're selling a can of peas, you don't need to qualify sales leads: anyone is a potential customer. If you're selling supply chain management software for semiconductor markets, you've got a much smaller universe. And your highly trained, commissioned sales team isn't going to want leads that aren't prequalified by some viable metric.

So it's up to you to establish the basic criteria for a good prospect, and measure each of your respondents to see if they're worth a sales call. Every product will have its own criteria (that's why we offer completely customizable qualifying logic!), but some basic starting points are:

• need for your product
• sufficient budget for your product
• authority to purchase or recommend the purchase of your product
• desire for the benefits your product brings

Ideally, you'll ask no more than one or possibly two questions in each of these categories. After all, you're not trying to replace the salesperson: you're just aiming for a reasonable certainty that this prospect is worth a phone call, sales visit, or email.

Don't business reply cards let me qualify leads, too?

They certainly CAN. Any question you ask on a lead capture form, you can ask on a BRC, or during a screening call to a toll-free number. However, it's our experience that these lead gathering methods tend to lack a certain rigor. One of the great benefits of our system is that we precisely, automatically, and continually score each response with a detailed, consistent algorithm. With our software, there's no question that your leads will be graded and sorted, because the software does the work for you.

Lead capture pages save you money

Our average order size is around $2500. That includes a Web form, a domain name, and a PIN-coded list. Let's see how that compares to traditional approaches for a drop size of 125,000, with a 1.5% response rate:

	BRC	toll-free number	Leadcleaner
Setup	free	free	$2500
Hard cost per response	$0.29	$0.50	free
Labor cost per response	$2.50	$5.00	free
Total cost per response	$2.79	$5.50	free
Cost for 1875 responses	$4218.75	$10312.50	free
Total cost:	$5,231.25	$10,312.50	$2500.00

Online fulfillment

Of course, one of the fundamental rules of direct response is to sell the offer, not the product. Business-to-business campaigns, especially in high-tech, tend to use a white paper or software download as the incentive. With offline response techniques, you'll be looking at offline fulfilllment as well. This can add several dollars to each response you process. With a Web-based response system like Leadcleaner, many campaigns simply use an online incentive, such as a PDF download or online software demo. We'll host and serve this files at no additional charge, as part of your form service -- or you can serve them straight from your corporate site.

Ease of tabulation and data mining

So, after you collect your leads, what will you do with them? Odds are you're going to want them in some electronic format, whether you simply store leads in a spreadsheet, import them into your contact management software, or use a more elaborate CRM or SFA system. If you collect your leads through Leadcleaner, it'll be a cakewalk to do any of these things... just download them as a CSV or TDF file, and drop them into any application you like.