The Acquisition Engine: Revving Up Your Web Sites Customer Acquisition

Nothing in Internet marketing is more important than customer acquisition -- attracting visitors and converting prospects into clients. The key to customer conversion is to turn your Web site into an acquisition engine that gets Web visitors to do something: Learn more. Sign up. Open an account. Buy something.

Getting Them There
Clients and prospects come to your Web site through a variety of means, driven by advertising, promotions, marketing, or word of mouth. All of these should be used to bring them to your site or to a specific in-site landing page:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Banner ads within your site

Promotion buttons within your site

Offer buttons within your site

Paid or co-op banners on other sites

Television advertising

Print advertising

Direct mail

E-mail marketing

Jump to the Landing Page
The landing page, whether it is your sites home page, an interior page, or a marketing-specific landing page, is a hard sell. The intent is to drive the user to conversion. If oriented around a specific product, it should contain all the information necessary to motivate the user to Sign Up for the product or service (in this paper, Sign Up may mean any number of transactions, from buying to enrolling in a program to creating a user name and password it is shorthand for a transaction that ties the site visitor to you).

For users who want more familiarity with your products or services before signing up, the second call-to-action on the landing page is to Learn More about the products or services.

Each landing page should use the same basic information design. Many organizations use source-specific landing pages, oriented with consideration to the source acquisition. For example, a user who came from a link within the site will find more links related to the specific offer, where one who sees a television advertisement might be directed to a page specifically built for that audience and its expectations. This allows you not only to set up audience specific sell points, but also to create tracking mechanisms for assessing the strength of your various means of customer acquisition.

All landing pages should contain a primary call-to-action, to Sign up, and a secondary call to Learn More about the products or services.

Usability
Making your site easy to use is not simply an academic exercise. It relates directly to customer acquisition and conversion. The site must be organized to make the content and navigation as intuitive as possible and to point to the calls to action (Note: Not just the landing pages, but all pages on the site should include a prominent call to action).

An intuitive site allows the visitors to reassure themselves that your offerings are right for them. It encourages visitors to explore the offerings to their own level of comfort. That does not mean that the content should be endlessly deep, providing visitors to dig and dig and dig. A critical decision point is how much to give them before you require them to transact with you, either through a Sign Up online, or by contacting you through some other means. The idea is to allow the visitor to intuitively self-select any selling point they need about any of your products or services.

Putting it Together
First, you attract them, then you send them somewhere relevant and finally you make it simple to sign up. These three simple components can increase your conversion rates dramatically. This acquisition engine has produced solid results for companies like AOL and Ameritrade. Are you ready for higher conversion rates

Kari White is a Content Developer for Brook Group, a Web site design firm near Washington, DC. Visit for more information about Brook Groups customer acquisition engine.

Use Co-Registration To Generate Quality Leads

Co-registration, once a little-known Web marketing tool, continues to quickly garner widespread usage. First used by just a few of the largest online marketers, co-registration has gone mainstream as marketers discover that it is a simple and cost-effective way to quickly build a large mailing list of potential customers.

Co-registration leverages the online sign-up process. While it is most common on Web sites for Internet tools, like free email or file storage, it can be implemented on any site where users are required to register. Co-registration takes advantage of the information input by users in the registration form to sign them up for additional services, often by simply checking an opt in box at the end of the form. Nearly every Internet user has come across co-registration on Web sites such as Hotmail and Yahoo.

The benefit of co-registration is a tremendously high volume of leads from interested customers, generally on a return-on-investment-friendly cost per action (CPA) or cost per lead (CPL) basis. Opt in rates can be as high as 15 percent to 20 percent, resulting in thousands of new leads daily. This makes co-registration a highly effective tool to quickly build a large mailing list or recruit a potential customer base. Plus, with email list rental prices as high as 20 cents to 30 cents per name, co-registration can help you build and own a mailing list for about the same cost as just one or two list rentals.

Many Web sites have taken notice of this revenue opportunity, which has resulted in a rapid increase in the number of sites where co-registration is offered. With dozens of new outlets available, co-registration is a fit for many marketers needs and budget.

Here are points to consider when creating a co-registration campaign:

Placement is everything. Partner with Web sites that have user base demographics similar to your own to produce the highest-quality results. Long-term co-registration partnerships will result in heavy overlap between your user base and your partners, so be sure to weigh that risk, especially when partnering with potential competitors. A small number of networks now offer co-registration services, thereby simplifying the site selection process.

Follow-up is key. Users obtained through co-registration have likely never been to your Web site and may quickly forget that they have signed up for it. Co-registration provides you with a steady stream of leads; its up to you to convert them into customers. A thorough email follow-up plan designed to convert co-registration leads into active users yields the best results.

Price is fluctuating. With prices rapidly changing for most online marketing tools and limited history for co-registration, prices currently vary widely from 25 cents to 25 dollars per co-registration. Factors affecting price include the amount of information collected from each user, the quality of a partners user base and negotiating skill. ROI calculations are key when determining price, based on conversion rate and customer acquisition cost. Avoid opportunities priced on an impression or click basis.

Keep it simple. Typically, co-registration offers users just a one- or two-sentence description of the service for which they are signing up. Gear copy and information requirements toward gaining qualified leads, not lifelong customers. Consider incorporating a promotion, such as a sweepstakes or free newsletter to increase opt in rates.

Never require an opt out. While most co-registration is done on an opt in basis, occasionally some programs are run on an opt out basis. With opt in rates frequently as high as they are, sacrificing quality to increase quantity via opt out is a poor trade-off.

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Mitchel Harad is a renouned expert in online marketing, who has founded, lead and sold two pioneering and successful companies. You can visit his blog for further insights on online marketing trends and strategies.