
Don't make your customers cry by promising and not delivering.
Message match is the ability for your destination or “landing” page to match the content and messaging of the upstream ad you arrive from. Good message match is the foundation of conversion optimization and helps to ensure a smooth experience for your customers.
Aaaaaaaand here’s an example of how to get it horribly wrong…
While checking my email the other day I spotted a sponsored ad at the top of my Gmail inbox.

How awesome or lame is your landing page? There's no hiding from the Conversion Marketing Scorecard.
Let’s start with a simple statement: Most Landing Pages Suck More Than You Think!
Following the principles of denial, the first step in recovery is admitting that you have a problem. If you followed my last post about the 4 Truths of Conversion Marketing, you’ll know that there is a fair amount of psychology involved in delivering the best landing page experiences.
To make things easier, I’ve created an interactive scorecard that walks you through the “4 Truths” and allows you to apply them to your existing landing pages in a simple checklist format.

If you can understand the 4 fundamental aspects of visitor behavior you can design for better conversions.
In an earlier post, I likened customer interaction with your landing page to a dance between 2 parties. The primary point of that article was to understand the questions and barriers facing your potential customers, and to unlock a strategy for dealing with these issues.
Key to this process was understanding what your customer is thinking during their visit. We learned that there are 4 primary questions to be considered:

Conversion marketing is a conversation or dance between you and your customers.
The Marketing Dance is the back and forth between marketer and customer. It is a conversation between 2 consenting adults with what we would hope is a common goal.
How you perform in these precious few moments of intimacy, will determine whether the song plays out as Stairway to Heaven – an 8 minute epic journey that builds to a crescendo of immeasurable grandeur, followed by the perfect date – or that awkward moment of silence where one party politely declines the untoward advances of the other.
The dance begins with the request. The marketer bows gently, takes the customer’s hand and asks “may I have this dance?” Or more typically, BUY THIS NOW!!!!
It’s easy to produce a disconnect at this crucial time, and usually it’s the fault of the clumsy marketer who hasn’t thought carefully enough about the feelings of their intended partner.

In today's lesson we'll prove how landing pages can increase your return on marketing spend. (Image: Zazzle T-shirts)
Landing pages are a focused and customized sales pitch, specifically designed to get your visitor to take an action.
As an extension of your upstream advertising (paid search and banners), they have the ability to increase your conversions rates compared to the effectiveness of a campaign that doesn’t use them.
In this article, we’ll share some insight into the simple economics of landing page use and answer the question: “Why Should I use a landing page?”
There are several simple answers to this question, the most obvious of which is that it can increase your conversion rate. But how, and by how much?

Put each marketing funnel feeder into the magic hat. Shake it around and pull out a consistent message
A common problem in SMB’s (small to medium businesses) is something I like to call Marketing Funnel Overflow – where the traffic pouring into your business is coming from competing rather than complimentary sources.
When you have multiple small teams in your marketing department, campaign messaging can break down unless there is a strong and cohesive strategic direction. Consider the following marketing sources that commonly have teams in the marketing department:
Despite the intention to run a single campaign with a single message, the moment it gets split up into these 5 potential avenues, the delivery of that message can change. Not to mention the limitations that certain media place on your messaging (140 characters on Twitter, limited line length in AdWords etc.)