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 site's 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 system has produced solid results for companies like AOL and Ameritrade. Are you ready for higher conversion rates? Rev up your acquisition engine.

About the author:
Kari White is a Content Developer for Brook Group, a Web design firm near Washington, DC. Visit http://www.brookgroup.com/customer-acquisitionto learn more about the customer acquisition engine.