Welcome to 2009, post-click marketers!

As the first tip of the New Year, consider Matt Greitzer’s Search Insider column from a couple of days ago, Just One Opportunity for 2009. Matt is the head search guru at Razorfish, and if he could offer only one piece of advice to search marketers for the year ahead, it would be this: redefine success metrics by paying more attention to branding and other indirect effects of your online marketing.

We’ve settled squarely on directly measured, Web-based response metrics (sales, leads, revenue, etc.) as the primary indicator of value. And these metrics have a profound influence on everything from our optimization decisions to segmentation and targeting to budgeting to internal and external resourcing against the search opportunity.

What we’ve seen in the last quarter of 2008, however, is that every metric, whether derived from search, banner media, offline advertising, or “other”, is up for debate as marketers scrutinize their investments like never before.

Matt believes that marketers should incorporate three other dimensions into thinking about ROI:

First and foremost, we should factor in value outside of the online order process.

Second, we should push incessantly for brand awareness, message association and brand favorability metrics as a factor in evaluating search marketing success.

And third, we should quantify and include into our success metrics the opportunity costs of not participating in the search landscape, or segments therein.

A lot of Matt’s arguments extend quite logically into the landing pages and post-click marketing experiences associated with the click-throughs from these advertising sources. This is a big part of what I was getting at with my post a few weeks ago: Optimizing yourself out of a brand.

To be sure, we all want a higher conversion rate in our online marketing. That should remain as the primary metric of success, especially in post-click marketing programs. However, even if someone does not convert immediately on a particular landing page, we still want their brand experience to be a positive one — setting up the opportunity for a conversion in the future.

As we noted last week, 2008 has been a breakthrough year for post-click marketing.

To round out the year, Chris Golec, the CEO of Demandbase, just wrote an article for today’s Online Media Daily titled Click to Close: How Marketers Are Supercharging Online Campaigns. Chris notes that of the billions of online ad dollars spent in B2B to drive clicks, some 98% of that traffic goes “unrealized”.

Basically, what do marketers do after the click? Fortunately, there is an emerging cottage industry focused on this very issue, picking up where the click leaves off. Welcome to the wonderful world of post-click marketing.

The biggest mistake companies make is to think the end goal of an online campaign is to drive traffic to a site. Click-throughs are an important metric, but traffic alone won’t bring home the proverbial bacon for most companies. Savvy customers now want a personalized experience — they want to know that you can fulfill their needs, yet they are not likely to fill out lengthy surveys to help show you the way.

It’s interesting to note that the term “post-click marketing” is taking on several different meanings — or, more accurately, several different sub-categories:

• Landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites and their optimization, what we focus on here at ion — and what I primarily intended when I coined the term post-click marketing in 2005.

• Identification, filtering and tracking of site visitors, such as what Demandbase does, which can enable light personalization of one’s core web site accordingly.

• Lead nurturing after a respondent has been converted, which certainly happens after the initial click, but since it also happens after the initial conversion, I think of this more as post-conversion marketing.

These are not mutually exclusive — in fact, they’re highly complementary. All of them contribute to the same benefit:

More selling opportunities and higher marketing ROI.

You’re an online marketer, the New Year is almost upon you, and the old stand-by resolutions — exercise a little more, eat a little better, kick an old habit — don’t do justice to your creative intuition. So if you’re coming up short on meaningful and achievable New Year’s Resolutions, we have a few suggestions:

1. If you haven’t already, get on top of the post-click marketing stage of your online marketing funnel.

2. Do a competitive benchmark of the other firms in your space, from advertising through post-click. Commit to becoming best-in-class.

3. Make search marketing continuity a rallying mission. If you haven’t already, put together a message match message map — the exercise alone will reveal new opportunities.

4. Discover at least three new attractive segments in your audience that can be targeted specifically with Long Tail marketing.

5. Experiment with at least three interactive widgets or Flash objects to increase the engagement and utility of select landing pages in your portfolio.

6. Build at least three landing pages specifically for mobile devices — all those millions of iPhones and Blackberries are attached to potential customers, eager to be engaged on the go.

7. Double your conversion rate — yes, double it — by improving user experience after the click.

Of course, just like you might hire a personal trainer at the gym to help with some of those other, mundane resolutions, please know that our team of post-click professionals would be delighted to help you achieve any or all of these goals in the year ahead.

Have a safe Happy New Year!

‘Twas the moment of click-through, and all through the site
All the pages were crafted to bring visitors delight
The images were placed in the layout with care
Along with the headlines that perfectly paired

The tracking codes were nestled, all snug in the page
To measure performance (that’s what we do in this age)
The variations were ready for a good A/B test
To discover which versions would convert people best

Landing pages were added to match ads even more
Knowing the secret to a great quality score
“Now Flash, now widgets”, the marketer cried
Improving engagement by wow’ing their eyes

Respondents were segmented with a choice and a click
Receiving the right content and offers right quick
Behaviors were noted so the whole team could learn
How to do even better when respondents return

And as the traffic arrived, through the funnel it went
From pre-click to post-click to money well spent
How the dashboard twinkled as the conversion rate soared
And the marketer knew there’d be joy on the Board

As the conversion rate multiplied, the marketer winked
“This post-click marketing rocks, don’t you think?”
And you could hear her exclaim as she drove out of sight
“Happy click-throughs to all, and to all a good night!”

Wow, 2008 was an incredible year for post-click marketing!

We were delighted to see triple-digit growth in our customer base, with millions and millions of respondents being served world-class landing experiences in well-managed post-click campaigns. Collectively, our customers launched thousands of landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites.

Of course, it’s not just the quantity, it’s the quality: our “lead gen” clients continue to convert at over 4X the industry average — wrapping up Q4 with a stunning 14.6% conversion rate. Our transactional and e-commerce clients haven’t been too shabby either, with better than a 2X lead over the industry average.

Our software-as-a-service (SaaS) model freed our customers from IT worries, while delivering a rock-solid 99.997% uptime across our service (including scheduled maintenance!). With a triple-digit investment in our infrastructure and reliability/redundancy this year, we’re committed to keeping SaaS as an “IT-free, no worries” solution for marketers.

It was a year of innovative ideas for making landing pages more engaging and effective — and delivering the capabilities to execute them — including:

• dynamic Flash objects
• social networking features
• reusable, interactive widgets
• iPhone-specific landing experiences

In August, SES San Jose became the first industry show to have a dedicated post-click marketing session, where Tom Leung of Google began his presentation by proclaiming, “Google loves post-click marketing!” Thank you, Tom, we love you too.

In September, Compete became one of the first independent third-party research groups to publish an objective analysis of the difference post-click marketing can make. Their report: best-in-class post-click marketing generates 5X the ROI in online marketing.

This year our customers also received industry acclaim for their post-click marketing success stories. The New England Journal of Medicine presented at the post-click marketing session at SES San Jose. Overland Storage presented at MarketingSherpa’s B2B Lead Gen Summit in both Boston and San Francisco. And American Greetings presented their case study at SES Chicago earier this month (see ClickZ’s summary, How Agile Marketing Pays Off). Kudos!

And although most of our customers like to keep their results secret — outsized conversion rates are, indeed, a tremendous competitive advantage — Expand Media, MarketingProfs, and Millennium Bankcard were all kind enough to share their success stories in new cases studies for us this year.

And I’ve barely scratched the surface of the year’s events…

But the conclusion is unmistakable: it’s been a wonderful year. Thank you to everyone who has contributed, supported, and participated with us in the post-click marketing movement. Happy holidays, and best wishes for the New Year.

Here’s to 2009 being even more “The Year of Post-Click Marketing”.