With the all-new Drift Conversational Landing Pages, one of the greatest tools in direct marketing just got a whole lot more powerful.
Most effect direct marketing efforts these days refer the recipient to one webpage or another. That's why Drift's new release is so significant – it allows you to integrate their conversion-driving bots into any direct marketing campaign. And we mean any. Did you know that one of the best ways to use this new tool to stand out from the competition is to drive traffic to bot-enabled landing pages from an offline source?
That's right! Nowadays direct mail doesn't have to stay offline – including unique links in mailers allows you to use physical mail to drive online traffic. And direct mail is making a serious comeback. Digital marketing has become saturated in the last few years making it hard to stand out from the crowd using email marketing or display advertising alone. The result is that direct mail has a response rate that is more than thirty times higher than the response rate to emails. When combined with the new tactic of including links in mailings, direct mail becomes a powerful force indeed.
But no matter how effective your direct mail campaign is, its impact will be limited by the quality of your landing pages. If you're familiar with digital advertising, this will likely make sense to you: landing pages can drive down the conversion rate and quality score of even the best-optimized campaign, with a dream click through rate. Plus, creating custom landing pages for each campaign can take up an enormous number of marketing team hours, making setting up new campaigns extremely costly.
Luckily, Drift's new feature helps streamline the process of setting up specialized landing pages to accompany your direct mail campaigns. Set up isn't just easier, the landing pages also make your marketing team's job easier by driving visitors further down the funnel and triggering next-step activities.
What Are Conversational Landing Pages?
For a while now, Drift has offered chatbots to its clients to help them drive conversions. But companies still had to build a landing page, and successfully integrate the chatbots so that they were a natural part of the page, rather than an unwelcome intrusion on the user experience. Now, Drift offers easily customizable landing pages built around the chatbot, making sure that visitors actually engage.
Most marketing campaigns eventually direct leads to the company's website in order to trigger further activity and eventually drive conversions. Email campaigns and search or social media advertising almost always send people to a webpage – this is increasingly true of direct mail too, as we'll explore more later. As a result, the quality of the landing page and its ability to convince users to take the next step down the funnel is essential to the success of any campaign. So, companies generally build landing pages customized to the given campaign and call to action.
So how does Drift change this process? Well, for one thing, it makes building landing pages easier – freeing marketing teams up to run more campaigns or explore less conventional channels. You can think of the conversational landing pages as incredibly flexible, AI-enabled templates. Once you create a base template that is branded to your company, all you have to do is create Drift playbooks with the necessary information to talk the lead into taking the next step. Since this is the same information that the marketing team would need to plan out the page, informing the bot doesn't take any extra work. Even better, the conversational landing page removes the need to painstakingly design a page to communicate the information effectively – the bot will handle the conversation for you. You can learn more about setting up the pages here.
It can also be incredibly hard to convince visitors to a traditional page to fill out a form. They might read an email, click through to the page, decide to sign up for a free webinar – but then leave the page as soon as they have to enter their name, company, and email address. The relationship between website and visitor is extremely precarious, and any barrier to taking the next step will cost you a huge number of leads. Drift's landing pages solve this problem by essentially disguising forms within the flow of conversation. The bot can collect all the information it needs to capture and qualify the lead without presenting the same barriers that forms do.
The conversational landing pages can also allow you to skip several steps in the funnel and qualify SQL's faster. That's because the back-and-forth of conversation can move the lead down the funnel as much as several traditional marketing interaction in just one conversation – depending on how much information you provide to the bot. A lead might come to the page for a free ebook and end up scheduling a demo!
All in all, Drift's new conversational landing pages are a powerful tool to up your marketing game. Any campaign can qualify more leads and drive more conversions, and best of all your marketing team will have to work less hard. Traditional pages will still have their place when branding is especially important, but conversational landing pages are a worthwhile addition to your arsenal.
Learn how to get started automating direct mail efforts and drive more traffic to your online content.
Using Drift with Direct Mail
So, Conversational Landing Pages can be extremely useful. But how can you implement them as part of your direct mail strategy?
As any veteran direct mail marketer will know, integrating online next-steps into direct mail campaigns is a vital element of modern direct marketing. You can maximize the impact of direct mail by including a unique access code in the mailing. When the recipient enters the link or code online, they'll be directed to the content that you want to promote, for instance an ebook, webinar, or sales page. The unique codes also allow you to track exactly who is responding to your direct mail campaigns and when, so you can set up triggers to launch follow-up workflows – including further direct mail, emails, or even calls from sales representatives.
There are two ways to maximize the impact of your integration of web pages into your direct mail campaigns. The first is to use direct mail automation tools, like Enthusem, that integrate with your CRM system and email automation to create a unified, effective marketing interface. This allows for consistent messaging and coordinated follow-through across all platforms.
The second is to use Drift's conversational landing pages to optimize the online experience and drive conversions. All of the general benefits we outlined earlier apply here: you can set up the landing pages more easily, and the pages themselves will be more effective at moving leads down the funnel – or even allow you to skip the funnel entirely. Setting campaigns up gets even easier when you use a direct mail automation system like Enthusem that integrates with Drift-capable marketing automation system like Hubspot or Marketo. You can use this hybrid system to automatically generate landing pages when you create the mailers, and have the landing pages trigger further mailers or emails. The possibilities for creative marketing are virtually endless.
Ready to Get Started?
Drift's new conversational landing pages are poised to take online marketing to the next level. And when combined with direct mail automation, they can truly give your company the competitive advantage. You can find out more about Drift at their website, and learn about how direct mail automation can work for your business right here at Enthusem. Get ready to stand out from the crowd with personalized mailers and conversational landing pages!
Want to learn how direct mail can also help you generate more leads for your agency? Click below to download our informative eGuide.
