Landing Page Fail

Digital marketing channels like email and social media are a huge part of the modern day marketing mix. However, this is making some of the 'old school' methods like direct mail more effective. For this reason, I was excited to get this direct mail piece from Symantec. It was all really well done, except the most important piece... the landing page.

THE EPIC MARKETING FAIL

So far so good, very creative/compelling direct mail piece

Upon receiving the letter, I was intrigued by the creative image of broken glass over a Facebook page in the large windowed envelope. The tagline, image and message all sparked my curiosity and made me want to open it. Inside the copy was structured around a new white paper. The twist here, is that they want you to access the white paper by scanning the QR code. Cool, I guess. Even better, the marketers introduced a time constraint: the first 250 people who scan it, win a USB Robot! Awesome.

Clever use of QR code and clear call-to-action with time constraint.

Up to this point I was actually thinking I might have to write a blog on Epic Marketing Wins! And then I saw the landing page...

Enormously long and unecessary form landing page.

Why? Why are you asking me for all of my information when you already have it?! You mailed me a letter, the only possible way I could have got to this landing page is by receiving the letter and scanning the code with my QR reader.

This one is really unfortunate. They almost had a home-run, but instead they struck out by sending a bunch of people to their landing page who will likely abandon it due to an enormous & unnecessary form. Who wants to fill out a huge form on their smartphone? Do they have any idea how hard it is to even click inside those tiny boxes?! [sidenote: it took me almost 4 minutes to fill out all the details. That is a lifetime on a smart phone].

THE UN-FAILURE

I need to give some kudos to Symantec for this campaign. They avoided the clutter of the email inbox and leveraged an under-utilized channel. The creative was compelling and actually creative (unlike a lot of campaigns you see these days), the content was good, and they had a compelling call-to-action.

This campaign demonstrates why marketing is only as strong as its weakest link. You could have the best creative, or the best content, or the best call to action, but if one piece is missing the entire campaign will suffer. In this case it's the landing page. A recent study by Marketo showed that for every field you introduce on your landing pages, your conversion rates decrease by 2%. I would imagine this is multiplied to be even higher on a mobile device.

The thing with this campaign is that it is not even necessary to have a form at all. If the campaign was optimized with a tool like QReate & Track they could have personalized the QR codes for each visitor and therefore automatically have known when each prospect scanned the QR code. Conversion rates would have been much higher, and the experience for the prospects would have been better too.

Ah well, here's to hoping I get my free USB robot in the mail...