One Link Sabotaged Your Email Ad

It was with great joy when I read the letter stating the 40 acre tract next to my house was being preserved and managed by the Audubon Society. But the woodpeckers who moved in to this wildlife protection zone don’t realize their 40 acre tract has a boundary – and that my home stands outside the boundary. So, it was with great interest when I saw the ad for the “FIRST Indoor-Use Bird Deterrent” in an email from a facilities industry magazine. I clicked to learn more and was brought to the company’s home page, which was a confounding maze of dozens of different products for controlling every type of pest from insects to rodents to birds of all kinds.

Best-selling products, in-action videos, testimonials and more were featured. But when everything gets the highlight treatment then nothing really stands out. There was no mention of the FIRST Indoor-Use Bird Deterrent anywhere. I clicked and clicked and clicked until I found it. Most prospects would’ve clicked the back button two clicks earlier. A marketing assistant measuring the number of leads per impression or cost per lead based on the ad rate might conclude the advertising didn’t work when in reality, all they needed to do was include a deep link bringing people directly to the product instead of merely to the home page. There’s no way to know exactly how many potentially happy customers clicked on the ad and left.

Many factors influence whether an ad campaign gets deemed successful. In this case, the company selected the right media to tell its most likely prospects about its new product, devised effective ad copy and created a product-specific Web page with a video demonstration. They just forgot to make it easy for the prospect to find it. With all the time, effort and cost involved in getting a new product to the point where it can be marketed and sold, it’s sad when something as simple as linking to the proper Web page in the call to action is overlooked and response is affected accordingly.