Monthly Archives: April 2012

Why Landing Pages Are an Indispensable Part of Marketing | Cross River NY Real Estate

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Any savvy inbound marketer “gets” that once you’ve done all that hard work to get visitors to your website, the next big step is to convert them into leads for your business. But what’s the best way to get them to convert? Landing pages, that’s what!

Unfortunately, there seems to be a major disconnect between the importance of landing pages and their use by marketers. According to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business’ homepage, not a special landing page. Furthermore, of the B2B companies that are using landing pages, 62% have six or fewer total landing pages.

Landing pages are the heart and soul of an inbound marketer’s lead generation efforts, so why are they still so underutilized? MarketingSherpa cites that the number one reason businesses don’t use landing pages is because their marketing department doesn’t know how to set them up or they are too overloaded.

But let’s put a stop to this, shall we, marketers? Landing pages are much too critical to the success of your lead generation efforts to sweep under the rug, and here’s why.

What is a Landing Page?

First, let’s start with a simple definition:

A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead-capture form (AKA a conversion form).

A good landing page will target a particular audience, such as traffic from an email campaign promoting a particular ebook, or visitors who click on a pay-per-click ad promoting your webinar. You can build landing pages that allow visitors to download your content offers (ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), or redeem other marketing offers such as free trials, demos, or coupons for your product. Creating landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, while also capturing information about who they are and what they’ve converted on.

How Landing Pages Work

For a more complete understanding of how landing pages make visitor-to-lead conversions (and reconversions) possible, let’s talk through a hypothetical scenario that will help demonstrate the simple pathway of a visitor into a lead through a landing page.

Let’s say you own a professional painting business, and your services include a variety of professional indoor and outdoor paint jobs. You’re a savvy inbound marketer, so you maintain a business blog that features articles about painting tips and tricks. You also have several more premium marketing offers like free educational ebooks on painting and free, no-obligation painting consultations.

Now let’s say a mother was looking for a professional painter to paint her new baby-to-be’s nursery but was first doing some research into color schemes. She comes across your blog post entitled “10 Popular Nursery Room Color Schemes for 2012” as a result of a Google search, and she clicks through to read it. When she reaches the bottom of the article, she notices a call-to-action (CTA), which is essentially an ad, for one of your offers — a free painting consultation to help her decide which color scheme would work best with the size and type of nursery she’s working with. “That would be valuable,” she thinks, clicking on the CTA and visiting the landing page where she can sign up for her free consultation.

The landing page provides some additional information and details about what she will get out of the free consultation, convincing her it’s worth providing her contact information on the landing page’s conversion form in order to take advantage of the offer. She submits her information, and voila! — she’s now a viable lead for your painting business with whom you can easily follow up! What’s more, she wants you to follow up with her. How fantastic does that sound?

And this isn’t the only pathway through which a visitor can travel to convert into a lead. In addition to search, visitors can find your site and its landing pages through a number of marketing channels including email, social media, PPC, direct traffic, or referral traffic. Furthermore, they can find your landing pages through calls-to-action you place throughout your website, or directly as a result of you sharing the link to those landing pages in these other marketing channels.

They key, as a marketer, is to create these landing pages in the first place, and make it easy for potential customers to find them in your various marketing efforts.

6 Reasons You Need Landing Pages

Still not convinced that landing pages can make your marketing and lead generation efforts more effective? Here are 6 more compelling reasons:

1) Easily Generate Leads! If you could do one thing right now to drastically improve your lead generation efforts, it would be to use landing pages on your website. As we mentioned earlier, too many companies send their email, social media, and search traffic to their homepages. This is the equivalent of throwing leads away. You could capture these leads at a much higher rate simply by sending them to targeted landing pages. Landing pages provide a very easy way to generate leads for your sales team that you can then easily segment, nurture, or distribute to your sales team.

2) Give Your Offers a Place to Live: Marketing offers and landing pages go hand in hand. Just think back to our painting business example. Without being gated behind landing pages, your offers will do nothing to support your lead generation efforts. The idea is to require your website visitors to ‘pay’ you in contact information for something valuable like an offer, and your landing page is the collections tool.

3) Collect Demographic Information About Your Prospects: Every time a lead completes a conversion form on a landing page, your marketing and sales team is collecting valuable information about your leads. Your marketing team can then use this information to understand what types of visitors or marketing personas are converting, and your sales team already has a baseline of information about a lead before they reach out.

4) Understand Which Prospects Are More Engaged: Landing pages not only enable you to generate new leads; they also allow you to track reconversions of existing leads, which you can then use to identify which prospects are more engaged with your business. This also enables you to collect better intelligence on your leads’ behaviors and activities on your website, which your sales team can use in the sales process.

 

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5) Provide Fuel for Other Marketing Channels: A successful inbound marketing strategy relies on content — and lots of it. Landing pages are a great addition to any marketer’s content arsenal since they can be shared in social media, used as the focus of dedicated email sends and in lead nurturing campaigns, be linked to in PPC ads, and get found in organic search.

6) Offer Insights Into the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Offers: Every time you create a landing page, you’re creating another data asset for your marketing program. By tracking and analyzing the metrics associated with your landing pages, you can collect a lot of insight into your marketing performance, such as how your various marketing offers compare, how visitors and leads are converting on your landing pages over time, and more. This gives you powerful insight that can help you optimize and improve your marketing. 

 

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Key Components of an Effective Landing Page

Okay, so now you understand what a landing page is, how they work to facilitate lead generation, and why you absolutely, positively need them. But what does a landing page look like? We have a full blog article that dives into a more detailed anatomy of a successful landing page based on industry best practices, but for now, let’s just briefly review a landing page’s main components. Refer to the numbers in the image below:

  1. Headline: The headline is the first thing visitors will likely see when they ‘land’ on a landing page. A great landing page headline sums up the offer as clearly and concisely as possible, and answers the question, “What will visitors who convert on this page receive?”
  2. Copy: The text on a landing page should explain the value of the offer clearly, simply, and in a compelling way. Bullet points can be used to demonstrate clear takeaways, break up large blocks of text, and keep it brief and succinct.
  3. Keywords: Like any other inbound marketing content, keywords should be used in the page title, headers, and text on a landing page to optimize it for search engines.
  4. Social Sharing Buttons/Links: These links enable visitors to easily share a landing page with their connections on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, extending the reach of your landing page beyond your own network of contacts, fans, and followers.
  5. Hidden Navigation: A landing page on which any top/side navigation bars are hidden will minimize distractions, reduce friction, decrease a landing page’s bounce rate, and increase the chances that visitors will stay on the page and convert.
  6. Lead-Capture/Conversion Form: The most critical component of any landing page, the lead-capture or conversion form is where page visitors submit their information in exchange for the offer, converting them into coveted sales leads.
  7. Image: Landing pages that include a relevant image give visitors a tangible idea of what they’ll receive and make landing pages much more visually appealing.

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Thank-You Pages and Email Responders

Landing pages should always be followed up by what’s called a ‘thank-you page,’ that confirms receipt of the lead’s information and either provides the offer, or details the next steps for receiving the offer. For example, if the landing page was offering an ebook, the thank-you page might provide the link to access the ebook. If the offer was the free painting consultation we discussed earlier, it might provide a message that someone would be in touch with the lead to schedule the consultation. 

Thank-you pages can also be accompanied by an automated email response that sends the offer or next steps in an email message triggered by the landing page form completion. This is especially helpful if the offer is something like a live webinar that will take place at a later date/time, and you want the lead to easily be able to save information such as log-in credentials.

The critical role of the thank-you page and the email response is to make sure the lead is never left hanging or wondering what will happen next.

The More Landing Pages You Have, The Better!

We mean it! Put simply, the more landing pages you create, the more opportunities you’ll have to convert visitors into leads.

via blog.hubspot.com

GDP report mixed for U.S. households | Katonah NY Real Estate

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Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 2.2% in the first quarter of 2012, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

In the fourth quarter of 2011, real GDP increased 3%. Despite the slowdown, economist are still positive that the current economic recovery, while slow, is on a sustainable path.

“Despite the weak start to the year, the economy appears solid,” said Scott Hoyt, senior director of consumer economics, Moody’s Analytics. “Looking beyond temporary factors, GDP appears to be growing at an annual rate near 2.5%. While hardly a boom pace, this is strong enough to expand employment and reduce joblessness especially as some of the current drags wane in the second half of the year.”

The increase in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures, exports, private inventory investment, and residential fixed investment, the report said. These positives were partly offset by negative contributions from federal government spending, nonresidential fixed investment, and state and local government spending.

According to Capital Economics, the report is mixed for the nation’s households. The economics firm found real personal disposable incomes rose only 0.4%.

“Households were only able to increase their spending at that pace by running down their saving rate to 3.9% in the first quarter from 4.5% in the quarter before,” said senior economist Paul Ashworth in an emailed reaction to GDP. “The warm winter weather undoubtedly explains some of the massive 19.1% annualized jump in residential investment.”

GDP is a meausre of the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States. Reports are compiled under the auspices of the Commerce Department. And despite being a national economic report, global events still weigh on its outcome.

“There are numerous threats to this relatively optimistic baseline outlook: a rise in oil and gasoline prices, a rekindled European debt crisis, a deeper housing crash, more federal fiscal drag than expected and a harder landing in China and other emerging-market economies,” Hoyt added.

“But most of these possibilities feel less threatening than they did a few months ago,” he said.

via housingwire.com

Sellers Get More from Cash from Cleaning | Pound Ridge NY Homes

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Cleaning and decluttering will garner sellers a 403 percent return on their investment when they sell their homes this spring compared to a 293 percent return for electrical and plumbing upgrades and 196 percent for staging.

The results from HomeGain’s annual 2012 D-I-Y Home Improvements for Sellers spiked a few myths about what improvements pay off in marketing homes today. Nearly 500 real estate agents nationwide participated in the survey to determine the top 10 low cost, do-it-yourself home improvements for people getting their home ready to sell.

Cleaning and de-cluttering continues to rank as the top suggested home improvement (since the survey was originally conducted in 2003). This low cost home improvement is recommended by 99 percent of real estate professionals. The average recommended cost is $402 with a returning value of just over $2,000 to the home’s sale price, or a 403 percent return.

In past surveys, home staging and lightening and brightening were battling it out for the number two spot on the top 10 list. In the 2011 survey, lightening and brightening reclaimed the number two position and held on to it in 2012. Home staging, however, fell to the number five position this year behind landscaping the yard and repairing electrical and/or plumbing.

The three least remunerative improvements were painting the interior (107 percent ROI), improving kitchens and bathrooms (66 percent ROI) and painting the exterior (55 percent ROI).

via realestateeconomywatch.com

Sand States Rebound, Atlanta Falls Farther Behind | Bedford Corners NY Homes

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Atlanta had the only double-digit negative annual price decline falling 17.3 percent below February 2010 in the latest S&P/ Caser-Shiller Home Price Index.

January marked the fifth consecutive month of double-digit negative returns for Atlanta and the lowest

annual return in Case-Shiller’s 20-year history.  On the other hand, only three metros-Miami, Phoenix and San Diego, all located in the four traditional “sand states” that just  two years ago accounted for more than half of all foreclosures-were the only to register positive monthly returns over January.

“Phoenix and Atlanta stand out this month in terms of their contrasting relative strength and weakness in the early 2012 housing market. At one end of the spectrum, we have Atlanta posting a double-digit, and lowest negative annual rates and seven consecutive monthly declines. On the other hand, Phoenix has posted two consecutive months of positive annual rates, with its latest being +3.3 percent, and five consecutive positive monthly returns,” said David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Indices.

Blitzer said Phoenix may be turning around but it has a long way to go to regain the equity that has been lost.  It is still down 54.2 percent from its peak in 2007.

Five of the 20 MSAs tracked by Case-Shiller saw positive annual returns – Denver, Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis and Phoenix. Nine MSAs — Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Las Vegas, New York, Portland, Seattle and Tampa — and both Composites posted new index lows in February 2012. These were the same cities that posted index lows last month. Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit and Las Vegas continue to have average home prices below their January 2000 levels.

via realestateeconomywatch.com

Buyers Walk the Walk | Chappaqua NY Homes

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What’s wrong with this picture? Attracted by super affordable prices, buyer walk-in traffic is up and tons of prospective homebuyers are kicking tires across the nation during this spring sales season. Inventories are at record lows, which should strengthen prices if you believe in supply and demand. So why are sales plummeting and prices not rising as hoped?

NAR reported Friday that existing home sales are down 2.1 percent from last month, not necessarily a big deal until you realize those are March numbers when sales are supposed to rise. Prices, however, are not doing what is expected of them. The Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey says they are falling just when optimists had hoped spring sales would boost the housing economy into the black and begin the long awaited recovery. NAR had March prices up 2.5 percent over a year ago.

According to the Campbell survey, home prices for non-distressed properties fell 5.7 percent from March 2011 to March 2012. Prices for damaged REOs fell 5.7 percent and for move-in ready REOs, prices fell 2.5 percent during the same one-year period. And for short sales, prices fell 14.3 percent, year-over-year. The total share of distressed properties in the housing market in March, as represented by the HousingPulse Distressed Property Index (DPI), was 47.7 percent, using a three-month moving average. This was the 25th month in a row that the DPI has been above 40 percent. .

Both NAR and the Campbell survey report that the buyers are pounding the pavement and looking at houses. NAR’s monthly survey of Realtors found foot traffic up from 38 to 58 percent since the first of the year and the Campbell survey’s traffic indicies for current homeowners and investors last month were even higher than those recorded when the federal homebuyer’s tax credit was offered in 2009 and 2010.

Yet they’re not buying. NAR’s Lawrence Yun blames the low inventory. “We were expecting a seasonal increase in home listings, but a lack of inventory has suddenly become an issue in several markets with not enough homes for sale in relation to buyer interest,” Yun said. “Home sales could be held back because of supply factors and not by demand – we’re already seeing this in the Western states and in South Florida.”

Listed inventory is 21.8 percent below a year ago. HousingPulse found that real estate agents reported housing inventories well below levels seen a year ago, with an especially acute shortage of attractive properties in good locations. HousingPulse found that real estate agents reported housing inventories well below levels seen a year ago, with an especially acute shortage of attractive properties in good locations.

With nearly half of the market being distressed, we’re a long way from a return to a normal market,” said Thomas Popik, research director at Campbell Surveys. “Agents responding to our survey say that homeowners with well-maintained properties in good locations are very reluctant to list at today’s prices. That’s why inventory is low-and also why forced REO and short sales are such a big proportion of the remaining market.

So, inventories are low because sellers don’t want to list their homes when prices are so low. Low inventories are supposed to be a good thing because they strengthen prices. Instead, they are driving away demand because buyers don’t see anything they like. Also, as chary sellers pull out of the market, distress sales acquire too large a market share. Falling sales and too many distress sales combine to lower prices even more. So more sellers flee, inventories shrink even more, more buyers walk, sales fall more the distress sale market share gets even bigger, prices fall even farther. Go figure.

via realestateeconomywatch.com

Single Family Rentals Now Exceed Multifamily | Armonk NY Homes

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While inventories of homes for sale have been shrinking this spring, MLSs are filling the void with rental listings for single family homes that until recently were foreclosures. Some 16.1 percent of all listings on MLSs today are rentals, more than double the number in 2006.

Single family rentals are $3 trillion business today and growing as investors turn to single family home sellers and opt to rent out the bargains they buy until prices improve. Today the single family rental market accounts for 21 million rental units or 52 percent of the entire residential rental market, according to a new study by CoreLogic economist Sam Khater.

Yet the single family rental market is poorly understood and almost invisible to economists and journalists because virtually all rental market data tracks multifamily properties and either ignores the single family segment or lumps it together with multifamily.

“Single family rentals are very distinct from multifamily and they behave very differently,” said Khater in an interview with Real Estate Economy Watch. For example, on a per unit basis, rents for single family rentals run 1.5 to 1.6 times higher than multifamily. Unlike multifamily, millions of single family rentals are listed on MLSs by real estate brokers, many of who represent new owners in acquiring investment properties. As the for-sale inventory has trended down since 2005, the rental share rose 13.3 percent last year alone. As of the end of last year rental closings were up 11.5 percent year-over-year while prices fell 9.8 percent during the year. Demand is strong. The national average months’ supply for single family rentals was 4.5 months in December compared to 6.2 months for homes listed for sale.”

Another important difference is the nature of the tenants. Single family rentals, usually stand-alone properties in ownership settings, appeal more to families. In fact, the typical SFR tenant is a family that has just left a foreclosure and can afford to pay the rent on a former foreclosure but could not make the mortgage payment on their old home, perhaps because they bought with alternative financing or purchased at the peak and could not get a modification when their home lost value. Over the past five years, foreclosures have turned more than 3 million homeowners into renters. Typical multifamily tenants, however, are younger, generally single and more mobile, and have never owned a home.

Khater found a strong relationship between distress sales markets and single family rentals. Census data shows a correlation between single family rentals and the hardest hit areas of the so-called “sand states”-Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada. Investors buying REOs and short sales in foreclosure markets convert them to rental units and homeowners in the same locale who have lost their homes to foreclosure rent homes that until recently were owned by other families who suffered the same ill fortune.

via realestateeconomywatch.com

U.S. home values rise the most in six years: Zillow | North Salem NY Real Estate

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U.S. home values edged up 0.5% from February to March, making it the largest monthly increase in six years, real estate data firm Zillow ($33.45 0%) said in its latest home value index.

The data arrived the same week as Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller national indices report.

The S&P Case-Shiller note, which measures real estate data further out, said home values in nine metro areas reached record lows. S&P reported that its 10-city composite index experienced an annual home-price decline of 3.6% in February, while the 20-city composite index declined 3.5% from a year earlier.  

Zillow, which evaluates home prices in 30 markets using its value index, reported that nineteen markets have either reached a bottom in home prices or are expected to hit bottom by year’s end. 

Optimism is spreading over markets like Phoenix and Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, with Zillow estimating home price increases of 6.5% and 5.6%, respectively, in the two cities over the next year or so.

Nationally, home prices are expected to remain flat over the next 12 months, with values reaching a bottom in late 2012 and falling approximately 0.4% from the first quarter of 2012 to the first period of 2013, Zillow said.  

Metro areas like Chicago and Atlanta, on the other hand, are expected to see home price declines in the 3.8-to-4.1% range over the next 12 months.

“For people who have been waiting to time their home purchase close to market bottom, it’s time to start shopping,” said Zillow chief economist Dr. Stan Humphries. “When the bottom will hit will vary by market, and it’s nearly impossible to time a purchase exactly right. But home prices are not the only part of the equation. Buyers also should take into account the possibility that rising mortgage rates could offset any further home value declines that may occur.”

via housingwire.com

MA, NY attorneys general launch foreclosure prevention programs | Mt Kisco NY Real Estate

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Two high-profile attorneys general revealed how they will use part of their respective state’s portion of the $25 billion national mortgage servicing settlement.

On Wednesday, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley launched an initiative intended to prevent unnecessary foreclosures. Titled HomeCorps, the program increases the amount of loan modification specialists available to distressed borrowers and provides grant opportunities to ease the foreclosure crisis in the state.

Coakley is using the $44.5 million paid to Massachusetts as part of the national settlement with the five largest mortgage servicers. As part of the settlement, signed earlier this month by a federal judge, the banks are ordered to provide $14.6 million in cash payments to Bay State borrowers and $257 million worth of mortgage relief across the Commonwealth.

The first part of HomeCorps dedicates about $16 million to providing loan modification, representation and recovery assistance to distressed borrowers in Massachusetts facing foreclosure. Applications for grant programs in connection with the initiative were launched earlier in April. The second part of the program provides up to $10 million for crisis response and housing restoration.

Also on Wednesday, about 200 miles west, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman awarded $3 million in foreclosure prevention services to aid New Yorkers struggling through the foreclosure crisis.

Two million dollars will be funded by a $4 million agreement with Steven J. Baum and Pillar Processing as part of a settlement with New York State related to abuses in their foreclosure-related legal work.

The Baum firm was the largest foreclosure firm in New York state until it ceased most of its operations in late 2011 in the wake of the robo-signing scandal. Between 2007 and 2010, the Baum firm filed more than 100,000 foreclosure proceedings and represented many of the largest servicers of residential mortgage loans, according to the AG’s office.

Another $1 million of the $3 million allocation will be funded by unspent dollars from a settlement between the Attorney General’s Office and Ameriquest Mortgage. That investigation found that Ameriquest engaged in predatory and illegal lending practices to sell and refinance mortgages.

This comes weeks after Schneiderman designated $15 million of the $132 million his state secured from the national mortgage servicing settlement to extend funding for foreclosure prevention. Up to $9 million of that will support the state’s Foreclosure Prevention Services Program, which was set to expire April 1, and $6 million will support housing and community renewal activities statewide through not-for-profit community-based housing organizations.

An average of one in 10 mortgages is at risk of foreclosure in New York, Schneiderman noted. The Empire Justice Center projects that if foreclosures of currently distressed properties continue unabated, they will cost local governments in the state more than $5 billion.

In Massachusetts, more than five million people across the nation lost their homes to foreclosure during this economic crisis, including more than 45,000 people in Massachusetts, and thousands more are on the brink of foreclosure. According to the Warren Group, in February alone there were 1,394 foreclosure starts in Massachusetts, more than double the amount in February 2011.

“Our office worked hard to ensure the best possible outcome for Massachusetts borrowers from this national settlement,” Coakley said. “These new programs will now allow us to further assist distressed borrowers and stabilize communities deeply impacted by the foreclosure crisis.”

via housingwire.com