Conventional wisdom suggests that a landing page should focus on providing one path and one path only. Either the user converts, or not. This works best for most offers. But what if your particular product or offer has a longer sales cycle, and your marketing campaign is likely driving prospects at various stages of the sales cycle to your landing page.

In this case, the single offer paradigm may be bettered by using more than one conversion option. Create conversion options for each possible stage of the buying cycle.

Consider this example. Prospects the farthest out in the sales funnel may be averse to filling out a full registration form to get a whitepaper. For them, a simple opt-in newsletter may work better. But the mid-stage prospects are beyond the newsletter and will gladly give their information for the information rich document.

How to handle these very different prospects with one page? Put both options on the same landing page. How you count conversions here is important. You can measure each element separately, lump them together, or do both at the same time.

The other option is to set up a “two stage” conversion process. This basically presents the conversion options one after another. First get the user to sign up for one thing, then on the confirmation page, present them with the next. This can work very well because the person has already crossed a mental barrier against providing information after the first step.

Of course the question is, which offer to put first. And that is one that needs to be tested too!

Today’s Wall Street Journal featured an article titled “Call to Action Ads Give Clients Results They Can Measure.” It’s the first time I have seen the Journal embrace something we have known would happen… that the trackability of online marketing has begun to filter into the world of Madison Ave. advertising.

By incorporating website addresses in a television spot, marketers can quickly guage an ad spot’s effectiveness. Companies like Cadillac are running ads and immediately correlating the numbers over to visits on the landing pages created for the TV campaign (see www.cadillacunder5.com for an example.) According to the Journal, Papa John’s is able to track online orders by the hour and can immediately judge a spots effectivess.

The part of the article I found the most compelling was this quote from John Freeland, managing partner at Accenture: “Do they focus on marketing as a management science, or do they treat it as an art form?” And of course the fact that all this stuff is measureable also means that it can be tested and optimized. I wonder if they are doing that too. They certainly should be.

Optimizing a single step process like a landing page gets great results. But if you want to get really incredible improvements, look at optimizing your “multiple step” transactions. Each step you optimize creates an accumulating effect on your end results. Check it out…

For this example, lets look at a newsletter. It’s possible to greatly increase your newsletter subscriber list, with a few simple tweaks and optimizations. Imagine if you could generate 1000 new subscribers a month instead of the current 500. Is this realistic? Absolutely. Almost everyone can achieve these kind of results with a carefully administered test and optimization strategy.

What you do with these ezine subscribers is up to you, but most people use ezines to build their brand as well as promote products and services. Take a typical offer in the newsletter, which pushes people to a landing page on your site. Have you tested and optimized this offer? Imagine you have, and you increased your clickthrough rate from 2% to 4%. Again, totally realistic.

Once they get to your site, they hit a landing page. This is where things get fun- the money is actually made here. Optimization of the landing page has yielded a conversion increase from 2% to 3%.

Lets see what happens to the big picture:

WOW! We went from 4 to 13 sales, by optimizing three steps in the process.

If you read many of the marketing SEO blogs or went to SES NYC, you probably have heard of Eyetools. Their recent research of how people actually see Google search results has been a major hit among search engine marketing practitioners. The Eyetools technology measures how people actually “see” a web page. The result is a multicolored heatmap with varying shades overlaid on a web page, depicting where eyes spend the most time.

Rather than jump on the bandwagon and report how great their Google research is, we’ve found some other nuggets on their site and blog. The best is probably this case study of an actual home page improvement project. Conversion was not their specific goal, but I would like to think that most of their findings could improve conversion rates, especially for internal marketing messages. People can’t click things they don’t even see, which after reviewing their research is quite a bit.

Keep an eye on these guys, their doing some really interesting stuff!

Dr. Ralph Wilson, of Wilsonweb.com fame, has just released the results from his test of the SitePal Avatar system. You can read the full case study in todays “Web Marketing Today” email, or by clicking here.

Sitepal avatars provide an animated flash character intended to “engage” the user. This being the case, Dr. Wilson used Vertster combined with Clicktracks to compare changes in site stickiness caused by the Sitepal avatar. View his full assessment and results.