Customer Acquisition Chain Link 2: Print to Online

March 30, 2012 By Carrie Burns, Cynthia Tully and Dorothy Weaver

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Ad No. 4: The Popcorn Factory's full-page ad featured a specific holiday tin filled with goodies. The link: www.ThePopcornFactory.com/ornament landed us on a page with the same product, price and offer. The easy-to-find "add to cart button" got us to checkout fast.

Ad No. 5: The two-third page ad for a White House Christmas Ornament features a Santa in front of the White House. Link: www.whitehousehistory1.org. The link takes us to a relevant page; however, we're not told what to do in order to buy it. By clicking on the graphic, you're taken to the order form-an unnecessary step. It's easy to improve this one!

Ad No. 6: A half-page ad for Plasma Cam for a robotic product that enables you to cut metal shapes. Link: www.plasmacam.com. The ad talks about a free demo video. The link takes us to a very well done landing page with a link to the free video in the upper right hand corner, a little bit out of the way, but generally OK.

Ad No. 7: A full-page ad for Omaha Steaks featuring a gift assortment for $59.99. Link: www.omahasteaks.com/KYN. The link takes us right to the product page with more detail and a prominent "add to cart." As in their steaks, well done!

Summary and Conclusion: These ads had an acceptable to excellent print-to-online acquisition chain that should not result in consumer frustration and not negatively impact conversions. In our analysis, we came across numerous ads that were in direct conflict with what was on the advertiser's website, such as a different price and the product being extremely difficult to locate. In general, print advertisers need to take a good look at their customer acquisition chain and follow these seven best practices examples.

Next week's article is about the direct mail acquisition chain.

Carrie Burns and Cynthia Tully are vice president account directors and Dorothy Weaver is a vice president of digital marketing services at St. Petersburg, Fla.-based advertising agency acquirgy. Burns can be reached at cburns@acquirgy.com, Tully via ctully@acquirgy.com and Weaver can be contacted at dweaver@acquirgy.com.

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