What is conversion scent and why is it important?

Computer scientists compare internet users searching for specific information with animals following the smell or scent of their prey while looking for food! However, animals will follow the ‘scent trail’ only if the smell of the prey or food is strong enough! Interestingly, something similar happens when a visitor clicks on your pay per click ad or responds to your e-mail marketing campaign.

Simply put, ‘conversion scent’ is about maintaining a consistent connection between your source ad—let it be, pay par click ad, banner ad or sidebar ad—and landing page. Strong ‘scent’ ensures that visitors to your landing page get exactly what they expect to find which in turn enhances the rate of conversion—that is, how many visitors are eventually converted to customers. In other words, close similarity between your source ad and landing page would encourage the visitor to become your customer by responding to your call to action—call to action is an instruction such as ‘sign up’, ‘contact us’, ‘call now’ and ‘buy now’ to provoke an immediate response from visitors. This simply means in order to convert a higher number of visitors to customers, you need to ensure a strong ‘scent’—that is, close proximity between your source ad and landing page, in terms of background texture, color, images, logo, headlines and message.  

When planning an online ad campaign—it can be pay par click ad, banner ad or sidebar ad—or any type of marketing strategy that requires visitors to do an ‘action’ online—for example, ‘sign up’, ‘contact us’, ‘call now’ or ‘buy now’—it makes sense to think of your prospects or possible customers as hunting dogs following the scent trail of their prey because a strong and enticing ‘scent’ can play a key role in converting visitors to customers.

In a nutshell, ‘conversion’ is the process of converting visitors of your ad campaign or website or those who respond to your e-mail campaign to your customers by encouraging them to respond to your call to action.

Successful online conversion works backwards from the desired action that potential customers should take and ensures that every link in the chain leads visitors towards your call to action and in every step in the process your message maintains the same ‘scent’ so that it would result in better conversion.

The word ‘scent’ points to what you are attempting to project and convey through your online marketing campaign and what purpose it serves for your prospects or prospective customers. This means while crafting an online conversion campaign, you need to ensure continuity from the source ad to the landing page in terms of words, graphics and colors and consistently position key elements such as logo and the call to action—whether it is ‘sign up’, ‘contact us’, ‘call now’ or ‘buy now’—at the expected spot in order to make it easy for your visitors to continue on the path you want them to take.

Also, you need to choose a pleasant, attractive and high-visibility color to depict the call to action so that it will easily catch the visitor’s attention and make sure you are not deviating from that color as the conversion process progresses.

It is also important not to introduce competing elements—images or written text—in close proximity during the process of leading your prospects to your goal—whether it is to encourage the visitor to make a purchasing decision or to turn the visitor to a ‘hot lead’ or a possible customer.

The landing page that results from clicking on the source ad must contain the same verbiage that is in the ad, especially the name of your product or service. You must also ensure that you are using the language of the customer, not industry jargon. As a marketer, you should discover what words your customers use to describe your product or service by actively listening to them. For this, you need to pay attention to the words customers use when they send an e-mail query or ask questions in support forums or talk to you directly. Using customers’ own language in your source ad and repeating the same in your landing page would result in strong and enticing ‘scent’. 

Graphics, including background texture, logos and call to action buttons must be consistent across the stages of the conversion process. If you use a picture of a rabbit or a tennis racket in source ad, use the same visual on the page that it links to and on every successive page displayed during the conversion process. It also makes sense to ensure consistency in terms of the font and formatting of headline and text across the source ad and the landing page. The idea is to ensure your landing page is delivering exactly what your source ad has promised.

Often, visitors follow a hub and spoke model while searching for specific information online. The hub can be a search engine like Google or a social site like Facebook or twitter from where they hit a trigger, for example a banner ad, and follow the trail as long as they feel confident that they are on the path to the desired outcome. If they feel they are not on the right path at any point during the search, they will return to the hub and try to track another trail till they find the desired outcome. Whether a visitor is following a particular spoke and eventually make a call to action would depend on the consistency, attractiveness and strength of the ‘scent’.

For example, if your banner ad talks about exotic chocolates and your landing page displays information on online lottery, the visitor is sure to get disgusted and drop off or go back to the initial hub to continue the search. This means, considering the limited attention span of the visitor, every stage in the conversion process should not only reinforce the ‘scent’ captured in the source ad but enhance it.

Broadly, there are two kinds of scents—these are scents related to design and benefits. While crafting and designing your landing page, it is important to ensure that all the design elements—including color, layout, font and imagery—are consistent with your source ad. Also, you need to ensure that your landing page offers the same benefits that the source ad has offered. For example, if your company runs a payments platform offering mobile wallet and your sidebar ad is offering pay back for purchases made through the wallet, your landing page too should reinforce, explain and elaborate the benefits promised in the ad. Besides, if you make an offer in an ad, maintain the ‘scent’ of that offer from the ad to the landing page. An easy way to do this is by exactly replicating the content and visuals in your source ad in your landing page.

Another key factor that would make the scent strong and effective is using specific words that capture the uniqueness and quality of your product rather than using generic descriptions to explain your offering in your source ad and landing page. It is important to note that ‘product’ or ‘service’ is too generic and translates to a weak scent. For example, if you want customers to subscribe to an online monthly expense planner, you can talk about how the tool will actually help reduce their monthly expense in a measurable way. For instance, if the planner helps customers cut expenses by 30 per cent through better control on how they spend money and the ability to monitor their cash outflow through various means through a single window, your source ad should talk about that. The 30 per cent cut in expense is more easily measurable and hence an attractive hook, translating to a strong scent, than presenting your offering as just another expense planner.

When customers click a link or source ad, they have certain ‘expectations’ in their mind. The idea is not to do anything to break or diminish those expectations—a strong scent will progressively enhance customers’ expectations at each stage of the conversion process.

Also, the scent doesn’t have to end with a single visit. E-mails, newsletters, RSS and forums, etc can provide additional ways for you to leave a scent trail by encouraging visitors to return to your landing page.

Customers search the web when there is a specific need for finding out something. Therefore, visitors clicking on your pay per click ad naturally have a desire to follow a ‘scent’. So it makes sense to reinforce and ‘spread’ the scent in order to turn a sizable number of your visitors into customers.