One of the goals of a direct mail marketing campaign is to get your leads to go from looking at their mail to looking at your website. While building an engaging, user-friendly website is essential to your success, sometimes a microsite is the best way to push a specific product, offer, or message.
So, what are microsites? Aspen Automotive finds out! With this rundown, we’ll take a closer look at what makes a microsite, how microsites can be an effective marketing tool, and how you can make them a part of your automotive direct mail marketing campaign.
What Is a Microsite?
As the name suggests, a microsite is a page that’s smaller than your typical website. Microsites are designed for a specific campaign or purpose, such as selling a new product, building brand awareness, or getting leads to sign up for an email list.
Most microsites are temporary, due to the fact that they’re designed for one specific campaign or offer. Since they’re built with branded content that’s meant to serve one purpose, they’re often not associated with the brand’s homepage. However, it’s not unheard of to see the parent company’s URL in the microsite’s address, too.
Difference Between a Microsite and a Landing Page
A short, succinct webpage that’s associated with a marketing campaign and built for a single purpose. Where have you heard that before? If you’re thinking it sounds a lot like a landing page, you’re not alone. However, there are some distinct differences between the two.
For starters, a landing page is just that, one single page. On the flipside, a microsite is a website, so it can contain several pages. Another difference between the two is that landing pages will always be published on the branded parent site. A microsite may be connected to the parent site, but usually they’re independent sites that are posted separately and can stand on their own.
How Microsites Can Help Your Marketing Strategy
Because microsites are constructed around a single idea, offer, or product, they can be used as an effective marketing tool. Incorporating them into your marketing strategy offers a lot of advantages. Some of the benefits of using them in your campaigns include:
- Direct engagement with leads and customers
- Increased conversion rates
- Relevant, customized content
- Easily trackable results
The end game of a microsite is to send visitors down a specific path with a single goal in mind. That gives you a great opportunity to guide them through the buyer’s journey with content that’s customized to your leads and their needs. That kind of direct communication is necessary to draw customers in and to convert leads.
Plus, whether your microsite is meant to sell a new car, get people to sign up for an email list, or schedule service, you can use that data to track your results. With Aspen Automotive and Epsilon by your side, we can use that information to determine what parts of your strategy worked well, what didn’t, and how to design your next campaign around that.
Linking Microsites to a Direct Mail Marketing Campaign
So, how do you make microsites a part of your direct mail marketing campaign? That’s easy. Just use your mailers to grab the reader’s attention and then invite them to your microsite. Some of the ways you can lead the recipients of your mailers to your microsite include:
QR Codes
Quick Response or QR codes have become commonplace in the last few years. Anyone with a smartphone can point their camera, scan, and be on your microsite in just a few seconds. They’re a perfect tool for interested parties to redeem exclusive offers, learn more about you and your business, or enroll in an email list. Putting a QR code on your postcard, newsletter, or dimensional mailer is an easy and convenient way to bring people to your microsite.
Personalized URLs
Another interactive marketing tool that you can include in your mailers is personalized URLs, or PURLs. They’re an excellent way to tailor your message and your microsites to a certain audience. For example, you can send one PURL to a new lead and a different one to a long-time customer. Each PURL can take them to a microsite that’s custom built to speak to where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Both QR codes and PURLs offer an easy path to your microsites. When it comes to your automotive business, they’re a convenient portal to scheduling a test drive, scheduling service, or to learning more about the latest models in your showroom.
Learn More About Using Microsites
Microsites can be used to strengthen your marketing strategy and to improve your upcoming campaigns, which means it’s smart to use them and track their success with every mailer that you send out. To learn more about what microsites are and how you can incorporate them into your automotive marketing strategy, contact Aspen Automotive today.
