Behind every email signup is a prospective customer waiting for persuasion.

If you are an outdoor plant enthusiast, the beginning of gardening season means that you’ll likely be visiting a garden centre to pick up a few supplies and to scope out new plants in preparation for building your perennial summer oasis.

For Hunters Garden Centre, spring is the perfect season to kick off a digital coupon promotion that will capture and convert new customers. Attracting these customers early in the season can result in repeat business as they drop in for supplies throughout the next 6-8 months of peak gardening season, and possibly for many years after that.

One of the ways they actively nurture repeat business is through their existing email newsletter program, so we designed a landing page with a strong value proposition: users sign up in exchange for a downloadable coupon. On top of increasing new subscribers for their mailing list, this campaign’s strategy also worked to drive foot traffic.

Hunter’s Garden Centre’s coupon campaign is a great example of message matching. Here is a performance recap, compiled during the first 3 months of the campaign:

The Programmatic Display campaign’s CTR is a healthy 0.35%
Google’s industry-wide benchmark is 0.03% for their display network in Canada. Our Ad Traffickers know what they are doing. This is a strong number for brand impression.

The Landing Page conversion rate for the campaign period is a respectful 0.45%
According to Unbounce, the average rate in the broad home improvement category is between 1.4% to 3.3%. There’s still a way to go, but this is a good start for capturing leads whose motivation to act may have been diluted if these users had been sent to the more general-purpose homepage.

Conversion rate metrics aside, every lead counts. If your average customer purchase value is $100 and you gained 15 leads in the campaign’s first month, your potential ROI would be $1500 minus your discount offer. And that’s not counting future repeat visits. When you make a head-turning value proposition to your audience, 15 leads per month doesn’t seem too far out of reach now, does it?

Every new campaign needs its own benchmark to help marketers plan future growth strategies. Improving the conversion rate requires a science-like approach. We have to form hypotheses and test them to garner results that will either validate or disprove assumptions.

Here are some things you can do to test and optimize conversion:

  • Try different offers
  • Change the button colour
  • Modify your copy or try different images
  • Change the visual flow by switching the placement of elements

Test each variant change one flight at a time to get segmented insights on what works for your audience. For more tips, download these 101 tips for landing page optimization or read more about the benefits of message matching.


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