“…it maximizes the conversion rates of those pages resulting in more business from less marketing expense.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan of Sully’s Blog

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Justin Talerico is the co-founder and CEO of ion interactive.  Prior to this, he was the founder of ion, an all-digital marketing communications firm with clients such as Samsung, Siemens and Bliss spa.  He was also creative director for the Fairweather Group, a travel & hospitality conglomerate with Caribbean resorts, a national travel magazine & several travel agencies.  Talerico is the co-author of Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Market to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changes and has written for the American Marketing Association, E-Commerce Times, MarketingProfs, iMediaConnection, .Net Magazine (UK), DM News and others.

ion interactive was founded in 1998 and is the leading provider of advanced landing page software that maximizes PPC, email and online advertising performance.  The company’s cloud-based landing page software platform is called LiveBall.  The software creates, tests and optimizes advanced landing experiences.  It quickly creates, optimizes and manages landing pages, microsites and conversion paths.  Clients include Fortune 100 companies as well as small business users.

MO:
LiveBall is the main product focus of ion interactive.  For those less familiar, landing pages are typically the pages users land on after they click a pay-per-click ad or other types of link advertising.  What is it that LiveBall actually accomplishes for businesses using landing pages?

Justin:
LiveBall helps marketing people put very specific content in front of the right people. It creates sophisticated landing pages that make highly effective first impressions on web visitors. And it maximizes the conversion rates of those pages resulting in more business from less marketing expense. As the online marketing world gains more understanding of the value of long-tail, hyper-targeted marketing, it needs a way to make that happen — without interference from arduous processes, outsourcing or the IT department. LiveBall frees marketers from all of that and puts them in direct control of their online marketing funnels. We like to say it frees people of worrying about how things get done, and lets them focus 100% of their energy on what gets done. For most of our customers, that means going from a few landing pages before LiveBall to hundreds or even thousands of sophisticated landing pages, microsites and conversion paths in a very short period of time.

MO:
LiveBall is web based with nothing to install which means it’s instantly available for your clients and really doesn’t require technical skills.  How does it integrate with their existing website?

Justin:
LiveBall becomes part of the top-level domain the same way that blog software does. Our customers create a LiveBall-specific subdomain and point that subdomain at their dedicated LiveBall IP address. For example, our customer American Greetings has their website at the www.americangreetings.com domain and their LiveBall pages at landing.americangreetings.com. For visitors and search engines, it’s all part of the same domain. LiveBall pages can then exist independently of the customer’s website infrastructure, which is the key to making LiveBall so agile. Most websites are change averse, whereas LiveBall was designed from the ground up to encourage change, diversity and experimentation. And it’s that agility that makes it so effective at increasing conversion rates.

MO:
You mention on a video on your site that your clients convert at 4 times the industry average.  That is an astounding number.  Other examples and case studies such as American Greetings showed that  on Mother’s Day alone, LiveBall resulted in $45,000 in incremental revenue.  What are some other results you have seen?

Justin:
We’ve seen conversion rate lift as high as thousands of percent. It is astounding and in many cases it borders on unbelievable. In our marketing we try to temper expectations, but in reality many customers blow that 4x completely out of the water. Of course there are those that don’t make those numbers. LiveBall is a fantastic and pragmatic tool, but it’s still just a tool. In order for it to be effective, it has to be used properly at both the tactical and strategic levels. We provide a range of services ranging from rich onboarding programs to full-service campaign creation and management to help ensure that our customers are successful. In many cases that means teaching them how to fish before we give them the pole. About 60% of our revenue comes from the platform, with the other 40% coming from our services arm.

MO:
Considering you founded a business on post-click marketing, wrote a book on post-click marketing, and blog about post-click marketing, I think it’s safe to assume it’s your passion.  Where did you develop this passion?

Justin:
We were in the software-powered web marketing services business between 1994-2005. During that time, we had the privilege of developing enterprise-scale websites and web marketing programs for many great clients. They taught us that low conversion rates were a universal problem. We began addressing the problem the traditional ways — landing pages, deep links and so on — but we couldn’t generate the lift that we thought was possible. Then we honed in on some of what became the post-click basics — highly specific content, message match, segmentation, honesty — user-focused, content-centric marketing. That became the passion. Once we started to apply those ideas in testing, we saw massive lift in conversion rates. But it was untenable to manage the thousands of pages and tests necessary to make real headway. LiveBall was developed to address that need and make enterprise-scale post-click marketing a resource- and ROI-effective endeavor. Today, post-click is gaining the traction it deserves, but we’re still just scratching the surface of its potential. Conservatively, we see it as a multibillion dollar global market and ion as a $130 million plus company by 2015.

MO:
You have some pretty high profile clients as well.  Many Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies.  How did you go about attracting those big firms?  Does ion interactive utilize online marketing as well?

Justin:
Oh sure, we eat our own dog food. And our online list is abbreviated as many customers don’t want to publicize their secret sauce. We use a mix of paid-search, organic search, email marketing, webinar marketing and offline events to generate leads. We write and present a lot of industry thought leadership both online and off. We use LiveBall to optimize our own conversion rates and pass leads and inbounds into a marketing automation platform and Salesforce.com. We have an ever-growing house list of 30,000+ leads that go into a sophisticated drip (or nurture) marketing campaign. Our leads are segmented into buckets based on what we know about our best customers. That lets us focus on our best prospects with our inside sales team. We actually don’t have true salespeople. We sell to marketers who want to buy from their peers. They need to have intelligent conversations about this stuff, so we put online marketers in salesish roles and it works very well for us. We constantly track and optimize our own marketing from the first dollar spent to the last dollar earned.

MO:
Is LiveBall a solution for small businesses and entrepreneurs looking to maximize their landing pages as well?

Justin:
We have successful customers at the Fortune 100 level as well as the one-man-show level. In fact, some of our case studies are small businesses who run LiveBall with one person. There are a few questions that seem to be good indicators of future success with the platform: Does the business need to create campaign pages? Does the business spend at least $100,000 per year generating online traffic? Or, does the business generate at least 5,000 unique visitors per month from its online marketing efforts? Regardless of business size, if they need to create pages and have the volume necessary to generate strong ROI from LiveBall, then it makes sense. As I said, we have mom & pops that have been happily optimizing on the platform for years. LiveBall is priced based solely on the number of unique visitors sent to it in any given month. So we have traffic tiers down as low at 10,000 uniques and many customers with global deployments in the millions of uniques per month. That pay-for-what-you-use approach has resulted in our diverse customer base.