Want to know how to post-click? Try this: go into your favorite electronics store (that employs actual salespeople) and start looking at a flat screen TV. Then, pay close attention to how the conversation with the salesman goes. If you're talking with a real salesman -- meaning someone who knows how to sell and not a teenager from the local high school -- he'll find your hot buttons in the course of a seemingly innocent conversation. And he'll also ferret out how serious you are about buying.
All of that will happen in the natural course of a short conversation. And if your salesperson is a good one, that conversation will be one in which you're happy to engage because he's offering valuable information to you in your search for the right flat screen TV. Over the course of those few important minutes, he'll increase your desire to buy and build your trust that he's the guy and his is the store you should be buying from. Hopefully for the salesman and the store, even if you don't buy right then and there, he's built enough rapport that you remember him as the man when you are ready to buy your TV.
Study this method. It's the off-line equivalent of post-click marketing.
When you walked in the store and looked at the TV: that was the click (on a banner, from an e-mail, or from a keyword ad). The subsequent conversation the salesman struck up was the post-click marketing conversion path. Every time he probed your motives and gave you information in return: that was post-click segmentation and trust cycle repetition within the conversion path. As he ferreted out how serious you were: that was post-click grading. And when he asked you to buy and you said no, he made sure to give you his business card anyway. That was a conversion for your re-marketing bucket. Of course if you bought, that would be a full-on conversion.
Post-click applies basic soft-selling methodology to what happens after the click. And although I used an e-commerce example here, it has little to do with what you're selling. Could be B2B lead gen or B2C travel bookings, doesn't matter, treat what happens after the click as a conversation. It works.
—Justin Talerico
