As recently as a year ago, the percentage of people responding via the Web to one of our campaigns usually hovered around 5 or 10 percent. Today, that rate can be as high as 30 or 40 percent. Clearly, the Web has quickly become the dominant source for business information, and this has influenced the way many people respond to direct marketing.

For this reason, a Web response page should be a standard component of your direct marketing campaigns. Here are a few tips to make your response pages as effective as possible:

1. Don't send prospects to your home page. The obvious risk is that people will search around, print a page or two, and you'll never hear from them again (nor know that they were responding to your campaign.) Always use a specific URL (ex: www.yourcompany.com/freeCD) or even a separate domain (www.freeCD.com).

2. Think of your response page as an electronic business reply card and structure the content accordingly. By all means, reinforce the person's decision to respond (ex: "YES! I want to learn how to increase network performance. Please send me my free ...") but don't bombard him or her with more copy about your product. Provide a form to fill out immediately.

3. Don't display *any* links on the response page itself (ex: "Company," "Products", etc.) Again, the risk is that your prospect will be distracted from identifying himself. (You always have the option of providing these links *after* the person has completed the form.)

4. If the offer is information of some sort, include a scanned photo as a way of making the offer more "real" and tangible.

5. If you're providing the option to download material (ex: PDF files, demo software), require the person to fill out the form first.