When you send an email, you want your subscribers to take action. Whether that’s signing up for an event, purchasing a product, or downloading an eBook. Your emails should be designed to inform and incite action.
But it’s not always as simple as this and even the best email can’t do all the work on its own. But creating an equally effective landing page as part of an email marketing automation campaign can help you boost your conversion rates significantly.
Email marketing and well created landing pages are powerful tools on their own. But together, they’re an unstoppable marketing force.
Landing pages work well as part of an email marketing strategy because they create a streamlined flow from one touch point to the next. In this article, we’ll explain how you can use them together to deliver the results you’re looking for.
What are email landing pages and why are they important?
An email landing page is a dedicated page designed to convert visitors into leads after they have been directed there by clicking a link in your email.
Most landing pages are set up to include the following:
- A form for capturing name and email address
- An engaging and relevant call to action (CTA)
- A clean page design with no distractions
But why are landing pages so important to your email marketing campaign? Firstly, they exist purely to move your prospects through the sales funnel, which is why it’s so important to keep them focused. Anything that could act as a distraction to take them out of that journey needs to be removed from the page.
4 key benefits of landing pages
Here are some of the top benefits of using landing pages for your email marketing campaigns:
- Generate more leads and conversions: A relevant and insightful landing page will interest visitors, potentially encouraging them to either give you their details in return for something valuable or share it with friends or colleagues. This will result in a larger email list for you to market to.
- Better customer insights: A landing page can also be a place where you can collect valuable data that you can use to improve your marketing activities in the future. By getting to know your potential customers better and having more in-depth insights into their wants and needs, you can tailor your activities to deliver better results.
- Targeted content: The best landing pages are targeted. This means you can create super-specific content such as messaging, imagery and offers to ensure it resonates with the audience you’re targeting.
- Simple campaign measurement: With only one call to action on a landing page, your analytics become much easier to track. A user only has two options – to complete your desired action or not - so you can see exactly how well your landing page is performing.
That’s why landing pages are important, so here is everything you need to know about landing page best practice to help you get started using them.
10 email landing page best practices for increasing conversions
Once you’ve got people to your landing page through a well-crafted email, you need to get the page design and content right to make sure you don’t waste this opportunity to convert.
1) Know your audience
When undertaking any kind of marketing activity, you always need to have a representative customer in mind – often known as a buyer persona.
Once you know what type of audience you want to attract, it’s much easier to create a landing page that will entice them to provide their details or take action. It also gives you the insight to make adjustments, for example, using larger fonts if your audience is older.
It can be impossible to be specific if you’re working with a large and diverse subscriber list. This is where segmentation is key, because you can split the list into groups that you can target with separate pages.
2) Write captivating headlines
First impressions count. If a prospect clicks on a link in your email and ends up on a page with a headline that either doesn’t capture their interest or - even worse - seems completely irrelevant, you’ll lose them before they get anywhere near your CTA.
Make sure your headline grabs their attention and that what they see when they first land on your page makes them want to scroll.
3) Make your CTA irresistible
Of course, the design and content on your landing page are both important, but they should work to support a CTA that demands to be clicked. As we mentioned earlier, you should have just one CTA on a landing page, making it easy to track your success and to keep it simple.
You’ve brought them to this page for a reason, so make sure your CTA is clear and attention grabbing.
4) Build trust with your audience
No matter how persuasive your content is, it can always help to include some testimonials or reviews from customers to make prospects feel safe and that they can trust you. Authentic user-generated content (UGC) on a landing page can have a big impact for that reason.
UGC - or social proof - can be collated from multiple places including your Instagram feed, review sites such as Trustpilot and other channels before adding them to your email landing page.
5) Don’t ask for too much information
Keeping it simple doesn’t just mean having a single CTA. It also means that if you’re going to ask prospects to fill out a form to claim a deal or sign up for something, you want to avoid over-complicating it.
While it might seem tempting to use this as an opportunity to get to know your audience more, it’s better to hold off as this can come further down the line. Resist the urge to add multiple fields as the more you add, the more likely they are to not want to fill in the form.
Requiring longer to complete the form and asking for too much information can lessen the effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing campaign and deter prospects from not leaving their details.
6) Add the FOMO factor
It’s human nature, we don’t like missing out on a good deal. But if that good deal is around for the long-term, we have no rush to jump in and make a purchase. This is where FOMO (fear of missing out) techniques can come in handy.
This is easily done by running limited and time-sensitive offers that are advertised on your landing page. Using more urgent language such as ‘today’, ‘now’ and ‘don’t miss out’ can help grab the attention of prospects.
7) Make sure it matches your email
We discussed this with your headline, but when it comes to email and landing page copy, repetition is your friend. The messaging on your email and landing page should reflect each other. For example, if your email campaign revolved around signing up for an exclusive discount on your new sofa range, ensure your landing page matches this messaging.
The design of the email and landing page should also have a similar look. While you’ll likely have more design capabilities on a landing page, it’s important that the design is consistent. Consider your colours, branding and font. When subscribers click through to the landing page from the email, this will reassure them that they’re in the right place which acts as a visual cue to follow through with the action.
8) Keep it simple
We really can’t stress this enough. Make it simple but significant. Avoid overcomplicating your landing page – you don’t need tons of text and imagery. To keep attention on the elements that matter, it’s important to stick to the basics.
This could include only featuring the necessary text, branding and buttons to make the page easier to navigate and to cut down on any confusion. A simple landing page encourages your visitors to focus on the prize: your call to action.
9) Use eye-catching images and videos where relevant
Including eye-catching images and videos can up your conversions when used appropriately. In fact, using videos on landing pages can improve conversions by up to 86 percent!
Videos and images attract attention and can communicate your message faster than text. This is essential on a landing page where you want people to stay focused and carry on through to taking the action you’ve brought them here for.
However, it’s critical to ensure that any images or videos used are relevant to the landing page content and describe your product or service in the best way possible. Don’t just use videos for the sake of it, otherwise you risk sabotaging yourself.
10) Test your landing page
Just as you would test your emails to maximise performance, we also suggest testing your landing pages. Testing allows you to make decisions based on data instead of gut instinct.
When it comes to your landing pages, certain elements such as image, text or CTA can be tested to see which resonates best with your audience. A/B testing your landing pages is one of the easiest ways to ensure you’re converting as much traffic as possible.
Wrapping it up
Marketing emails and landing pages go hand-in-hand. A great pairing to supercharge your marketing efforts, email campaigns perform better with custom landing pages and vice versa.
You can find more tips about creating landing pages that will convert as well as some examples of landing pages in this blog from equation, idhl’s specialist paid media agency.
Want to see how you can connect your email marketing and landing pages in Conesso? You can build email campaigns and pages in minutes. Book a demo of our platform to find out more.
