5 Ways to Improve Your Email Landing Pages

How many e-mails do you get per day? I get a lot. Thanks in part due to priority inbox, I get to the important ones, and leave the others for “later.” 

Later = never in most cases. 

Last month Chris Hosford over at BtoB Marketing magazine said, “as email inboxes become more cluttered, marketers find themselves grappling with declining click-through rates.” So, of the click-throughs you are getting, what are you doing to maximize your chances for conversion?

Whether you’re looking to nurture leads, or capture a sale, sending visitors to a targeted landing page will increase your likelihood of getting the visitor to do what you want. 

5 Ways to Improve Email Landing Pages

1. Unlike a pay-per-click ad, your email is likely branded with your colors, fonts and logo. This increases the need for a direct match between your “ad” (the email) and your landing page. If the two don’t match, your bounce rate is likely to be high. Be sure there is a clear match between the two.
    
2. The offer you make in your e-mail should be clearly paid off on the landing page. Do you promise a coupon for 15% off? Have a quickly printable coupon for 15% off on the landing page. Not 10% off, or buy one get one free,  it has to be 15% off to increase trust and relevancy. This is a basic landing page tip, but an important reminder. 
    
3. Have a mobile-optimized landing page. With the sheer number of people who check email on their mobile devices today, it only makes sense to have a mobile-optimized landing page to capture those visitors. (Grab our free Top 10 Mobile Tips guide)
    
4. Offer content for “free” on the landing page. If you’re using email marketing to drive downloads of a white paper or some other content, don’t require a reg form. You already have the persons contact information, so offer it for free. Simply track the download activity for your lead scoring.
    
5. Make your landing pages social. Most e-mails are very brand focused, instead try adding in more social or humanizing elements to start a conversation. You could try something as simple as including a Facebook button and inviting people to join you there where they can receive deals in their news stream. I know I don’t check every email in my inbox but I pretty consistently check my Facebook news stream, maybe your customers or leads do too. 

You can further increase the click-though rate and conversion rate of your email campaigns by learning from the information that got the person to opt-in in the first place. Look at the source, if it’s from a landing page or reg form - did they segment on either? If so, use that information to personalize your message. 

For instance, if you ask your visitors to segment on the landing page by small business or enterprise, you can use that information to tailor your subject line to increase clicks, and also tailor your message to drive traffic to the email landing page. Then based on that information you can better choose what content or offers would be most relevant to the recipient, and tailor the offer to better increase your chances for winning the conversion. 

It’s all about segmentation and personalization! The more specifically you can speak to someone, the better the chances are you can persuade them to take your desired action.

What are you doing to increase click-through and conversion rates in your email marketing campaigns? Leave a comment below and share!

Hooray, we fell into the correct segment!

Beautifully branded and well-segmented landing pages make marketers happy.

But, what do visitors think?

Credit: Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising blog

Well, maybe your best prospects don’t actually jump in the air, high-fiving each other, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel like doing it somewhere deep down inside. 

After all, you just helped them find on-target content and offers, really fast. And that’s exciting!

…Or maybe as marketers we have an unusual list of activities we find exciting….

Choose your own adventure landing pages

Seth Godin wrote a post not long ago called, Just Looking. In it he writes, “The prospect who walks up to the salesperson and says, ‘I’m looking for a pinstripe suit in size 38’ is a lot more likely to walk out with a suit than the one who mutters, ‘No thanks, just looking.’” However, a good salesperson and a good landing page can turn the “no thanks, just looking” prospect into a “pinstripe suite, size 38 please.” 

The salesperson would do this through a series of friendly questions, and the landing page does it much the same way.

Choose your own adventure

It’s not uncommon for people to make generic searches that lead to generic ads that send them to generic landing pages.

These generic visitors are the people who initially say to the salesperson, “no thanks, just looking” but actually have an idea of what they want in the back of their minds. The salesperson or the landing page just needs to help the visitor realize what it is he or she wants. This can be easily done through segmentation, or a series of quick choices.

Perhaps your landing page visitors don’t yet know they want a pinstripe suit in size 38, but you can help them get there by asking:

Solid Color | Pinstriped

I know my size | I don’t know my size

and so on.

Then, by the time you ask for the conversion, the visitor feels invested enough to want to make the purchase.

Think of it like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. The reader got to choose what would happen next to the characters in the book as they went along the journey; the series of choices made by the reader led to a number of different endings all within the confines of one narrative.

Segmentation on the landing page works the same way. For example, in the iomega Choose Your Own Adventure, the visitor is making choices about what kind of storage solution to buy. The first choice he must make is: home or office?

He chooses office and clicks through to a page specifically created to talk about office storage options. Now the viewer must decide: 1TB or 2TBs?

What will he choose? What choices do your visitors need to make to find the right product on your landing pages?

21 landing page tips shared in #CROchat this year

Image created by #CROchat contributor, @gatzseoIt’s been eight months since we all started gathering on Thursdays at 10am PT/ 1pm ET to discuss conversion optimization in #CROChat. We’ve shared advice on testing, design, personas and more in both the lead gen and ecommerce spaces. And now it’s time to step back and reflect.

#CROchat will be taking a brief pause through the end of the year, and will return with fresh energy and ideas in 2011. That doesn’t mean though we shouldn’t still use the #CROchat tag to talk with each other and share conversion marketing tips. We must never stop sharing and learning! I’ll still frequently be using the #CROChat hashtag and hope you will too.

Here are 21 of my favorite landing page tips shared in #CROchat this year:

1. Some very important things to measure on the landing page include: time spent on page, registration numbers, behaviors (both that lead to conversions and bounces), keyword performance, and number of pages per visit.
2. Some key micro-conversions to track: downloads, social engagements, and video views.
3. To track conversions that take place offline you can use: coupons, promo codes, and tracked phone numbers. You should also train your sales reps to track this kind of info.
4. Getting the wrong people to bounce is a good thing!
5. Test what you measure and see how that impacts the evolution of your campaigns.
6. Conversion rate optimization and SEO balance each other out. 
7. SEO should be followed up by conversion rate optimization. Rankings lead to site traffic, but site traffic does not always lead to conversions.
8. Highly specific conversion bait is likely to be much more specific than link bait.
9. Landing page pet peeves: wrong message, information overload, and poor design.
10. When implementing video, beware of auto-play and make sure your video loads quickly and smoothly.
11. Homemade videos don’t seem to hurt conversions. Test them!
12. When working within a shopping cart, only ask for what you need and store addresses in user accounts when possible.
13. Using a progress bar will help set user expectations when dealing with both multi-part forms and shopping carts.
14. Monitoring Average Order Value (AOV) helps show the quality not just quantity of online sales.
15. Data transparency works when it’s understandable by all and impartial; filtered data is always skewed.
16. Testing price points on the landing page is important because value is in the eye of the beholder.
17. After “what’s in it for me?” the most important question is, “how much?”
18. When it comes to price on the web, the competitor’s price is a search away.
19. Include trust elements and social proof on your landing page to increase conversions.
20. Segment your visitors to increase your ability to provide really targeted information and offers.
21. Analyzing behavioral analytics gives us insight into user behaviors that lead to and away from conversions.

I’m sure we’ll still see each other around the #CROchat watering hole during the next couple of months, and I’ll definitely still be tweeting with you about landing pages from the @ioninteractive account.

Happy tweeting and in the words of frequent #CROchat contributor, Carey Gatz: cro rulez.

A great reason to try segmentation on your landing pages

Last week Seth Godin had a great blog post about the customers you don’t know you lost. Seth says

It’s extremely difficult to figure out why people walk out of your store, throw out your brochure, leave your site… but in fact, this is fertile territory for dramatically increasing sales. 

When it comes to a web page: Why do people bounce away when they land? Who are they? What were they looking for? Some of them are likely in the wrong place—those people aren’t going to dramatically increase sales because they aren’t going to buy (or convert) no matter. But what about the ones who do belong there? How many more leads could you be generating if you knew who they were and what they were looking for?

Try some traffic segmentation on the landing page to find out. Give users simple choices that let them put themselves into a bucket. With segmentation you can ask “who are you?” and “what are you looking for?”, and you can use this knowledge to dramatically increase conversions (sales, leads…whatever it is you want more of).  Here are some blog posts that will inspire you to try some segmentation on your pages.

Post-click segmentation and the MECE principle

Crafting a narrative on your landing page

The powerful effect of limited choice

Choices: why 4 is better than 5, 3 is better than 4 and 2 is better than 3