If you read the stats in the infographic below, it’s clear that email marketing isn’t going anywhere, well, except to a landing page. Yup, every CTA in your email needs to go to a targeted landing page specifically matching what people clicked on to get there. One of the reasons this works, is that it lets you reduce the length of your emails (which will increase the number of people actually reading them) and leave the full description for the landing page.
How To Use a Landing Page for Your Email Marketing
Landing pages help you to increase conversions. Hooray! Jump around! Applause! Well, hold your horses there cowboy. Your landing pages still need to be effective. If you’re currently sending your email links to your homepage, you’re missing an opportunity.
So why you should I be sending my email campaigns to a landing page?
Many people ask why you should do this, so I’ll run though a few quick benefits:
- Segmentation: If you are segmenting (you should be), you need to create a different experience for each type of customer – perhaps a different offer for each group in your list. To do this you need separate landing pages, so you can track the effectiveness and responsiveness of each group.
- Absorbing Information: Consider this fun test that we like to do at Unbounce, to prove how having too many distractions on your page can cause a decrease in conversion, via a lack of comprehension of your focal point. Pick a random person from your office and throw one ping-pong ball at them. Chances are that they’ll catch it. Now throw 5 ping-pong balls at them, and they’ll scramble to catch any – maybe grabbing one or two, if you’re lucky. This is the difference between sending someone to a landing page focused on a single purpose and a homepage that has many things to do. They’ll miss your point and leave.
- Congruence: Related to the last point, every element on your landing page should be focused on the single objective of your page. Like the supporting cast in a ballet, the background dancers are there to focus attention on the star.
- One CTA: And that leads us to the final point. You should only have one thing to do on your landing page – this is your star attraction, and you need to do everything you can, to focus people’s attention on it. Read “Designing for Conversion – 8 Visual Design Techniques to Focus Attention on Your Landing Pages” to learn more about this concept.
The Email Marketing Cycle
Once you capture an email on your landing page, you can then re-market to them via email, to complete the cycle:
- Send lead to landing page
- Get extra information (more than just the email you had before) – by offering another service or product (eBook, webinar etc.)
- Email again, this time segmented by the extra information you gathered the second time.
- Add, rinse repeat…
Getting back to the matter at hand, email is still a great marketing tool, check out the wealth of stats from email provider iContact in the infographic below:
Tweetable Stats
Share these quotes on Twitter so people know you’re smart:
- 72% of email users check their inboxes 6 or more times each day
» Tweet This « - Consumers who receive email marketing spend 83% more when shopping
» Tweet This « - Average return on email marketing investment: $44.25 for every dollar spent
» Tweet This « - Email Marketing can be up to 20 times more cost effective than other marketing outlets!
» Tweet This « - Spending on email marketing is predicted to reach $2 billion by 2014
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