3 Best Practices for Building Better Email Landing Pages

In an email marketer’s perfect world, subscribers would never have to leave their inbox to complete transactions.

And while it’s pretty impressive that marketing emails have evolved from generic plaintext to highly personalized and remarkably interactive, more often than not, you still need to send subscribers to a landing page.

To make sure your landing pages offer the same value and positive user experience as your emails, take advantage of the three tips below.

Get to the Point

We’re not exaggerating when we say that you have about seven seconds to capture a visitor’s attention, which means conspicuousness and brevity are your friends. Make certain when visitors hit your email landing page, they see what they need to see and they see it fast.

Once you’ve grabbed their attention and convinced them to stick around for a while, make sure they know what they’re doing on your page. Are they …

• Registering for your customer loyalty program?
• Creating a holiday wish list?
• Claiming a coupon or promo code?

If the path to conversion isn’t instantly obvious, visitors will bounce and not come back. Visitors shouldn’t need a map to know what you’re giving them and how to get it; it should be immediately apparent.

Pro Tip: Offering something for free is a quick way to grab someone’s attention. If a free trial of your service is available or you have the option of sending the subscriber a free sample, consider making that the main conversion event.

Extend the Conversation, Don’t Interrupt It

Don’t sacrifice consistency for the sake of being eye-catching. Make sure the colors, imagery and tone you use on the landing page are the same as the ones you use in the email.

Most importantly, the landing page copy should correspond to the email copy. Did your email promise a limited time offer on international travel? Then the hero messaging on your landing page should read “Limited Time Offer on International Travel!” and a quick way to claim the deal. The email landing page should feel as if it’s simply the next step in the same journey – not the start of a brand new experience.

Pro Tip: Try to keep as much as you can above-the-fold. Similar to the inverted pyramid tactic journalists use, place all of the most important details towards the top of the page. The last thing you want is for a visitor to need to scroll to find where to complete the conversion event.

Don’t Overwhelm Visitors

No one wants to click on an email and be sent to a landing page that looks like a page out of the dictionary. Don’t use huge blocks of text; instead, take advantage of product photos and employ bulleted lists that quickly show a visitor the benefits of your product or service. Quick, digestible chunks of information tend to be the most successful when it comes to convincing someone to submit a form.

You also don’t want to scare people away by asking them for way too much information before they hit “submit.” Determine which data fields are the most vital and make only those fields required. You can include additional fields in your form, but they should be optional.

Pro Tip: The best email landing pages are ones that match the design and content to the value of what is being offered to the visitor. A landing page promoting a 20 percent discount on sports equipment will require fewer form fields and a much simpler design than one inviting visitors to enter for a chance to win a brand new car.

Finally, make sure your email landing page messaging is tailored to your unique audience. When someone gets to your page, the content should make them 100% confident they are in the right place and you have what they need. It doesn’t make sense to spend time personalizing email content to each audience segment only to send everyone to the same landing page.

The best landing pages are built based on objective consumer data. Discover the various data options that are immediately available via TowerData’s Active Customer Intelligence.