How to Connect the Dots Between Landing Pages and Email

A well-composed, expertly designed and highly targeted email can transform prospects into customers-but it can’t do it alone. To seamlessly guide your subscribers down the sales funnel, you also need a powerful landing page.

Unlike your homepage, a landing page is streamlined and tightly focused on a single, all-encompassing task: compel your reader to complete an action.

For most websites, these landing pages work the hardest and drive the most revenue. Like non-stop sales representatives, successful landing pages convert visitors into customers. However, to ensure your landing pages are working as hard as your emails, they need to be optimized.

Here are five best practices to turbocharge the process and achieve conversion goals fast:

1. Before You Make a Decision, Perform an A/B Test

When it comes to marketing, “Because I don’t think it looks good” is not an effective reason to make a decision. Especially not when A/B and split testing can give you cold, hard data. Be sure you look at actual numbers-not just your gut instincts-so you can make decisions with confidence.

For example, not sure whether about the copy or color of a CTA? Try both, measure the results and let the data make the call.

2. Focus on Customer Problems, Not Just Promotion

Successful marketers knows the key to customer loyalty is to build trust. Without trust, converting prospects into repeat customers is nearly impossible. But, how do you build trust? By being human, and engaging with your customers on a human level. This means focusing on what your customers need, rather than what you want to sell. To make landing page copy compelling, you need to clearly state how your product or service is going to satisfy your customer’s need.

3. Keep Your Messaging Consistent

Imagine you’re a financial institution. You send a customer a targeted email announcing a special offer for home loans. The customer excitedly clicks on the link but, instead of a landing page specifically targeting home loans, the customer sees a page with general loan information and a form to speak with a consultant. There’s nothing about home loans and, worse, nothing about the offer mentioned in the email. By failing to keep the message consistent, you’ve lost customer trust. To avoid this issue, eliminate disconnects in messaging and create a seamless customer experience.

4. Keep it Brief

Repeat after me: simplicity is key. In our busy, multi-channel lifestyle, simple design and fast, easy-to-consume copy always wins. And yet, we can’t help ourselves from adding just one more important detail, just one more promotion and one call-to-action. Stop! To keep the process seamless, use only as much copy as is absolutely necessary to inspire her to take the next step.

5. Make the Call-to-Action Unavoidable

For both your landing pages and your emails, everything boils down to your call-to-action. Is it clear? Does it stand out visually, and in a way that contrasts with the rest of your site? Does the reader know exactly what he is supposed to do? Is it obvious what will happen next? If the answer to any of these questions is anything other than a resounding yes, you may need to go back to the drawing board.

So much of the reader’s experience between the email and the landing page is over in the blink of an eye, but ensuring a high conversion rate requires data analysis, expert design, concise messaging and careful attention to detail. So, in this case, don’t be afraid to sweat the small stuff. Because, when it comes to optimizing your email campaigns and your landing pages, sometimes it’s the smallest details that lead to the biggest rewards.

Want more advice for taking your emails to the next level? Check out our free guide for revolutionizing your email strategy today!