A marketing email should not ever be an isolated interaction between you and the recipient — it should be a player in a concert designed to delight, woo, and convert. Other players in this concert include forms, links, content, assets, and, importantly, landing pages or squeeze pages. For your recipients, these pages should:
Provide a clear, concise path to becoming a customer.
Enable them to become a customer.
Resolve any concerns they may have about becoming a customer.
Let’s cover the basics:
A landing page is a web page, either on your site or hosted within your ESP or other site, that details the offer of your call to action (CTA). A landing page provides the visitor with several or numerous information sources or paths to engagement. For instance, you might link to white papers and videos that support your message (see figure 1), provide social-media icons for connecting, or even reviewing options for feedback. In short, there is no limit to the amount of information you may include on a landing page — but more is not always better.
When more is not better, a squeeze page provides an ideal solution. A squeeze page is a web page with a singular focus on the conversion (see figure 2). Similarly designed to a landing page, it is without the myriad options one might find on a targeted landing page. On this page you’ll have no social icons, no links to your website, and only one option for engagement. As a mnemonic, think of a squeeze page as putting the squeeze on the visitor to do just one thing: complete the call to action referenced in your email.
Landing and squeeze pages provide you with ample opportunities for A/B and multivariate testing. Creating multiple versions of your pages, you can test messaging, buttons, images, color, formats (responsive or static), and much more. What’s more, combined with analytics monitoring, you can discern who’s visiting, for how long, what they did, where they go, and so much more.
We have many clients who at the outset were performing some marketing (either direct mail or email), but in most cases were sending recipients to their home page — and without benefit of a tracking URL. There are two primary reasons you should never, never send your marketing traffic to your home page, 1) your home page should provide information appropriate for your general audience and as such, does not specifically engage the marketing-message recipient; and 2) it is difficult or impossible to discern — even through analytics — which visitors came to your home page through other promotions and which specifically visited your home page after having received your marketing campaign. These analytics are critical to understanding the behavior of your recipients, so don’t miss this opportunity to collect it, analyze it, and act on it.
As you design your landing or squeeze page, use your email or direct mail piece as the guideline. Be sure you are directing click-thrus to a page using the same art, same messaging, and consistent branding. This similarity of design is comforting to the visitor and ensures they’ve come to the right place. Given they found the design of the email compelling enough to click, why spoil the moment? You already found what works, give them more.
If, however, you find that you’re simply not getting the conversions you expected, check the number of visitors first. You must have visits to gain conversions. If not, back up and take a closer look at the initial engagement and consider first things first. No matter how wonderfully written, artfully designed, and programmatically perfect a landing or squeeze page is, if your message does not drive your recipient to visit the page, your conversion rate will suffer. Ensure your message drives the visit before you give angst an audience over conversion disappointments.
If number of visits is within your acceptable range (but when is it ever enough?), work on the other players within your campaign, such as:
Form length
Form questions
Button design and placement
Text content
Links
Downloads
Supporting resources
Design
Programming errors
All of these elements can and should be tested and tracked through A/B and multivariate testing combined with analytics and heat-mapping. Using landing and squeeze pages makes this testing process easier and more reliable than trying to root through or make drastic changes to your site’s home page.
Taking this discussion just one step further, if a landing page simply doesn’t provide you adequate real estate, consider a microsite, a series of linked landing pages that spotlights your offer.
Sometimes integrated email means the integrated components within your campaign and rather than the components of the initiative. As you develop your emails, think beyond the inbox and give consideration to the end-to-end experience and what you can provide to your visitor in order to attain that elusive conversion.
