Best Practices Exist for a Reason, Part 2: Landing Pages

In my last post, I gave some specific and proven best practices for the creation of successful emails. In this post, I'll talk about Landing Pages—because now that you've been able to lure your target into opening your email and clicking on the embedded link(s), you want to continue to drive that prospect to your desired outcome. Whether your email offer is more information, a video, an e-book, a survey or a whitepaper, don't send your prospect down a black hole by linking them to your website. Instead, create a specific digital destination (a landing page) for your campaign so you can not only quantify site visitors and their actions on the site, but it also reassures prospects that they've arrived at the right destination. Based on lots of testing with our own clients and best practices from sites like Marketing Experiments, Marketing Sherpa, KISSmetrics, HubSpot and more, here's what I've learned: Your LP Headline Should Match Your Email Headline: While this may not seem like rocket science, prospects can get easily confused. You have less than a second to help them take the next step, so why create confusion with a brand new headline that is seemingly unrelated to the email they opened, read and clicked? Place the CTA ABOVE the Fold: Especially now that we've entered the world of responsive design, it's critical that your call-to-action is near the top of your page so that those viewing on even the smallest screens can clearly take the next step. And, make sure it's the most obvious thing on the page because—after all—it's the action you want them to take! Make Buttons Highly Obvious and Actionable: Whether it's using a color that contrasts to the rest of your page, uses language that makes it clear what you want/what they'll get when they click, or are sized big enough to be obvious and legible, don't hide your action buttons where they might get missed. Instead of buttons that say "Click here" try "Get me my.." Have a Single Purpose With a Single-Focused Message: Think about why the prospect clicked on the email, and what their expectations are for when they arrive on your page. Don't clutter it up with extraneous copy points or additional "stuff." In fact, remove other types of navigation from the page as it can unnecessarily distract the visitor from taking the desired next step. Be Authentic and Transparent With Real Testimonials: While you can—and should—edit quotes, make sure they're attributable to someone even if it's "Carolyn G., Business owner" or "C. Goodman, California." Make sure they're pithy and don't ramble. These days, "social proof" (using quotes from Facebook posts or Tweets), adds social credibility. Plus people are influenced based on reviews by others. Use Bullet Points for Copy: People skim, and won't spend any time reading long paragraphs of text. Make sure your copy is crisp—short, sharp and to the point. Include a Phone Number: This helps overcome buyer insecurity that they may be dealing with a company based overseas. Plus, they may have questions before completing an order, so it's best to provide an easy-to-find phone number to help. Keep Your Forms Simple: If you don't need to collect certain data, then don't ask/collect it. As a rule-of-thumb, shorter forms tend to work better. Personally, I'm always annoyed that certain forms ask me for personal information that is seemingly irrelevant to my purchase. As a result, I'm often untruthful in the information I provide in that field because I consider it none of their business. Radio Buttons or Drop Down Menus? The right answer is to test it yourself because different tests for different customers yield different results. Marketing Experiments provides some great case studies on this topic. In one experiment, radio buttons generated a 15% lift over a drop down menu. In summary, if all of these marketers have already done all the testing for you, why wouldn't you at least consider these insights and apply them to your own landing page efforts? Tell me. I'm all ears.

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Best Practices Exist for a Reason, Part 2: Landing Pages

Carolyn Goodman

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Carolyn Goodman