According to Econsultancy’s “Email Marketing Industry Census 2010” report, segmentation, measurement and analytics, and campaign optimization belong to the main areas email marketers have to focus on this year.
In the report, the words “ROI” and “results” are never far away, and if you take a look at the above mentioned areas, you can see that they all revolve around increasing efficiency, conversion and the bottom-line.
Segmentation and personalization, which is another priority as you can see below, ultimately seek to improve the results of our email marketing efforts.
In other words: conversion. Conversion has two meanings: conversion from
lead or prospect to customer and conversion as in number of recipients
that did x, y or z.
In email marketing, conversion has several components. It starts with…reaching the inbox. Next it’s about getting the email opened (remember your subject line). Then comes the click: the recipient arrives on the landing page. And that’s where it really begins as you can read below.
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Does he or she do what you hoped to achieve? Like filling in that form to get that free white paper? What happens next?
How will you convert those obviously interested recipients into customers with follow-up actions based upon their actions?
And what do you do with those that haven’t clicked? And those that clicked but didn’t download, etc.?
That’s not a topic I will tackle in this post because we are starting to talk marketing automation and lead nurturing here, but I mention it to broaden the concept of conversion a bit.
A landing page is about keeping your promise
What I wanted to talk about in this post is the landing page, a crucial element in the whole conversion process after the click.
The importance of the landing page cannot be emphasized enough.
It must meet the expectations of your recipients, and it should make a clear connection between the content and even lay-out of the email and the content it contains. Ensure that there is perfect synchronization between the email (or an ad) and the landing page in terms of the offer, graphics, colors, etc.
It should be simple. Remember Steve Krug’s book I mentioned earlier: don’t make people think, certainly not when they get on your landing page!
Relevance is an important aspect for the optimization of a landing page. If the visitor does not find the page meeting his intent, he will say “bye” at the speed of a mouse click.
You can only convert visitors into leads or customers when your page offers them the information, product or service they have been looking for and, in the case of email marketing: that you have promised them!
