Landing pages have fallen out of favour lately.
But are they really worth the extra effort?

Here are 7 ways to use landing pages the smart way…

1. Communicate value
A landing page can be a great way to show your subscribers the value of being on your email list. Giving them extra content and money-saving offers which aren’t available directly on your website adds extra motivation to interact with you through your email programme in the long term. It could be a special-offer coupon, a game, early notification of a sale or valuable article-based content.

2. When space is at a premium
Spreading your message across an email and a landing page gives you extra real estate to play with. Try putting fine details on your landing page to make more room in your email for a wider range of products and services. You’ll be able to appeal to many different subscribers with one email.

3. When you need it right now
It’s usually much quicker and easier to create a landing page than to make additional pages on your website. So it’s great if you need to create a page to link to from your email quickly and flexibly. The speed and agility also means you can create multiple landing pages tailored to different audiences.

4. When basic HTML just isn’t enough
Email is very limited by functionality, so if you want to create more advanced content for your subscribers, a landing page could fit the bill. Use one for anything from a data-capture form to a fun Java-based game.

5. To give your audiences what they really want
By clicking on a particular link, a subscriber is telling you what interests them about your product or service. Use this information to tailor your landing page to your subscriber’s motivators, and deliver relevant content.

6. To track data
The information you collect from clicks to your landing page is essential for keeping your subscriber preference data up to date. You can also use it for future segmentation and targeting.

This is particularly important for emotional links (the in-text links and highly visible calls to action), which typically generate the majority of revenue. Clicks from emotional links usually come from subscribers who need more convincing than those who click on functional links (the less-signposted links found in your templates and headers).

7. If you’re concerned about emails reaching inboxes
If deliverability is an issue for you, encouraging your subscribers to click becomes more important than ever. Email clients look at the interactions that users make to determine whether your messages make it into their inboxes. So encouraging clicks should – as ever – be a priority.

If your emails only ever link to your website, subscribers will learn over time that there’s no real benefit to clicking when they could just navigate straight to your site. A dedicated landing page gives them a more compelling reason to interact.

Making landing pages that matter

An email’s role is to drive site traffic, and a website’s role is to convert visitors. But a well-developed landing page can add to your website’s conversions rather than adding an unnecessary step to the process. The key is to only include landing pages when they’re needed.

You can optimise your email design and copy to encourage clicks by including a short piece of ‘teaser’ copy and a strong call to action. After that, use the essentially limitless space on your landing page to promote yourself or your specific products.

Want more advice on optimising your email marketing? Get in touch

Landing pages are crucial. They provide additional space to promote yourself, help you understand your subscribers and drive more people to your website. Real estate with email is limited, so it’s important to ensure that your email design and copy encourage interactions. One of the best ways of doing this is to have a short piece of ‘teaser’ copy for each article or section within your newsletter and a strong call to action, linking to a landing page where you have all the time in the world to promote yourself.

Including additional details on landing pages frees up valuable space within your message, giving you an opportunity to feature more products or offers in your message and appeal to more subscribers. They also providing virtually unlimited space on the landing pages themselves.

By clicking on a link to a landing page, a subscriber is telling you that they are interested in that topic or product. You can use this information immediately by ensuring that the message/products on the page are showcased with contextually relevant content. More importantly, you can use this knowledge to segment and target people who visited that landing page with a follow up message. Inferential segmentation or targeting, where you use the fact that you know what landing pages people have visited is particularly important in situations where the only thing you know about somebody is their email address. If you intend to use inferential targeting, be sure that your privacy policy reflects that. Finally, your landing pages can help with natural search.

There is a view using landing pages will result in less visitors to your site however here at Alchemy Worx, we don’t subscribe to that view. We believe there are two types of links, functional and emotional. Subscribers who want to get to your site immediately will click on functional links (such as your logo or navigation bar) so landing pages will not get in their way. Our experience indicates that subscribers who need more convincing are more likely to click on emotional links (from your newsletter articles) where the landing page content can be used to provide additional inspirational copy to help you persuade them to make a purchase.