We all concentrate on the design of the marketing email as the prime requirement of our campaigns. There are spam filters to negotiate, exciting subject lines to capture the imagination, headlines to entrance and images and copy to keep people reading, all the time focusing on the click-through button. It doesn’t sound easy, because it’s not.

When all’s settled, checked, passed through a number of readers, and Send is waiting to be clicked, the work becomes more complex. The landing page is every bit as important as a marketing email. If you lose them now, you’ve lost them for good.

The skills you honed steadily over time with regards to creating marketing emails do not transfer seamlessly to the landing page. It is the weakest part of many campaigns. If you check out those of your competitors, it’s a good bet you’ll be surprised, maybe appalled, by how poorly produced they are. If we can’t copy what other companies produce, we have to be creative ourselves.

Let’s look at the positives. The first is that there are a lot of them. For instance, it can be extremely useful to broadly mimic the design of your marketing email in order not to surprise or distract your subscribers.

Use the same header and colour scheme. It can be beneficial to more or less copy the general layout of the email, especially with regards the location of copy and images, although you might want to replace the latter with your form. All this ensures a smooth transition between the two radically different functions.

With your subscribers reassured, we now need to use the various opportunities of the landing page to encourage them to complete. Start with the headline. A repetition of the one on the email is a waste. Your subscriber already knows what the product is. We need to nail them and a short, sharp overview of what the offer entails, perhaps suggesting there is more to come, might do just that. 

The subheading is more flexible in content and construction, with the limitation of needing to reinforce the heading but also include phrases such as ‘Time Limited’. Everything is about emotion. Excite them and encourage concerns of missing out.

One of the main irritations with landing pages is the multitude of different content. You’ll probably need copy, together with an image of the product and a form to complete. Then there’s the click through, maybe a video, details of ways to contact you, that clever little GIF you love, and not to forget the first person reviews you have spent so much time collecting. We need a bigger page.

You’ve worked out what to include, which is the easy part of the process, but now you have to consider what can be left out. Your experiences in email marketing will be useful here. 

Many companies opt out by depending on the fold. Yet, if the landing page is operating correctly, the subscriber shouldn’t get past the form.

We’ll cover how to hone your landing pages in the near future.