Email marketing consists of a series of critical stages: getting the email opened, getting the person to buy, keeping them happy enough to ignore the unsubscribe box. Despite its vital importance, the squeeze page, the landing page for signing up to an email marking list, seems to get less attention than it should, which is odd as failure here will severely limit the number signing up.

One way of discovering what to do is to view the attempts of others and work out what they do well. More fun, of course, is working out what they do poorly. A quick run through some quite large companies’ sites shows many basic mistakes. In reverse order:

Scare Stories
We all want to point out that subscribing to our email marketing list does not mean addresses will be sold on. However, we do not want to scare potential subscribers by telling them horror stories of what other companies do.

Gift Choice
I found a couple of the offers really tempting despite having no real interest in the products the company sold. Don’t make the offer too general or too valuable. It is easy to grab the gift and unsubscribe once you receive the first marketing email. This is a big subject and will be covered in a later article.

Ease of Leaving the Page
There should be just two options open to anyone who lands on the page: subscribe to your email marketing list or leave. Do not make it too easy to do the latter.

Too Many Questions
I can understand why someone in bulk email marketing would want to know a lot about a new subscriber but if the form contains too many questions it will put people off. If some answers are essential for you, such as position in a company or location, that sort of thing, then by all means ask. However, research has shown that just the two questions of name and address gives best returns.

Too Many Distractions
This is probably the most common problem and there are often superfluous pictures, too much copy and irrelevant information. Keep it short, keep it simple and keep focused on the task in hand.