Email marketing messages are issued with a goal. That goal may be as vague as maintaining a connection with an audience but it’s often something specific — and usually that means selling a product.
But the email message itself doesn’t make the sale. Email marketing is a two-stage process that uses the email to generate interest. It’s the landing page that converts that interest into a purchase.
That makes the content of the landing page at least as important as the content of the email.
The easiest option is to link the call to action in the email to a permanent page built into the website. That’s a strategy that can work well if the message is promoting an item that’s a part of your inventory. Using email marketing to push one specific product — either by integrating the promotion into a newsletter or by sending out a special announcement about the product – can be one very effective way of generating extra sales of products you’re already offering.
But a more powerful approach is to create a special offer exclusively for subscribers and link the content of that customized landing page to the content of the email.
Guide Readers to the End of the Marketing Story
The design will play a vital role here. Readers should feel that they’re continuing the investigative process, that the trust they’ve given to the sender when they clicked the link in the email hasn’t been abused by sending them to another seller’s site. The look of the landing page should match the look of the email.
And the headline will be important too, of course. While the headline of the email needs to tell readers that the information outlined below is important, the headline of the landing page needs to continue the narrative. Because it will be seen by a smaller number of people who have already expressed their interest it can be informative and succinct without shouting for attention.
One strategy to try would be to ask a question in the headline of the email, use the body of the message to describe the problem, but only present the solution on the landing page. It’s an approach that should generate plenty of clickthroughs from readers looking for the end of the marketing message’s story.
Whether those clickthroughs convert though will depend on the quality of the copy on the landing page, and in particular on the ease with which the user can take action. When you’re offering a solution to a problem, you need to put that solution in the user’s hands as quickly as possible. A site that requires registration, for example, should start the process right from that page by offering the sign-up form next to the text.
As always, this isn’t a strategy that will work for every business or for every email promotion. But every email marketer should know what they want the user to do beyond the click.