Archive for the ‘improve email response rates’ tag

Dedicated Landing Pages: The Other 50 Percent of your Email Marketing Campaign

In my last post I talked about How To Create An Email Marketing Campaign. There’s an old Direct Mail rule that goes like this. List. Offer. Package. Message. Without the right List, your Offer doesn’t matter. With the right Offer, the Package doesn’t matter and so on…

In Email Marketing, there are two dimensions to the Package: the email itself and the recipient’s experience after the click. I realize this isn’t technically in the Package. But recipients can immediately act on an email offer. In Direct Mail, the next step is a little disconnected. In email marketing, you have the opportunity to send recipients to a dedicated landing page to fulfill your offer immediately.

I argue that the email itself is only 50% of the battle in an Email Marketing Campaign. How easy is it for recipients to get their incentive, fill out a form or make a purchase after the click? Is it clear to them what they are supposed to do? Does it tie back into the offer/message they just saw in the email?

You need to use dedicated landing pages for your email campaigns. Putting all that effort into your List, Offer and Package is meaningless if you dump them on your home page or contact page. Recipients aren’t interested in exploring your website or hunting for the service/product you just advertised. Spend a portion of your budget on a dedicated landing page and it will pay off.

Your landing page should tie to the messaging in your email. It should entice them to act on the offer. It should allow the recipient to act on the offer right there on the landing page i.e. put the form on the landing page. The form and the number of steps should be kept to a minimum.

The concept of using landing pages applies to both third-party email blasts and house blasts. If you are sending a third-party email blast, you want to capture the recipient’s information to build your in-house email list. Of course you will capture their full contact information if they make a purchase, but it gets tricky in other scenarios. How much contact information should they provide to get their incentive? Use your best judgment but remember that you can always market to them later for much less than buying an email blast again if you simply ask for their email address, name and maybe a segmentation question or two.

Use landing pages for your house email blasts as well. Just because they are a subscriber doesn’t mean they are intimately familiar with your company, your products and your website. Make it easy on them, too, to respond to your emails by offering them a concise, well-thought out landing page.

Implementing landing pages on static sites are much easier than implementing them on sites driven by Content Management Solutions (CMS). With CMS-driven sites you have templates and dynamically populated pages. You can’t make a static copy of them to create your landing page. The page will never be updated again and will get stale. And your developers probably won’t do it anyway. But you can create an alternate CMS template with an editable body area for your email marketing campaigns. It’s extra work but you don’t really have a choice. Sending them to a page that doesn’t directly tie back into your email and make it very clear what they are supposed to do next is pointless.

Let’s say you are an ecommerce site and you want to advertise a single product or a category of products. You still need a dedicated landing page with messaging that ties back into your email marketing campaign but you can’t edit the live page just for this campaign. Create your landing page with the custom messaging and images and then link to the single product you are promoting with a Buy Now or Learn More call to action. Another option is to link to a search result page or category page with a Browse call to action. Go to your site, search for that single product, drill down to the product category or search for keywords and copy the URL in the address bar. You may have to remove session variables form the URL but this is a great way to link to your email to a landing page and still get them where they need to go in an efficient manner.

And don’t neglect the copy! I cannot stress this enough. Stating the facts and listing your products might be enough if you’re selling something everyone understands and, more to-the-point, understands why they should buy it from YOU. But if you aren’t the category leader (who has to work hard at it, too), spend a little time explaining your Unique Value Proposition (UVP). Why Best Buy instead of Office Depot? Why Oscar Meyer instead of Hebrew?

Slideshare: Dedicated Landing Pages: The Other 50 Percent of your Email Marketing Campaign

Move Compelling Content Up And Graphics Down To Win At Email

I see so many emails that lead with menus from their website, unsub and web version text, large header graphics/logos (that don’t show up) and other distractions. Subscribers DON’T CARE! I suspect that many times this is just to fill in whitespace. Branding your company is a good argument, too. Recognizing you as the sender… Even better argument. Whatever the case, get rid of it. Why? 1) Subscribers don’t care. 2) Images are disabled on 50+% of email programs and I’ll bet that number is growing. I achieved a 700% increase in response rates for one email program by following this simple rule: Move content up and images down… What’s the big deal? Read on and I’ll tell and show you.

The top left 4 inch square of your email is the most valuable real estate there is. Move the stuff subscribers don’t care about lower down and give them something that will make them thankful for receiving the email and continue to open your emails in the future. If you are in retail, give them the latest coupon and a link to get it. If you are pushing content, lead with the headlines and links versus an intro or long teaser paragraphs. And whatever you do, don’t put a bunch of images at the top before your content. Here’s an example of why you shouldn’t…

This is a screen shot of three emails in my inbox using the Auto-Preview view of Outlook. Can you spot the winner? (Click to open small window.)

The first one wins. The other two aren’t leading with content I’m interested in. If I’m someone who uses Auto-Preview (25% of users do), then the two losers haven’t told me anything. I have to open the email to figure it out and stats say that people won’t. I completely ignore the last email because it’s full of image links. I glance right over it.

This comes down to layout. If you position your images after your lead content, the image links will appear after the most important content.

Now for the clincher. This image speaks for itself: (Click to open small window.)

50+% of recipients have images disabled by default. 70+% of them will make the decision to read, file for later or delete your message without enabling images and without scrolling down.

Push your content up and your other messages down…

Stay tuned for more. Thanks for reading.

Slideshare:

Email Marketing: Move Compelling Content Up And Graphics Down To Win At Email

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