HTML Email Templates: Three Ways to Use Landing Pages Effectively

The landing page is a vital, yet often overlooked element of email marketing.  Depending on campaign objectives, one could argue that it is even more important than the call to action used to enforce the purpose of your initial message.  In many cases, it is this simple page that will determine whether your campaign is a huge success, or miserable failure.  Considering its immeasurable importance, you would be wise to pay special attention to your landing page when designing your HTML email templates.  Here are three tips that will help you along the way:

So your call to action served its purpose of getting the user to click through to your landing page.  That’s all fine and dandy, but what now?  Where do you go from here?  Work on creating another well defined call to action that helps you convert the sale.  A good landing page has one or multiple call to actions that clearly indicate what you want the subscriber to do when they click through and land on your website.  They should not have to navigate your entire site or sit and think about the action you want them to take.  If the call to action is not clearly defined, your landing page could be equivalent to a dead end that leads to nowhere.

Landing pages are so important to an email campaign because when designed correctly, they can be very effective at converting visitors into customers.  This holds true for email campaigns as well as pay per click and search engine marketing.  In order to know just how effective your landing pages are, you must analyze their performance, something that can be done by measuring critical metrics such as bounces and conversion rates.  A high bounce rate gives indication that a large number of subscribers visited your landing page but did not click on anything further and thus, bounced.  On the contrary, a low bounce rate indicates that many subscribers visited your landing page, clicked on links and engaged with your content.  Obviously, a low conversion rate implies that visitors who arrived at your landing page were not compelled to act on whatever call to action you implemented.  Having access to this information is critical to improving both the performance of your landing pages and overall marketing strategy. 

The tips in this article are enough to get you started on creating a good landing page, but to be honest, we have barely scratched the surface.  There is so much that needs to be covered if you want to create pages that truly compliment your initial message and call to action.  You must consider crucial design elements such as the layouts, colors, and images in your HTML email template, as well as forms, video content, shopping carts and various other interactive elements that may have been implemented to engage the visitor and trigger a reaction.  Because each component warrants a closer look, thorough testing only makes perfect sense.