You’ve swept your customers off their feet with a dazzling email creative and message. To help you give them somewhere equally stunning to land, we at the eec Email Design Roundtable have added a Landing Page Checklist to our Email Checklist Series. With so many details to think about, our checklist offers a collection of ideas that you can easily apply to your program.
Landing pages should feel like a continuation of the positive experience initiated by your email so that the motions from opening the message to clicking through to responding to the call-to-action (CTA) feel like one fluid movement. Brush up on your landing page best practices to increase conversion:
● Audience and Goal. Thinking about your intended audience and the actions you want to inspire were your primary foci in creating your email, and they’re also the core of the landing page. Construct your landing page to propel your audience toward1s the next step. Anthropologie landing pages like this one often add an extra step between the message and the product pages, but their whimsically artsy landing pages are on-brand and engaging to their particular audience.
● Design. To facilitate the unity of the experience, the creative elements must stay consistent with the email—use similar graphics, text and imagery. Keep your designs quite simple—consider losing the navigation and extra links that will distract from the primary message. Use images if they can earn their keep by relating specifically to your offer—steer clear of distracting, generic imagery. This Horchow message shows a nice progression from email to landing page design. The landing page picks up the basic creative elements of the email but shows larger and more compelling imagery and CTAs to move the viewer to the next step.
● Main Copy. Best practice is to use a white background behind text. Keep your copy brief, and start it off by stating the benefits of the offer concisely and in manner consistent with the email copy. This Land of Nod landing page repeats the headline from the (very cute!) email but includes more detailed information about the features. It often works well to use bullet points and a large font for readability, listing the benefits in order of value. Every word should work toward getting the visitor to act.
● Forms. If you need to gather customer information with forms, hold interest by keeping them short and sweet. Ask only for the most necessary information, clearly indicate required fields and pre-populate those fields whenever possible. Include all forms and CTAs necessary for conversion on the landing page. Which brings us to the big whammy...
● Call-to-Action. Your landing page’s great love, its reason for existing: the big CTA. But don’t stop at one: repeat your CTA multiple times to maximize clicks. The initial CTA should live right after the summary of the offer details and needs to fall above the fold. The CTA copy must be direct and obvious and pack a punch that inspires action. Be careful not to drive your sale to soon—let the CTA match the subscriber’s place in the decision-making process. If you’re a retailer, consider using an “Add to Cart” button as opposed to something like a “Buy Now” button, as Crate & Barrel does in this focused landing page from this message.
● Other Tips. It may also be a good idea to create multiple landing pages so that they can get as specific as possible to different customer segments. Keep your landing pages live for longer than you’d expect. You don’t want people who read their messages later than the rest of the crew to be sent flying with nowhere to touch down and act.
A solid landing page that attends to best practices offers customers a memorably smooth experience with your brand while effectively increasing conversion. For even more tips and tricks, check out the new addition to the eec Email Checklist Series.
Comment below to tell us about some of your own smooth and rocky landings.
--eec Email Design Roundtable co-chairs Lisa Harmon of Smith-Harmon and Megan Walsh of Williams-Sonoma
.gif)
Comments (1)
This post is very nice, I did one myself on the same subject and I agree with the elements listed here, if I may I would just add as a complement to your Call-to-action paragraph:
One advice I would give, out of experiments I made, is to keep as little steps as possible between the landing page and the transformation page (might be a cart or a subscription form).
The more steps there are, the more likely the user might give up.
Posted by Anton Panaitesco | November 12, 2008 3:48 PM
Posted on November 12, 2008 15:48