Getting email recipients to click on a link in your message is only part of the goal of any email marketing campaign. While click-through rates are extremely important; ultimately you want those clicks to turn into new customers, members, participants or subscribers. If you consider email marketing to be a two-lap race, the email itself could be considered as the first lap and the landing page (that page that the email message links recipients to) could be considered as the second lap. To win the race, you need to perform well on both laps.
Your landing page is the springboard to customer conversion. Some will jump off the board and convert to a customer, member, participant, reader, etc. Others will become anxious of the board and will climb down rather than jumping off. This is often referred to as abandonment.
To maximize the conversion rates of your landing pages, you want to decrease friction and anxiety. There are several ways to do this. One is by offering incentives which offset the friction and anxiety.
Marketing Experiments provides some interesting analysis of landing page conversions and offers some practical case studies which demonstrate how specific changes can increase conversion rates.
“…In this clinic we looked at two case studies where Landing Page elements that overcame the value inhibitors of Friction and Anxiety increased Conversion. The increase attributed to these elements in one test was 162%…”
For the full report, read Improving Conversion by 162%
