A special landing page tied to a specific campaign offers a distraction-free, singular-focussed page that channels the visitor to focus on that offer and take the action. It could be a landing page to collect emails to begin the email journey with a visitor or conversely, it could be one to offer more details about a specific product/collection promoted in an email campaign. In this post, we tell you the difference, and why and how you can create great email marketing landing pages.
What is a Landing Page?
Let’s start defining what a landing page is. A landing page is a standalone web page that is created for marketing and advertising purposes. Creating new leads and engaging with existing prospects of your e-commerce store are some of the goals and benefits a landing page can give you.
The design of your landing page will be the key point of success to keep people’s attention on doing what they have to do on the landing page to reach your goal. So here I will be sharing some tips and best practices on how to create a winning landing page for your e-commerce store.
Kinds of Landing Pages for email marketing:
There’re 2 kinds of landing pages for email marketing
1. Landing page to collect emails to begin email marketing
Typically most stores have a landing page, to collect email addresses of website visitors. It’s usually the home page of the store or a special page created just to create emails.
Other tactics of collecting emails for non-ecommerce businesses could be to have landing pages that:
- Offer a lead magnet
- Book calls
- Collect more information
- Conduct a poll
2. Landing pages created for a certain email campaign
Once you have an email list and you start rolling out email flows and campaigns to the list, every now and then you may have a special collection or offer promoted through the campaign. A landing page that the user clicks on to read more information about the offer or the featured product and take the desired action of your offer is this landing page. Here’s an example of an email campaign and the landing page associated with it.
As you would’ve noticed the two kind of landing pages actually work in reverse. A landing page to create emails is followed by an email. While a landing page created to promote a campaign follows the email.
Why do I need a special landing page for email marketing?
I’m sure as a marketer, you’ve thought about this many times. You already have a website with separate pages for collections and an individual page for every product. Why do you need a special landing page for a campaign? The reason is that a special landing page tied to a specific campaign offers a distraction-free, singular-focussed page that channels the visitor to focus on that offer and take the action.
Yes, your email serves as a page to include a lot of information too, but an email page is like an ad that leads to the final destination where action can be taken. For example, an email can talk about the greatness of a product, but the landing page is where it will offer more elaborate information about the product, include all the product pictures, usage guide, pricing details, and of course the CTA that will lead to the next step in the completion of the action.
Another reason is, you may be a running an email-only offer, but not want to offer it to every visitor on your site. So this particular landing page offers an exclusive page only to a specific audience which is not visible to the general website visitors. If you notice, many ecommerce stores have a landing page that is linked with a specific ad or email campaign, but is not promoted on the website to visitors landing from others.
Characteristics of a good landing page:
1. Single focus The landing page focusses on all the information relevant to a specific offer: As opposed to a generic page on your store with all the products or general information about your store, the landing page will mostly focus on one product, collection or offer. You don’t want people to get distracted with so much information and buttons where to click. You want them to fill in the information you want and then go. The copy is directed towards informing about, promoting, and creating a desired action you want the customer to take on that page.
2. Clearly defined CTA: Since the landing page is focused on a singular action of conversion, it needs a clearly defined CTA. Is it a sign up, a buy or learn more? The CTA button should be well defined, be easily distinguishable, and repeated at least a couple of times – once in the first fold and another at the end of the promotional content.
Pro-tip: A study has it that red colour CTA buttons lead to more actions than any other!
3. Usually has an incentive: Most landing page whether it’s one created to collect emails or to promote a collection feature an incentive to push the landing page visitor to take the desired action faster. When it comes to collecting email addresses, it can involve giving them a valuable information, a piece of content or a welcome bonus to sign up. In case of an offer landing page, it can also offer a discount or another incentive to buy the product or download the information.
4. Has a Thank you page: Not only is it a matter of social courtesy to have a thank you page after the desired action has been taken on the landing page. It’s also important from a tracking point of view. Most analytics count a conversion when the user has reached the ‘thank you page’. So it could be a ‘thank you for placing your order’. or in case of an email sign up, the page could similarly be ‘thank you for signing up! Here’s what to expect next”
5. Has social proof: Sometimes people can doubt about making the first step. Push them by showing them testimonials, images, reviews of happy customers, case studies, statistics or anything that you feel can give the audience social proof about your store. Being on a landing page is the first step a customer makes in their purchasing journey, but they may need an additional push to come closer to conversion. Most landing pages these days have a section dedicated to testimonials, or they’re integrated with automatic review sites like Okendo and others.
6. Has a time-sensitivity and scarcity built in: A landing page created for a special campaign or promo amongst the above also can include an element of time-sensitivity or needing a user to complete an action within a given time to avail of the special offer or benefits. Some of the elements you can induce a time-sensitivity is a last day for the offer and include a live countdown timer on the page. To induce scarcity, use words like “limited quantities available” or show a live counter of the quantities left in stock of the promoted product.
7. Has the same look and feel and offer as the one advertised in the email: To have a landing page truly tied to a specific email marketing campaign, it has to look and feel the same as the email. In fact the landing page should look like an extension of the email itself. To achieve this consistency, it’s important that the email and the landing page have a similar design theme, same images, same offer, and of course the same product being advertised. Having said that, it’s okay to have a different CTA in the email and on the landing page. For eg. the CTA on the email can be “Learn more” which leads to the landing page providing more information, but the CTA on the landing page can be “Shop now” or “Buy” or “Add to cart” whatever the case may be.
8. Has UTM parameters
Any special marketing campaign needs to be actionable and measurable. How will you track the action on a specific landing page? Sure, you can track the data on Google Analytics, but to make sure you can track the page separately and have a report dedicated to it, you need to attach a UTM string to the URL of this particular landing page. A UTM string is nothing but a piece of simple code added to the URL (www.examplestore.com) to track it in Google Analytics and other analytics tools. All you need to do to add a UTM parameter to a URL is follow this logic.
Take the URL
Add a ? to the end of the URL and add this logic.
https://example.com?utm_source=news4&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring-summer
Or you can simply use Google’s free UTM builder to do this:
How to create a landing page
Creating a landing page can be as simple or complex as you want the end result to be. Most Shopify stores offer an “add page” function which you can use to create a text-specific landing page.
Or you can play around with collections and categories to create a collection based landing page.
Klaviyo itself offers the option to create a landing tool for a specific promo or campaign.
So now that you know why it’s important to create an email marketing specific landing page, what makes a good landing page and how to create it, you should be better placed to drive those conversions.
Want a professional experts to handle your email marketing as well as create and manage landing pages associated with email campaigns? We’re happy to help as we do not only offer email marketing, but thanks to our well-loved design talent, we also offer landing page creation.
