Every landing page should deliver a convincing first impression, consider the maturity of the market, and reflect the customer’s stage of awareness. The best way to see how the absence or presence of these elements alter a landing page is to review real-life examples. So, with the three foundational elements in mind, I’ve evaluated the landing pages of nine companies—from member management software to a vegan candy brand to a court date notification service. Here goes:
Hey Miles, you just do such a great job helping those people like me try to understand the world of online marketing. I have been in this business for over 22 years and went into cardiac arrest and actually died. After being on life support and hyperthermia, and a long stay in ACCU I woke up on Easter Sunday. I thank God for a second chance in life. It has been such a struggle with my memory, but am working harder than I have ever worked. I had to close down the paper version of the Planet Weekly back in May and have taken 1000's of hours studying online classes. I'm still at a lose of why I am not making any money with this. Can you please take a look at my site and make any suggestions you might have. The site has been up and running for 5 or so years now. Due to health issues I have to make this work, for I can no longer beat the pavements 10 or 12 hour days. I trust you and hope you can help me if you have time. God Bless and thank you.
You also need specific expectations for your landing page, on which to gauge its success. These expectations can be based on previous experience, anecdotal evidence, or simply wishful thinking. But it’s helpful to have a specific number to compare your actual results with. This could be the total number of conversions, or the number of people who make it past your landing page, or some other number, based on your own goals.
The best email copywriting starts with the subject line, which has to make new subscribers want to open your email. Follow that with an appealing headline so they’ll keep reading. Constant Contact’s research suggests that email copy should be short, around 200 words. It’s also wise to avoid being promotional in all your emails. Instead, offer value to your subscribers. The most important part is the call to action which helps improve your email open rate by leading recipients from the email to your landing pages or blog post.
Marketing experts recommend websites remove the navigation menu and limit internal and external links on the page.[7] The form length mirrors the value of the offer[clarification needed]. They may also include a relevant image, animation or short video. These pages also tend to contain small icons (i.e. of Facebook, or Twitter) to facilitate social media sharing.
Follow-up with a thank you page. The thank-you page is a great way to guide visitors to other related material on your website that they may be interested in. Providing this added info in the initial landing page would have been distracting and could have led visitors away from making a conversion. However, now that you’ve sealed the deal, the thank-you page is the perfect place to suggest related products, guides and information your audience may find helpful, or links to other parts of your site, such as your company blog.
Your customers, prospects, and partners are the lifeblood of of your business. You need to build your marketing strategy around them. Step 1 of marketing is understanding what your customers want, which can be challenging when you’re dealing with such a diverse audience. This chapter will walk you through (1) the process of building personal connections at scale and (2) crafting customer value propositions that funnel back to ROI for your company.
That small PDF symbol over the feature image helps set expectations for what format the download will be in. The arrow in front of the subheadline helps further direct your attention to important copy they want visitors to read. Like IMPACT, they also have an auto-checked box to subscribe to their newsletter on their form -- which, if turned into an opt-in check box, is a great way to increase subscribers. All of these small, seemingly insignificant details help bring together a solid, admirable landing page design.
More sophisticated companies will route visitors who, say, search for products for large companies to a page geared toward enterprises rather than a homepage with general information. If you have a website with more than one page—or a more advanced information architecture and sitemap—consider linking to the page on your site that best addresses a visitor’s intent.
I have to say I’m so insanely jaded by autoresponders since I’ve been in the web marketing business that I snub the thought of using them personally…but isn’t that the temptation we can so easily fall into…especially since we forget that most people are UNDER exposed to them and see them for the fresh content, authority-inducing mechanism they are.
Particular groups of customers can be targeted or even individuals. Offering individual customers special deals on merchandise and/or services on the customer's birthday, for instance, is one example of email marketing personalization. (A restaurant might send an email to customers on their birthday offering 50% off an entree,) Email marketing helps a business develop and maintain a relationship with a customer over time that hopefully results in increased sales and increased customer loyalty.
While the obvious purpose of internet marketing is to sell goods, services or advertising over the internet, it's not the only purpose a business using internet marketing may have; a company may be marketing online to communicate a message about itself (building its brand) or to conduct research. Online marketing can be a very effective way to identify a target market or discover a marketing segment's wants and needs. (Learn more about conducting market research).
First, the spoiler: landing page copy is never done. Like your company, it will—and should—evolve over time. It’s an iterative process, and can always be improved. There are hundreds of copywriting formulas (many of them documented here) that can help you craft a headline, draft bullets, or structure a CTA. But if you don’t have the fundamentals down, the improvement will be incremental, not game-changing.
Open-ended experimentation. This approach is similar to closed-ended experimentation except that more variations will be added for testing and experimentation will not stop when a winner is found. This method is used by large corporation to dynamically improve their conversion rates and improve user experience. Landing page can also be adjusted dynamically as the experiment results change to further enhance user experience.
“It’s clear that the goal on this page is to get someone to leave their email address, but there is a lot to distract them, the very first link is to ‘Powered by SumoMe’ at the very top of the page, the social share icons are an overlay that appears after page load. You need to test all these, how many people click these, how many social shares do you get from the share widget, how valuable is the evidence that many people have shared the page – is it worth the distraction. How many people click SumoMe and don’t complete the form – testing will tell you all of this.
MailChimp is another popular email marketing service in the industry. It allows you to create and send email newsletters to your customers, manage subscriber lists, track campaign performance and much more. It also offers responsive email templates that look great on mobile devices and different screens. MailChimp automatically takes care of your sign-ups, un-subscribes, and bounce-back cleaning.
Excellent tips! I’m bookmarking this post. I’ve encountered too many people recently (unfortunately, one was a potential boss in an interview!) who believe in quantity over quality for email lists. They don’t realize that a smaller, targeted list of people who are genuinely interested can produce much better results than a large list of bought names.
If you rely on Facebook or Twitter, you are at the mercy of them allowing you to talk to your customers. When you email it gets in your customers inboxes. Then it’s up to you to make sure you are sending things your customers want to receive. Email is the most scalable way to make sales with new customers and build deeper relationship with deeper customers. AppSumo.com is a 7 figure business and 90%+ of our revenue comes from emails.
Hi Scott, yes that is correct. Most platforms will not let you upload large customer lists if you do not have specific opt-in dates. However if you can provide the data when the user opted in to receive email notifications from you, then you would be able to import the list. These rules may vary based on different providers, but this is exactly the process for switching email service providers (you have to import customer list in the new provider).
Autoresponders were built for you to send a single email based on a contact's action. Mailchimp's newer marketing automation feature offers many more options, including the ability to schedule multiple emails based on many trigger activities. Although we strongly recommend you take advantage of this powerful tool, you can continue to use legacy autoresponders in your account.
Every week, the folks at InVision send a roundup of their best blog content, their favorite design links from the week, and a new opportunity to win a free t-shirt. (Seriously. They give away a new design every week.) They also sometimes have fun survey questions where they crowdsource for their blog. This week's, for example, asked subscribers what they would do if the internet didn't exist.
