Small Business Website Content Marketing Blog

Landing pages aren’t exclusively reserved for search engine optimization and cost-per-click marketing campaigns. You need to consider them for all online marketing opportunities, for instance, email marketing.

When it comes to email marketing, landing pages are special pages that you create as the destination for links in your email newsletter. If you’re promoting a specific product in your newsletter, you’ll want to make sure that your landing page is relevant to that particular product and offer. Continuity is the key. Marketers often make the mistake of directing all of their email newsletter links to their website’s homepage which can easily lead subscribers away from their intended focus. Confusion reduces conversions. Building landing pages specific to each marketing campaign reduces confusion and in result increases conversions.

As a best practice, you should consider split A/B testing your landing pages. With split A/B testing you compare different landing pages against each other by sending traffic to each and then comparing the results. If the goal of a landing page is to get a visitor to submit an information request form then the unique landing page that generates the most form submissions will be the winner. Testing is very important because it lets you get more results from your existing marketing campaigns. Once you’ve determined the best performing landing page you can link to it from all future email newsletters.

There are many A/B testing software solutions available that can automate this type of testing for you. But most are too expensive or too technical for small business owners. If you don’t have access to this type of testing software, you can conduct a split A/B test for your email marketing campaigns manually in just a few minutes.

Here’s how:

• Create two landing pages on your website. Use different text headings, descriptive text, and images in each landing page.
• Divide your recipient email list into two different lists. The easiest way to do this is to export your list into Excel, move half of the list to a new Excel file, and then upload the files into two new lists.
• Create two versions of your next email newsletter where the only difference between each version is the link to each specific landing page. For example, this might be a link or button with the text “request a free information packet.” Make sure to keep the rest of the newsletter identical including the subject.
• Send one version of the newsletter to the first half of your recipient list. Send the other version of the newsletter to the other half of your recipient list.

After a few days you can use your email marketing software to see how many subscribers clicked on the link to each landing page. Divide the number of form submissions that each page generated into the number of clicks that it received from the email newsletter to determine the conversion rate for that page. After a while you can delete the page with the lower conversion rate and link to the page with the higher conversion rate from future email newsletters.

Creating and testing landing pages has been shown to increase the number of conversions that email marketers receive from their email newsletters. Increased results typically range from 30% to 150% after the first successful test.

We suggest that you use iContact for your email newsletters and Eden Platform to create your website landing pages. But of course, we’re biased. You can use any email service provider or website content management system to run a split A/B test on your email marketing campaigns.