Email Design Includes Landing Pages for the Mobile Device

As a follow up to our June article on making emails mobile, we asked two of our in-house technical whizzes to give us the lowdown on carrying that mobility through to the landing page. After all, if your email marketing best practices are ensuring your emails render correctly on the small screens of smart phones and tablet PCs, shouldn’t that same mobile experience carry through to your landing pages too?

Lucky for us, the team behind the scenes at ClickMail has been paying attention and they were ready to answer all of our questions about mobile landing page design. The July issue of the ClickMail Marketer email marketing newsletter offers their tried-and-true tips for rethinking-and redesigning-your landing pages. Doing so will streamline engagement for your recipients and just might give you a leg up over your competitors who may still be sending mobile users to a clunky, computer-centric landing page.

From coding to copy, fingers to forms, this brief newsletter article covers all the basics you need to know to implement email marketing best practices around serving a mobile audience…even where they land.

Consider this fictional example: If you’re sending out emails promising something specific like, let’s say specialty teas, but the link in your email goes to a landing page promoting all of your gourmet beverages, you are misleading.

That’s like a woman wearing red boots with a magenta and forest green dress—clash!

Same for the email. Specialty is a gourmet beverage. But you promised specifically the specialty tea in your hypothetical email, but then send the recipient to a broad page where they have to hunt around for what they want.

The email and the landing page don’t match. That is a neglect of email marketing best practices.

You might not consider your treatment of landing pages part of your email marketing best practices, but you should, because your email is only starting the job of conversion (i.e. selling). Your landing page must pick up where your email leaves off.

And if your landing page doesn’t match your email, it’s going to have a tough time delivering on the promise your email made to that potential customer!

Maybe think of your wardrobe next time you work on a landing page. Approach your email and landing page with the same best practices approach you use when choosing your outfit for the day. I guarantee you’ll find a match!

This is an effective way to moderate one’s comfort via clothing, but an ineffective way to “dress” your email. Your email should be scantily clad, no matter the weather or temperature.

Is your email dressed in layers? Do you have multiple calls to action? Are you trying to cram all your information into one promotional email rather than enticing people to click through to a landing page? Is your email design overly busy? Is your email marketing message unclear?

If your email marketing is all bundled up, strip it down:

• Keep it simple
• Focus on one call to action (included 3 to 5 times)
• Stay clear and concise in your message
• Streamline your design so it complements, not complicates, your message
• Don’t think of your email as the sales vehicle, but the introduction. Your goal is clicks, not cash…yet

Don’t smother your email marketing with turtlenecks and cardigans or else your recipients will only see a bundle of clothes, not the body beneath it. And the body is what drives your email marketing results.

It seems there are still those companies linking their email marketing calls to action to a home page, or, if they are using a landing page, they’re doing a poor job of it.

It’s not that landing pages are simple; it takes a lot of effort and knowledge and testing to build a powerhouse landing page that converts at a higher rate. But there are two landing page essentials that can get you started at least, and they are absolutely necessary for effective email marketing:

• 1. Use one-Make sure you use a landing page specific to the email marketing message you’re sending out. I mean it. Don’t send them to a catch-all page or a product listing page or-worst of all-a home page.
• 2. Match the email-When someone does click through, they need a seamless experience. If you’re landing page doesn’t match the look, feel and offer of the email, you are creating friction. Friction slows down motion. That’s bad. We want to keep them moving toward conversion. So make sure your landing page matches the email that links to it in design and in message.

Over time make sure you’re paying more attention to your landing page elements, including the message, design, the information you ask for, etc. But for now, make sure you use these two ways to make your landing pages land you more customers and a higher email marketing ROI!