Another day at the Email Summit and another great certification course led by the dynamic Dr. Flint McGlaughlin. Today was the Email Messaging Optimization Professional Certification and as if I didn’t have enough to do as a result of what we covered in yesterday’s course, I now have more insight into how to optimize the ‘email capture to landing page conversion’ process. The idea of looking at email marketing as a science is not new but having someone like Dr McGlaughlin and the rest of the MarketingExperiments group provide these types of programs can really open even the most seasoned veteran’s eyes. Throughout the day there were many little tidbits of information, any of which alone could make a big difference in your email marketing ROI.

Today’s course was broken into three areas:

1)      Optimizing Email Capture

2)      Optimizing Open Rate and Clickthrough

3)      Optimizing Landing Pages

And although they are each extremely important (the chain is as strong as the weakest link), the formula presented today states:

Email capture < Open Rate < Click Through < Landing Page

Again, this is skimming the surface and, like yesterday, I strongly urge anyone involved in email marketing to take this course as well: you  won’t regret it.

As an email marketing vendor, we’re excited to be participating at such a high caliber event. The first day is over and I just finished the Landing Page Optimization Professional Certification course put on by MarketingExperiments. If you haven’t been exposed to these two organizations (MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments), you’re missing out.

Optimizing landing pages are essential for any email marketer. But as a seasoned Marketer, I’m astonished at how much I learned on this topic — I can’t wait to go back to apply what I’ve learned to what ClickMail is doing as well as to our own customers’ marketing initiatives.To analyze and optimize landing pages, MarketingExperiments uses a conversion sequence as a conceptual tool for understanding and remembering the essential factors that affect website conversion and the relationships among them. That sequence is loosely as follows:

Conversion = User Motivation + Value Proposition + Incentive- Friction – Anxiety.

I say loosely because the actual sequence is: 

Conversion= 4 x (User Motivation) + 3 x (Value Prop) + 2 x (Incentive to take action – Friction) – 2x (Anxiety).

Of course the details behind the formula are the meat of what to look at but trust me, it’s all extremely useful information. By taking this certification or course you’ll learn how to do everything from expressing an effective value proposition to the types and levels of anxiety (concerns stimulated by a given element in the conversion process) and everything in between.

I strongly recommend you take this certification. It’ll change how you approach your landing pages. For the better. I promise.