It’s estimated that up to 50 percent of visitors to landing pages will bail in the first eight seconds. E-mail marketers spend countless hours and untold millions trying to make recipients click on a link leading to a landing page, but delivering only clicks is short-changing the company. Marketers need to convert prospects to customers; clicks need to result in purchases.
Silverpop, a provider of e-newsletter and e-mail marketing services (SMM is a customer), created a white paper entitled “8 Seconds to Capture Attention.” These five landing page tips are taken from that paper:
› Successful landing pages grab attention quickly by matching the promotional copy in the e-mail’s call to action that yielded the click. A whopping 45 percent of the landing pages evaluated failed to repeat the e-mail’s promotional copy in the headline.
› Catapulting a clicker to a website’s home page generally fails to deliver on the promise inherent in the e-mail’s call to action. Yet 17 percent of e-mail campaigns dumped recipients there.
› Recipients can be taken aback when they click on a link and end up on a landing page without the same look and feel as the e-mail that captured their attention.
› Asking too many questions can lead prospective customers to become wary and frustrated enough that they abandon the process.
› Less copy, when it’s well written, is more effective than long. Yet 25 percent of the landing pages reviewed by Silverpop required scrolling through more than two screens of text.
A link to the complete paper is available on the SMM website at salesandmarketing.com.
