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Landing pages are Achilles heel for email marketers

by Alicia Buller, Revolution UK 27-Jun-07, 11:20

LONDON - More than four out of 10 companies practising email marketing in the UK and across North America fail to repeat promotional copy through to the landing page, thereby running the risk of confusing customers who will quickly abandon the site, a new survey has revealed.

The survey, conducted by email service provider Silverpop, analysed landing pages for email promotions from 150 companies across the US & UK.

Only 45 per cent of landing pages repeated copy from the original email. And, somewhat alarmingly, in 30 per cent of cases, the look of the landing page didn't match that of the promotional email, with 17 per cent of emails sending customers to a home page rather than a promotional page uniquely relevant to the email offer.

"Landing pages can be extremely useful if you've got a complicated story to tell [your audience] and mini-sites can work well to engage the prospect with deeper messages, but the look and feel should always be consistent," said Simone Barratt, managing director, e-Dialog UK and member of the DMA email marketing council.

Other survey findings included the use of navigation bars on seven out of ten landing pages, despite their potential to distract customers, and the presence of overlong questionnaires with 45 per cent requiring more than ten fields to be completed.

"It's a bit like trying to catch water with a sieve if your landing pages aren't consistent with your email promotion," said Mike Weston, MD of Silverpop EMEA. "A clear path needs to be plotted from email through to sale to ensure customer satisfaction and ROI is optimised."

Barratt agreed: "Any decent marketer is going to ensure consistency in their communications or they run the risk of confusing and annoying prospects and customers. You have to everything you can to make their journey easy."

Comments

TONY ATTWOOD - 27/06/2007

What a weird piece. The key issue - does a lack of a repeat copy actually confuse readers is ignored. It is just an assumption. It is equally possible that repeating the offer on the landing page could bore people so they just move away. Likewise the issue of making the landing page have the same look and feel as the advert is also based on an assumption - where is the research to show that this is true? There is every reason to believe that such assumptions are false - just look at direct mail where people assume that illustrations always enhance response rates, or that colour always gives higher sales (both are shown to be untrue through experimentation) or that going for the named B2B list will always generate better responses than buying in a general unnamed list (again untrue). All this research has been gathered together on www.theory.bz - but where is the research site on the issue of email? It is quite possible that the 45% of people who don't repeat the message are the brainy lot who are really pushing their response rates up. Tony Attwood, Hamilton House Mailings plc

Lisa Tomlinson - 28/06/2007

Come on.. Surely the issue is more complex than that it’s about relevancy.. If you are telling people something they want need to know then that is much more a compelling fact than if it colour or not. And if you use someone’s name it is just more professional and polite..

Jeremy Jarrett - 03/07/2007

I think both of you have good views and in some ways both are right. I personally from experience always use designated landing pages or micro-sites, but i still have no problem with sending my customers to pages that are incorporated into the main website templates. I happy to say that if you correctly entice customers to your site through emarketing and they begin to engage with you through use of your landing page or other area’s of your website then the emarketing communications and the compelling copy has worked. By putting the time in up front with your emarketing messages and copy you can gain good results and as long as the reader is aware where they are being taken and has the opportunity to find out the information that they require to make an informed decision does it really matter where they go? I think the answer to that is no it doesn’t matter. I have sent many hundreds of campaigns, some with designated landing pages, some with landing pages with in a company web template and some to micro-sites and all have had better than average open and click-thru rates… so I am a strong believer that the answer is in the copy and the content and the relevancy…..