How awful landing pages can kill email campaigns

SilverPop did a study recently called, “Eight Seconds to Capture Attention: Silverpop’s Landing Page Report” that analyzed the email campaigns of 150 top online companies. What they found were excellently executed email campaigns that promised results, only to have poor conversion because of an ill-planned landing page. Uninterested prospects quickly took their business elsewhere.
Even the large companies need to concentrate on their landing page and consider it part of the whole project. Take some of the work used on making the email part look fabulous and transfer it to make the landing page equally as brilliant.
So what exactly was examined in this study?
• Use of readable URLs
PRIMARY FINDING: B2B companies were less likely to use readable URLs than B2C firms. A clear, unforgettable URL makes good sense, though probably not as important in a PPC campaign.
• Repetition of email promotional copy
PRIMARY FINDING: Almost half of the landing pages neglected to replicate the email’s call-to-action.
• Primary conversion goals
PRIMARY FINDING: 60% of companies utilize landing pages in order to sell their products or services. Other goals include branding, education and lead generation.
• Location of the landing page
PRIMARY FINDING: 17% of email marketing campaigns, mostly B2C, dropped receivers at the firm’s home page instead of their own exclusive campaign landing page.
• Whether the design of the page matched the email and/or website
PRIMARY FINDING: Over 1 in 3 landing pages neglected to copy the look, feel, and tone of the original email.
• Landing page design
PRIMARY FINDING: 25% of the landing pages used a 2-column format, while only 36% used the suggested one-column format.
• Placement of the key call-to-action
PRIMARY FINDING: 90% of landing pages had their main call-to-action above the fold. However, only 11% had further calls-to-action adjoining to the below-the-fold copy, in those cases where the copy continued past the normal fold.