Your Landing Pages May Need Work

Though most marketers’ e-mail landing pages are at least relevant to the offer, a relative few are created specifically for the promotion, according to a recent report by Silverpop.

In a study of promotional e-mail from 150 companies in North America and the U.K.—110 business-to-consumer and 40 business-to-business—the e-mail service provider found that 50% of the messages took recipients to a previously existing Web page within the site that was relevant to the offer. Also, 33% took responders to landing pages created specifically for that e-mail, but 17% dropped people who clicked through off at the company’s home page.

Somewhat surprisingly, b-to-c e-mails were far more likely to lead recipients to the companies’ home pages than b-to-b promotions. One in five b-to-c e-mails led to company home pages, compared to just 8% of b-to-b e-mails, according to Silverpop.

Elaine O’Gorman, vice president of strategy for Silverpop, was quick to point out that one shouldn’t assume that leading an e-mail recipient to an e-commerce site’s home page is the wrong thing to do.

“Testing trumps best practices,” she said. “If you’ve made some custom landing pages and you’ve tested them against dumping people on your home page and you convert better by dumping people on your home page, then by all means do it.”

However, she added: “My guess is the 17% of people who are sending recipients to their home pages either haven’t thought it through or are lacking the resources to make that work for them.”

O’Gorman said many marketers have been mainly focused on getting their outbound e-mail to perform by working on front-end issues, such as delivery, e-mail list building and file hygiene.

“Focusing on the landing page is the next logical step,” she said.

In a somewhat disturbing finding, 45% of landing pages Silverpop evaluated failed to repeat the e-mail’s promotional copy in the headline. Moreover, 35% of landing pages in the study didn’t match the e-mail’s look or tone, according to Silverpop.

One reason for the mismatch between commercial e-mails and their landing pages is probably that many companies aren’t organized to allow e-mail marketing executives to set up their own landing pages, and working with IT takes time these marketers often don’t have.

“I can’t tell you how many customers we have who say, ‘I’d love to do landing pages, but it takes a minimum of 90 days for my IT department to put up a page and they won’t be able to change it for like six months,’” said O’Gorman.

However, she said, tools are increasingly becoming available—including one being developed by Silverpop—that allow e-mail marketing executives to create and maintain their own landing pages.

“I would encourage people not to accept answers [concerning the creation of landing pages] that may have been acceptable 18 or 24 months ago,” she said. “You do have choices now.”

She said she has seen 200% to 300% lifts in response and conversion rates with simple home-page tweaks.

As for whether or not to create specific landing pages for every product in an e-mail, it depends on the marketer, said O’Gorman.

“If you’ve got 12 or 18 products in an e-mail, are you really going to do a landing page for each one of them?” said O’Gorman. “I think you should test it. If it gives you the lift that justifies doing it, then you betcha.”