Key Takeaways
- Optimize the landing page: The experience beyond the click is crucial. Ensure that the landing page aligns with the expectations set in the email to improve conversion rates.
- Adapt the landing page to the email CTA: The intent of the landing page should match the intent of the email CTA. If the email says "shop now," the landing page should lead to a shopping experience.
- Segment your audience: Adapt your landing page based on the targeted segment. Different segments may respond better to different landing page designs or content.
- Align email and landing page content: The content on the landing page should align with what was promised in the email to maintain consistency and trust.
- Sequence products on the landing page: Based on the intent of the email, sequence the products on the landing page accordingly. This can help guide the user's journey and increase the likelihood of conversion.
Summary of the session
The webinar, led by Mailjet’s digital marketing expert, Julia Ritter, delved into the intricacies of optimizing email campaigns and landing pages. Julia emphasized the importance of product sequencing, aligning email imagery with landing page content, and tailoring landing page design based on customer segmentation. She also discussed the emerging bundle strategy and the importance of placing high-interest products or features at the top of the page.
She warned against misleading clickbait strategies, using an example of inconsistent discount messaging. The host, Raghav, facilitated a Q&A session, where Julia advised attendees to benchmark against competitors’ newsletters for better results.
Webinar Video
Webinar Deck
Top questions asked by the audience
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It would be great to know if you should subscribe to a very specific newsletter from any company in the world. So it has a great reputation so we can benchmark it for the later run. Right?
Totally. So here's the thing. Benchmarking is hard because you don't know every industry is different, and you don't know They could be putting out a newsletter. If you don't know if it's successful, ...you know, I mean, it could be successful to you because you're getting something out of it. So I think if you're looking for something to benchmark against, maybe, subscribe to, like, do some competitor research, you know, subscribe to their newsletters to see what they're putting out and how they're treating their customers. But, and also, like, anything content-wise, and sometimes you do, like, it's a test, you know, you subscribe to some. You might unsubscribe from them a month in because they're not giving you what you need. A good example, is a really good email. It is really good - emails.com. They have great examples of good emails. So, if you need to see kind of what's out there, without subscribing to things, I think that's a great resource too. -
How important is personalization when we consider designing a landing page for an email user?
100%. Like, short answer, it's 101% important. I think one of the slides Julia also talked about was that about 89% of people prefer key to content or subject lines over a discount code, things of tha ...t sort. So I think 110%. It's very, very important. And if you talk about how you can go ahead with personalization. I think a lot of, first, just define the parameters that you wanna personalize the experience on. Is it by the demographics? Is it about the age, the gender, the country they are in? I think Slack does that. Slack code uses your IP address to detect which country you're from, and it says that it's the best plan for India and the best plan for teams in the US. I think that's one thing that they do on demographics. You can do it based on your visitor attributes, whether they're a new visitor, they're in returning visitor, or they're a customer, they're a subscriber. As I said, to a customer, you wanna show things that have passed in the, there are things that they have chosen in the past. So you wanna show those kinds of things. You wanna show things from the same category to them. You know, there are endless possibilities that can, you know, probably even be personalized based on the time of the day they're coming on the website. You see that a lot of times, good morning, good evening, so that's all. So 100% important, I think, just seeing that the website knows me, has a word for human connect, then knowing that I'm just connecting over a machine from something of that sort. So for both of them, go for personalization. I think that's the new thing to be.
Transcription
Disclaimer- Please be aware that the content below is computer-generated, so kindly disregard any potential errors or shortcomings.
She has been involved in email marketing activities for the last 5 years and has achieved phenomenal results for the companies she has worked with. In her campaigns, she focuses on brand voice and also on automation ideas that improve efficiency. Julia, welcome to this session and thank you for taking the time to enlighten us on email marketing concepts. We also have another expert with us who is an optimization consultant at VWO. And one thing that I would want to tell everybody about is Aastha is our in-house expert on all the things in CRO. In her career, she has worked with clients in a wide range of industries like e-commerce, SaaS, and banking. She’s popular among her clients for her ability to analyze the nuances of visitor behavior. And implement data-backed growth-oriented strategies. I extend a warm welcome to you, Aastha, and would like to thank you for joining us in the sure-to-be enriching session.
Most importantly, a very warm welcome, everyone, I want to welcome the entire audience today. Thank you for joining in, and I hope you enjoy this webinar. And you get the exact knowledge that you have your expectations around. More importantly, if you like to ask any question at any point in this webinar, please feel free to nudge us in the chat box and put that down as a comment. I assure you that towards the end of this webinar, we will pick important and, discussable questions.
And I’ll also ensure that our guests, Aastha and Julia, will offer their responses to the same. With this particular note, if there are any concerns, I would like to have them over the chat box. But on a most important aspect, if there is any audio issue, I would want everybody to just spam at the very moment so that I can get that fixed at the very moment again. With this, I’d like to invite Julia to present please.
Julia Ritter:
Okay. Can everyone hear me and see me and see my screen? I’m still laughing at what you said. Everyone, if you can just spam that moment that we’re having audio issues, because how more of a pun is that? Okay.
So, let’s get started, shall we? I’m Julia. I’m so happy to be here, with VWO. I think this is gonna be a great webinar. I’m so excited to learn about more CRO, from their side as well.
So it’s gonna be a really great webinar in your inventory. Okay. So I am here to talk to you about how to convert more users from your email campaign. And we’re gonna dive into a lot of topics. So, hope you have your notebooks ready.
I know I do. So let’s get started. So just a little bit about me. I am the Email Marketing Manager at Mailjet by Sinch. I also work with Mailgun and email and acid brands. I’ve been an email for over 5 years. It’s been a really great 5 years of learning, execution and campaign management, and email writing. And, I really enjoy email writing with attention to a brand voice like Gerard said.
I really enjoy, automating and finding new ways to make our lives more efficient and our team more efficient. And I also live in Chicago. So if anyone’s from Chicago, shout out, a little bit about Mailjet, we are an all-in-one email form with features such as a drag-and-drop editor, email previews, and list verification. So, we also have great content on our blog. So if you’re looking for some light reading, I actually have a lot of resources for you later in the presentation, but, just a heads up there.
Okay. So there are two different sources I’m gonna be talking about here is kind of the ground for my presentation. And these were both published by Mailjet. We did an email engagement survey in which we asked 2000 respondents to tell us how they interact with their personal inboxes. So not from a company standpoint, but how I would interact with my Gmail or other companies’ emails just to kind of get a more a greater perspective of how to interact with them and help brand other brands build meaningful connections.
The responses were really enlightening and I have that link later for you to download the full report very interesting. And then we also have inbox insights, and this is from the brand perspective. And it’s asking, brands what it takes to be or how successful they deem their email strategy to be. And again, it was very interesting just to see how, what trends they think are coming and are very important to them, what kind of, components of email they wanna focus on in 2022. So it’s a great resource.
Okay. So some things we’re gonna go over are how to prep your campaign, and how to cater to your audience, And that’ll include a lot of talk about personalization in here. So we’ll get into that. Loving your content and loving your design. How to give people what they want, calculating ROI because here we are, and then some final thoughts and resources like I mentioned.
I’m just gonna check that to make sure you can all hear me. Okay. Nothing there because it sounds good. Okay. So the first is prepping your campaign.
So first things first, you wanna make sure you have a goal. Right? You wanna brainstorm this idea for your campaign. So with the intention of what you want, rather than looking at the analytics after the campaign and seeing, like, okay, what can I get from this? What are your important KPIs?
Are you trying to get your audiences re-engaged, are you trying to increase web or webinar registrants? What are you looking to get out of this? So If it’s educational or relationship building cross-sell, upsell, something like that, that’s multifaceted. Do you know what I mean? And don’t be fooled by the educational or relationship-building content because you’re creating a relationship with your audience.
Keeping those existing customers coming back for more is cheaper overall than trying to gain a new customer. They need to know who you are and what you’re talking about. And what you’re about. So they were in a pinch. They come to you for a solution.
They know that they can go to you and you will have good content. You will have that product that can solve their problem. So there’s lots of different things you can do. Second thing – what you’re trying before you start a campaign is monitoring your deliverability. I mean, deliverability is basically email currency. Right? If your reputation and domain does not seem trustworthy, it will be reflected in your results. So positive impacts. Positive impacts are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. I can go into those a little bit more just as a quick rundown. So SPF, and I’m reading a note about this, so I do not misquote what we’re talking about because all these acronyms get a little confusing. So this allows the domain owner to look after their own reputation and decide who has the right to send emails on their behalf. DKIM is a standard used by ISPs to verify that no phishing acts have been committed during the email routine, and then DMARC is an additional protection measure against domain theft.
And it’s basically if the SPF and DKIM fail, DMARC is there to help you out. A double opt-in subscription method, I’m skipping engagement for now. The double opt-in subscription method is just I think the smartest thing you can do because you can have the email verification up front when they are adding in their email to your subscription or to a subscription or to your site for 20% off. And then they receive an email that says confirm your email so that you know 1, it’s the most valid. They didn’t find their email address had a typo.
And then you know it’s not some spammer out there trying to just get on your list. And it also increases your engagement. When they’re actually verifying their email, they’re committing again to say that they want your content. They want your emails. And so that engagement has a positive impact because you want only people who are going to be active for your emails, are gonna actually be interested in opening them every time.
Regular maintenance – so our VP of Deliverability, she actually had a webinar yesterday, and I was listening all about this. She recommends doing this once a month. That means, removing any spam traps or invalid emails, anyone, any old emails that the inbox is full and can no longer, be delivered to if someone left their company. That’s an old inbox, you know, they’re gonna end up being inactive on your list. And so that kind of drives down your engagement.
And flags to DKIM an SPF that, you know, something isn’t right here. Segmentation – again, you wanna segment to your most engaged but then make sure your messages are going to the right people, at the right time. And again, this will go into personalization, later in your presentation. So we’ll see how exactly to segment and who to segment so that we can further dive into that. Negative impacts, again, your list quality and engagement.
If it’s not, everyone who is engaged, who isn’t actually an active participant on your list. If you have someone who is accidentally a spam trap, or, an invalid email address, it’s gonna drive down your reputation. Your email content and design you know, avoid using spammy words like free, sale, click here. Please don’t use click here. You can also, you know, if your image is too large, it can end up in the spam folder.
So you wanna monitor your send volume. So you’re not spending, and you also wanna monitor your spend volume. So you’re not sending a huge amount of emails at one time. You know, you could send, like, 10,000, say in 3 weeks, send another 10,000. That’s not a very good idea.
So watch that sticky sending. Okay. Move forward. As I mentioned, inbox insights, I’m using this as a resource. So respondents ranked the critical elements of increasing engagement and the top 3 were content quality, personalization, and responsive design.
This was a select all that applies. So that’s why the percentages are a little bit ranked, but, so we’re gonna dive into those deep bars. Peter, to your audience, Oops. Sorry. So in our email engagement survey, 89% of respondents of this subject line is personalized or that is personalized to our interests.
Is more important to them than a discount code. So to me, that says a promo code’s important. But I’d rather have the idea that you know what you’re paying attention to and what I want so that you’re giving me more catered content. So that I can trust you more. And that, you know, you’re impressing me with it, what you know about me.
So, you know, It’s kinda nice. Including a promo code with that, I’m sure would not heard. Okay. So with personalization comes a few different ideas here so you can do the basics like personas, interests, geographic areas, or you can do something like the stage in the process. If they’re new or brand new customers, they’re gonna need different messaging.
Then the existing active versus the inactive. So new customers. What do they need to start your product or service? What do they need after they buy something from you? Existing customers – you’re just maintaining that relationship and nurturing them, and this is a great opportunity for a cross-sell and up-sell.
Whereas inactive, how can you bring them back? How can you establish that you have value and that they’ve come to you before? How can you get them to come to you again? This all leads to, again, segmentation to boost your engagement. And you can also segment based on customer and behavioral data. So, did they visit a web page, think of an abandoned cart email or, you know, recent purchases? Did they just buy, something from you? And, you know, you can follow up with, like, a review request or, did they use something from your product? So we have like email verifications. How many email verifications did they use last month? Can I upsell them something?
Oops. I keep clicking the wrong screen for some reason. This is an example of how I’ve done it. So we sent out a holiday toolkit email, and based on the plan based on our Mailjet plans, you have different features available. So the first example on the left is the premium plan, they have, 1000 verifications at their disposal.
Whereas on the left, the essential plan does not have any included, but it is available to them. So we left that as more educational. Whereas we personalized in the premium email, again, on the left, something that they could exactly what they could do with it, how many have at their disposal. To log in and take advantage of that. Okay.
Loving your content. So position your content in a way that they’re gonna know exactly what they’re getting out of it. Don’t bear the lead. How does it solve the problem that they may be or how does it solve a problem they may be experiencing so that they know that they can rely on you? And why are they gonna benefit from it?
We love our own content, but we created it. So, of course, we love it. But, like, how is it gonna help your audiences? You know, like, how is it being shown in the email to know that they can get exactly what they wanted? So I have a few examples from really good emails Grammarly has, this is a great example of, a win-back campaign.
You called out they called out that, they were interwriting things. Here’s what and they have loved Grammarly before. They disappeared. Start again. You know, like it’s easy, it’s simple.
Go. Judy. I did not know what Judy was. You know, obviously, an email subscriber would, but I don’t know what I didn’t know what Judy was before I saw this email, but then everything is right there above the fold for me to see. So a well-stocked emergency survival kit.
There’s a testimonial from a well-renowned writer from Rolling Stone magazine. Crazy. And then it gives you another example of how it can be used. Brilliant. And I think it’s on the forefront for you to have. And then, the Casper example is a great abandoned cart. So you know exactly what you’re missing out on, and then they give a testimonial of how helpful Casper has been to them. So I think it’s all at the forefront, they’re not explaining too much. They’re giving it to you and going.
Loving your design. So sometimes it is about looks. Our senior email developer, Megan Bishausen gave a great speech, a couple of weeks ago, spam about accessibility, and this is just huge. One of the biggest takeaways I had was it doesn’t matter what segment of your audience needs the accessible version because everything should be inclusive and everything should be accessible. So code your emails for the screen readers that are helping people with these sensitivities.
Make sure you’re using all text in case they cancel the image, but the alt text helps the screen reader tell them exactly what it is and be descriptive. Text size and imagery. Watch your gift usage. You know, make sure it’s not too flashy. Make sure, it’s not, you know, the color combinations aren’t, you know, hindering someone with those kinds of sensitivities.
Email rendering. You wanna make sure emails render correctly across all the platforms and devices possible. You put so much time and effort into your emails. You don’t wanna end up with, you know, an image. It’s over to the left and not aligning with your CTA button. It’s not great. It can kind of decrease the trust that your customers have with you. And then, if you’re sending out an email, there are other options or tools available for you to do to make sure this happens. So utilize them, like Email and Acid, which is one of our brands I won’t lie, they’re great. They can show you across 60-plus platforms and devices, how exactly your email’s gonna look. So sometimes we see a problem with Outlook, who doesn’t, you know, we can catch that before we send.
And then dynamic content, which we’re gonna go into shortly, is a great way to personalize. It’s kind of what I did in our holiday toolkit example. But it’s just an excellent way to, you know, show another dedication to your audiences. Okay. So that’s top 3 ways to use dynamic content are through images of visuals, text in the email body, and then text in the subject lines.
I’m sure we’ve all seen texting the subject lines, sometimes your data isn’t that great. You know, people put Julia in all caps. So if your subject line is all sentence case and then my name is in all caps, it’s not my favorite. I get it all the time. It’s just that it’s a good effort, but, you know, it kind of falls short.
So here are some examples of how to do that in your body. So the United by Blue. This is an email that automatically updates depending on the tracking, so and then the shipping confirmation. So right here, it’s in transit. But this will change once it’s delivered or originally when it was shipped, which I think is really clever. The Loom email is a, very cool example of how to personalize their data from, like, a year in review.
I love it. How many videos did they record? Videos they watched, you can do, like, how many products you use or I would do how many verifications they used. It’s awesome. And then the made-in cookware. This email was all about personalized cookware.
Like, you can add your name to it, and they showed that right in the email. And Smiles Davis is the name that really good emails use just as the placeholder. So I think it’s really cool that they put that in their email of how it would look. Okay. So giving people what they want, starting to go past that slide so quickly.
78.5 percent of respondents in the email engagement survey said they wanna hear from their brands at least once a week. While 51% so they wanna hear from them more than once a week. Take that and run with it. You know, I mean, a lot of people, you know, if depending on the industry or end, it’s gonna be you can send a lot because if you want a promotions or a lot of products, you wanna hit But just keep in mind that sometimes less is more, or if you’re only spending once a week, maybe you can nudge it up to 2 and see what happens. So some options for you here are automated and trigger campaigns.
This along with dynamic content saves you so much time and gives you so much opportunity. You can do them based on the behavioral aspects like I was, mentioning or even with onboarding, you know, you wanna make sure that your customers are receiving a nurture series if that applies to your product. And I know this is cliche, but timing is everything individually for that campaign, but then also for your whole strategy. So I also have it under testing because it can be something cool to test the dynamic content we had. This is an example.
We had a pricing email that needed to go out, and we sent it out in 4 languages. Each plan had a different feature or feature allocation that needed to be included. We made that dynamic so that instead of sending out 25 emails, I could trigger the dynamic section of the segment. And then it saved me time and execution and still provided a personalized experience. So just keep these things in mind, because it’s not just for the benefit of your audience, but it’s for your benefit too. Testing.
Love testing. You can test anything you want subject lines, CTA buttons, content. Did they like something straight to the point or funny? Did they like something vague or specific? It’s great.
Like I mentioned the timing, you can see, you know, are they more gonna respond to an email if you wait a week after they onboard or in 3 days? You know, how long does it take for them to buy something else? Upgrade. You don’t know. Try it out.
And I love testing with content placement, and corresponding subject lines. So if I have multiple features in an email, I like to say for our blog newsletter example. So say I have 3 blogs, I will correspond the last feature in the email with the subject line. So that way I can see if people are actually only clicking on the first feature because it’s easy or if they’re actually taking the time to go to the bottom of my email to read that feature. And it’s a really cool test.
It’s just interesting to see people’s behavior because they often do go down because they actually care about that topic. Okay. Calculating ROI. We just did a very in-depth article about this, and I’m gonna include the link for you because it’s a lot of math.
1, That we don’t have time for today. 2, It’s very complex. There are so many complexities such as your providers, your employees, and your services. How much is going into your total email costs? So this is a very personal thing that you can take away.
There are multiple possible conversions from an email and not every email is trying to make a sale you know, I send out the blog newsletter. That’s not trying to make a sale. It’s just trying to get education out there. Whereas there are 5 attribution models that you can use. And again, we dive so much deeper into this in our blog, so I will have that for you.
But last-click attribution, first-click attribution, linear attribution, position-based, and time decay attribution. There are tons of examples and more definitions. So, I do have this for you. I just figured it’d be a little bit easier for everyone to do it on their own. So very cool when coming to calculating email ROI because you have to because it’s to show that email’s making a difference in your strategy in your company. Email is the channel that brings in the highest ROI.
So why not, you know, give yourself a boost? Get a little raise out of it. You know? It’ll be excellent. Okay.
So we’re gonna wrap it up. Can’t believe I babbled to you for this long, but it feels like 5 minutes to me. Sorry. Let’s see. Okay.
So email dues. Monitor your deliverability because, again, it’s your email currency. Personalize the user’s content. And their experience overall through copy, segmentation, promotions, never, implement accessibility always. And, again, email and assets are a great tool to help you make sure that your emails are rendering.
Email don’ts. Don’t forget to test your emails before you send them for rendering. Send out a campaign without it. Don’t send out a campaign without a direct goal and purpose in mind.
Just leave with that thought, and it’ll be more successful overall. And please don’t use the term e e-blast. I doubt anyone is doing that here, but I’m just putting it in there. Don’t use it. Okay.
Great resources for you. So, again, email and asset is a great email rendering tool. We also have email previews in Mailjet, that are combined with email and asset. So, that’s perfect. It’s so helpful. I use it every day. Megan, our email dev uses it every day.
Email verifications. So that is a great list maintenance tool I mentioned, you should be doing it every month if you can or at least every quarter. Mailgun has great API solutions and other deliverability products. So if you care to check that out, we have a great podcast at Mailgun called Email’s Not Dead. Megan and I actually just did an episode that’ll be coming out shortly. That might have been a sneak peek. So sorry Thomas, if you’re watching, it’s very interesting, and our team is so funny and so great to listen to.
Community. So the email geek select channels, if you’re not part of it, apply. It’s so cool. I don’t know what I was doing before the email geek slack channel, but it’s so cool. It’s just great to be part of this community.
Staying with women of email. Amazing. And if there are any others, please share them with the group so we can all, join them together. I truly love this community and how niche it is, but how excited where all are about this. So please drop them in the chat.
Okay. Like, I promised some light reading. So the inbox insights and the email engagement survey that we put in there, that I’ve used as background. I’ll give you links for both of those. And, either me or Raghav can put them in the chat as well so you have the direct links.
And just some other newsletter ideas, email previews, and the calculating email ROI that I mentioned. Email marketing audits if you’re in a, you know, spring cleaning mood and then, the marketing calendar for 2022 dates you shouldn’t miss. So, lots of good things. And this is my contact information. Please stay in touch, my email LinkedIn and Slack, and I can be found on the email geeks.
My bio is I email about email. So, that’s how you can find me. Twitter. I don’t have one. I’m gonna get one today because it’s just time.
And then I, work on the Mailjet email and asset and Mailgun newsletters. So if you subscribe to those, you’ll hear from me a lot. Okay, this has been wonderful. I know I have talked really fast, so please put all your questions in the chat so we can get to them. And I am gonna turn it over to Aastha.
I’m so excited.
Raghav:
This has been really resourceful for everyone, I believe. As there is a famous quote, great power comes with great responsibilities. I would like to tweak it a little bit. Personalization comes with great responsibilities for sure. Taking major learnings from your presentation.
Everyone who has been a bit attentive or majorly attentive, I assure you there is a valued bond that is gonna drop regarding the landing pages that get involved within the email marketing process. So I’ll start without further ado. Over to you.
Aastha:
Perfect. I think first of all, Julia, I think that was a great presentation. A lot to learn today. And, just moving on from where Julia left off, I’ll be talking more about that. Where a person ends up coming on your website via interacting after interacting with that email, how do we make sure that person converts on the website as well?
Right? So I’ll just be talking about what we can do on that landing page. So in order to ensure that the beyond-click experience is optimized. But before I do that, just a quick introduction about myself. So I’ve been working with the VWO Services and, I basically help online businesses curate a strategy, the data growth-oriented strategy, which basically helps them to improve the KPIs that matter to them.
Right? So everything about landing page optimization, testing different campaign ideas, looking at what the problem ideas are, things that sort of something that I have been doing and something I love doing. And, just as a fun fact, I am from this beautiful country called India, and, on that note, just, I think diving deep into what we all are here for. I’ll be talking about, I think, 3 major things today. One would be I’ll start with what is the one big thing that email marketers are missing today.
If not all, at least 90% of the email marketers are missing today. Why is it important? Like, what is the difference it’s making out there? Once you’ve established, what is the importance of that one particular element – How can we get started? Right?
So these are the 3 things that are on my agenda. What I want to sort of deliver through this entire engagement. And coming to, like, that one big thing of what typically happens is that today, you know, email marketers just focus on what’s on the email. We just limit the entire optimization to what goes on the email. You know. I think testing subject lines, testing email copies, and testing CTAs, are 100%.
Like, I think that is 100% important. But at the same time, when a person is clicking on the CTA, they’re convinced with your email, they’re converting amazingly well. The person clicks on the CTA, We also have to make sure that on the website, they’re landing on an experience that they expected. Right? Think this way, like, people who are coming via email for them.
That landing page is your entire website. They just know or they just remember about your brand. Just that much of what is written in the email. They are not on your home page, so they don’t essentially know about how many people like you, what you really sell, or which magazines have featured you. Nothing of that sort.
They just know what’s on the email. They just know what would be on the landing page. And based on these two experiences, they’re gonna convert it. So you can’t just limit your optimization to the email, but you have to think beyond that click. That’s what I’m gonna talk more about, what to do, what to do on your landing pages so that the person who has landed on your website is also converting after that.
4 small yet big things that we can get started with. 1, adapt the intent of the landing page based on what is the intent of the CTA. I’ll cover all of these 4 with examples in the next slide. So I’ll probably just read it out or read them out on this slide and just talk a lot about it on the upcoming slides. So first is, as I said, adapting your landing page intent with the email CTA intent.
The other would be adapting your landing page based on the segment that’s targeted. The third would be having an alignment between what’s on the landing page and what’s on the email copy. I will be sequencing products on the landing page based on what was the email intent. Diving deeper into it, talking about what you mean by where when I say that you have to adapt the landing page intent with the email CTA copy intent.
What do I really mean? Imagine you get an email. Let’s say we got an email from an e-commerce client. Most of the emails say shop now. I think typically, which page you would expect to be redirected to?
The action is more about shopping, right? So I would expect it to be redirected to either a product page or a collection page where I can essentially take that action of shopping. But what we have seen in a lot of clicks, if let’s say, I received 20 emails in a week. I mean, at least in 12 emails, if not more, I’m being redirected to the home page. The home page doesn’t align with the action of shopping. That’s the first thing. Secondly, let’s take an example of a SaaS company where on the email, you know, we try to get back a lot of people who have started filling a form, but we have lost them at step 2 or step 3, something of that sort.
We always wanna get back those users because they seem to be a high intent user for us. But when we send them an email, why do we have to get them started on the entire form again? Why not redirect them to the very same place where they left the form? So continuing registration should ideally redirect them to the intent that they have. They wanna complete the registration form.
Right? So just send them to the last step where they left the registration form. So the idea is that you adapt the CTA copy to what action they are expecting to get out of it. For example, I just give you an example, on my screen, this is an email by a player in the aviation industry where they are sort of promoting a package to Kathmandu and Singapore. They have a rough itinerary over here and the CTA here says ‘Book now’.
When I click on the CTA here, I land on a generic destination page where I’m supposed to make all the selections again on this email. If you’re talking about a package sending me to Kathmandu, Singapore, I’m clicking on ‘Book now’ because my intent is to visit this place. Why not have these as default selections? In fact, why not test it? In one case, you test this particular variation that I have on my screen.
In another, you have the location selected as Kathmandu, Singapore. In the third one, you actually also have the flights selected as per the itinerary that is given over here. The idea is that we want to take the user deeper into the funnel as soon as we can. So what we have over here is kind of a wrong experience. We could have tested it.
We could have made it much better than what it currently is. Has there ever been a talk about what would have been the right experience? This is, again, one of the players in the analytics industry where it’s talking that the intent of this email seems to be to get more sign-ups, to get more registrations. So when I look in this email, at the CTA sign-up, I click on it. I get to the registration page of the get started page.
A very light experience, something that would be recommended, but what would have been better is something of this sort. Remember, I told you that for an audience that’s coming via email, the landing page is the entire website. So when they’re landing on a page like this, they don’t really have that social proof. They don’t have that trust factor. They might have second thoughts, and they might abandon the website altogether.
So no matter how much optimization you have done in this email, what CTAs you have used, you’ve got the click from the user yet to lose them because they don’t have any context. They don’t know who you work with. So having something of this sort, which talks about, you know, some big brands in the market, which talks about some numbers, which talks about certain deliverables, things of that sort, increases your chance of conversion. It increases the probability that the person who got it actually will get started with you. So this is what is a recommended experience altogether.
The second one is one of my favorite settings, adapting the landing page based on the segment that’s targeted. I think Julia talked a lot about segmentation, talked a lot about personalization, of course, sending emails, and adapting the pop-up for females, as for the segment that’s targeted is a crazy, very long strategy altogether, but take it this way. You know, let’s say that, I have sent an email a specific very well-curated, very personalized email to people who have purchased from me in the past. Now these people have purchased from me in the past. I send them to let’s say a collection page.
Right? Now I don’t want all the people who have purchased from me in the past to see the same collection page. So why not adapt the landing page, why not show people who have bought in the past? Let’s say, people who have bought a lot of handbags from me in the past, why not show different handbags in the top row versus people who have, let’s say, purchased a suitcase from us, why not show them suitcase in the first row altogether? So again, on the landing page, also, what you’re showing should be adapted based on what segment you are targeting altogether.
Right now, segmentation can be based on a lot of factors. It can be based on what is the awareness level of the brand. Like, for whether that email has been sent to a subscriber a person who has subscribed to your newsletter but never purchased from you, or whether he or she is the person receiving your email and landing on the landing page, But is it a customer who’s landing on that landing page? So that’s one of the ways you can segment others could be what’s the purchase history, what essentially they have bought in the past, and the last could be, how much they are readily spending on the brand. Are the average order value high or are they more inclined to offers?
In case they’re inclined to offers, you probably want to send them on a landing page, which is very offer-oriented. While people who are readily okay, like, to spend on your brand, why give them offers, why not increase your LTVs? Right? So all of these kinds of landing page testing you can do. And again, just to give you a perspective about how to do that, again, like, we use VWO, our AB testing software where let’s say that, you know, in the settings, what we have done, we have sent an email, let’s say the UTM source of that email is email 1.
We do the setting where we say that all the people who are coming via UTM source are equal to email 1. In that 50% of the people see the control 50% of the people see where my top row is more, you know, is more discount oriented. 50% of the people see where my top row is not so discounted oriented. They are high-value products. Right?
So all of this is very much possible via the tool altogether. I just wanna give you an idea about why we should do it. And I hope you understand that this is gonna increase your personalization altogether. Right? And, I think one more of something that I’ve also seen emerging a lot in the industry specifically in the e-commerce spaces subscriptions, you know, a lot of businesses are introducing subscriptions or not.
So again, if you’re able to identify those people who are repeat buyers, who are customers who have made more than 2 purchases, why not send them to a page that is heavy on subscriptions and not send them to the page, that only has one-time product purchase options? In fact, redirect the subscribers to those pages, where you can just make a one-time purchase altogether. So, like, these are just two examples of how you can leverage segmentation altogether. Again, this is something that I landed on, in my inbox, Canva, where they very smartly did what they did. People who have not used Canva for a very long time, people like me, or people who are new to the entire software, have a CTA that says ‘Start designing’. When I click on it, I land on this experience where this pop-up talks about learning to design in Canva.
However, people who use Canva a lot, for them, it says design faster. It tells them to upgrade. When I clicked on it, I landed on an experience that talks all about Canva getting more affordable, what they can get when they upgrade, and things of that sort. So I think that’s what is a smart strategy knowing who your audience is and adapting the landing page based on the segment that’s targeted. Another right experience plan for the brand in the e-commerce industry is where people who were your low AOB buyers that you offer for seekers. I’m not sure whether you can, like, look in the screen share or not, but I can assure you that the products that we have on the top, are, like, the cheapest on the website.
So for them, we have that on the top row by people who are high AOV buyers based on the purchase history. For them, the talk flow talks more about what are high-value products. Right? Again, one pro tip, this is more around emails, is again, people who are subscribers who are low-value buyers, people who are not very much open to spending more on the website. Talk more about collections with them, you know, show them options, show them the range you have, have more collection-oriented tiles on your emails, talk about having budget-oriented messaging on the emails. People who have repeat purchased those based on what they have bought in the past, use product tiles on the email.
So that when someone clicks on it, they are redirected to the product as compared to people who are not so aware of the brand, they are being redirected to your collection page. This is something we have tested. It’s something that works really well. So, again, something that I added over here so that you can drive more value out of it. The third would be aligning landing page copy with email copy, which is all about keeping that coherence between what’s on the email versus what’s on the landing page.
Even making sure of things such as, you know, the language that’s used, the tone that’s used, the fonts, the visuals, everything is very well aligned between email and a landing page. In a typical scenario, what happens, the person who’s taking care of your email marketing is not the person who takes care of the website and the landing page creation. Because of this, there’s usually a mismatch between what’s on the email and what’s on the website. So I think it’s very important for the email marketer to make sure that the traffic that’s being redirected from email to the landing pages, there’s no mismatch in the expectations. What’s written on the email should not be repeated a lot, But if there’s an offer there, that offer should again be, mentioned on the landing page because people moving to the website will not go back and check their email to see what was the code altogether.
And once they leave the website, there’s a very low possibility that they’re gonna come back again. Right? So make sure you use similar language and similar fonts. Make sure your landing page is set as reactivated as possible. You mentioned all the offers you are giving, you mentioned the benefits that were highlighted on the email because that benefit essentially may then click on that email.
But at the same time, don’t repeat the entire content from the email. Just repeat what is the benefit and then you should expand using testimonials, product reviews, data about its usefulness, and things of that sort. The idea is I think that the master strategy is to keep your emails short. Keep it compelling enough that the person clicks. Get them on the landing page.
Optimize a landing page. Even if they don’t convert the drop-off from the landing page, you can always remark you can always retarget them using your Facebook ads, push notifications, and things of that sort. So the idea is to at least get them to the landing page. And, of course, we don’t want them to drop off. But keep your emails short and expand on the content of emails on the landing page with your social proof and things and that sort.
And one of the most important things, I think I have seen hundreds of brands doing strong is if let’s say I’m giving them a 10% off on my email, don’t introduce a new offer on the landing page. If you introduce a new one on the landing page, it confuses the visitor. He or she starts recalculating which offer they should move forward with. The more you confuse them, the more they’re gonna delay the decision the higher chance that they’re gonna drop off. Right?
This is an example of a wrong experience, again, an e-commerce plan talks about 15% off on the email. I land on the website. It talks about some 10% off. This is because they have used a generic collection page, or this is a collection page that you can fetch when you’re on the website. This landing page is not curated for emails because that has been used. Two different offers have been given here, which just confuses the user altogether. He or she might feel that he was promised a 10%.
They’re coming on the website. They’re getting a 10%. It was a click bid, with higher chances of dropping off. So a big noise, what I have on my screen, while the right experience would be, again, this is an email from an e-commerce brand. You have 2 offers mentioned over here.
Those mentions are reiterated on this top banner. I’m not sure how much feasible it is for you, but over here, we have those offers that I mentioned here, we have a timer, which is a classic strategy, something we again recommend testing on your landing pages. Have 2 variations, one with a timer, and one without a timer, see what works for you. Test out the timer duration is 24 hours good, 12 hours good, things of that sort. And this is what’s again, expected out of an optimal journey.
What’s the offer that is written over here should be reiterated here because I have 2 offers. You can’t expect me to remember the codes of both the offers and the amount that I’m supposed to spend to get to unlock these offers. The last, again, very important specifically at the time of Black Friday, Cyber Mondays, and major sale periods is sequencing products based on the main intent. This is something that’s noticed a lot on the stale emails where, you’ll see a lot of, emails in your inbox, which talk about up to 40% or up to 30% off, and things of that sort. Again, as I’ve been saying, the people who schedule emails tend to be different than the person who handles the site, the person who essentially puts a sale on the website.
And what really happens is an email that promotes up to 40% off. I land on the landing page. And I can’t spot a single product that has a 40% off because that product is maybe somewhere down the page, down the folder together. So sequencing of product on the page becomes really, really important. Again, one point reiterating it based on the segment that’s targeted, sequence the product based on price by high-value prospects, sort the landing page using price high to low, and place bundles up.
I think bundle strategy, something that’s emerging in the market, use that, leverage that to your benefit. Also, based on the imagery that’s used in email, specifically for industries where visuals play a very, very important role, for example, in the apparel industry, if I looked at an image, I really love the outfit. I click on an email. If that outfit is something you sell, put that on the top because that imagery is something that really excited me. And if I see that in the first role together, I’m more inclined towards making that purchase.
So based on the image that’s used in the email, prefer putting those same products on the top row. Specifically, like, again, going from a SaaS business perspective, when you have an email that’s more focused on making a sale, place pricing on the top because that matters to most of the people who have a high intent. If you’re talking about upgrades by a current customer base, like, if you want someone to upgrade on the landing page, only and only talk about the next best plan. Don’t talk about the plan. Don’t talk about the plan they currently are on. Just focus on the next best plan to get that upgrade altogether. For new features for new subscribers or people who do not know the brand well, place features on the top followed by pricing because they want more information. They’re probably in the research mode, and then they’re gonna take and then they would want to know about the pricing altogether.
Sometimes, pricing scares people and pushes them away. So the new subscribers don’t put pricing in the post hold. Make it accessible. Don’t make it on the first 4. That’s the idea.
One of the wrong experiences, over here, I read, save up to 50% off. This is what is being highlighted. This is supposed to catch my attention the way it is being designed. I see save up to 50% off. I click on shop now over here.
It’s bold and it says save up to 40% off and select mattresses. In a very tiny font that’s written and up to 50% of embedding and more with an asterisk. A clear example of clickbait, a clear example of what pisses off a user or a visitor of today. And very interestingly, the products that I have over here, it is a 35% off. So three percentages in one experience, I don’t know whether it was, like, 50% off was a legit discount, or it was something that was supposed to trip me.
So again, not an ideal experience, not something that’s recommended. The right experience is like something I have on my screen, it talks about up to 40% off. I click on the shop button. It’s re-iterative. You can also see an alignment between the designs.
So to the 3rd point, it’s actually confining the 3rd point where we align the the text, the wish with the feel of the email, and the landing page. I have it re-iterated over here. I have a timer over here. The first, after this, this, and this product these three products are all at 40% off. So that is something that’s, again, recommended.
What you’re telling them in the email is something they should see on the landing page as well. And, I think talking for so long about what are the best practices, trying to make it more interesting with the examples that are being shared. Just quick tips, quick things to remember. One of the biggest things is that most emails nowadays are being opened on mobile devices. Whenever you work on a landing page optimization, always always always focus on keeping it more mobile-focused.
2nd, if you talking about it, if your email is more discount-oriented, more coupon code-oriented, always apply that coupon code that’s offered and add the checkout by default. As I said, nobody wants to go back to the email to see what that email code is. And if they forget about it, they just abandon the website. Avoid any clickbait, according to actions. It violates the principle of alignment between email and landing page.
So you click the paid call to action, yes, you’re able to get traffic on the email, but on the website, very low-quality traffic will hardly gonna convert anytime. 4th would be to test different landing pages. So even though we have craps that we want to send or we wanna send, let’s say, a repeat post repeat buyout to a subscription-oriented page. We know the category of the page, and it’s got a description, what the point end gonna be, you know, whether we are highlighting a testimonial on that page? Are we highlighting the benefit on that page?
Are we highlighting how to avail of a subscription on that page? What are we really highlighting? So trying different copies, trying different content, trying a different you know, color scheme, things that’s also test different things on a landing page, even when you know which category you want to redirect them to. The 5th point would be in case you have any top aside navigation bars. Again, if that’s a possibility, try to hide them.
Because we don’t want people to come on the landing page and go back to the home page, which is more of the fun. We want them to stay very focused on an email that came with an intent. We want them to complete that intent. That’s it. So we don’t want them to get lost on the website.
If possible, try any Poppins side navigation bars. And on that lagging bridge altogether, just focus on that one very important call to action. Specifically what is your desired action, what desired action out of that visitor that you have been able to get on the landing page? I think these were, like, some top things to remember some tactics that you should get started with to make sure that the posting has come on your website. From that email converts for short.
And with this, where are you open to questions?
Raghav:
So, Julia, first of all, the person says thank you for taking this webinar. Much appreciated. It would be great to know if you should subscribe to a very specific newsletter from any company in the world. So it has a great reputation so we can benchmark it for the later run. Right?
Maybe she’s concerned about getting the best ones on the list so that we’re not missing out on any important information. Right?
Julia:
Totally. So here’s the thing. Benchmarking is hard because you don’t know every industry is different, and you don’t know They could be putting out a newsletter. If you don’t know if it’s successful, you know, I mean, it could be successful to you because you’re getting something out of it. So I think if you’re looking for something to benchmark against, maybe, subscribe to, like, do some competitor research, you know, subscribe to their newsletters to see what they’re putting out and how they’re treating their customers. But, and also, like, anything content-wise, and sometimes you do, like, it’s a test, you know, you subscribe to some. You might unsubscribe from them a month in because they’re not giving you what you need. A good example, is a really good email. It is really good – emails.com.
They have great examples of good emails. So, if you need to see kind of what’s out there, without subscribing to things, I think that’s a great resource too.
Raghav:
Understood. And, everyone who is attending this webinar, I showed you that we’ll drop a particular email to each one of you, regarding the contents that we created and Julia created with the dashboard, and you will also get this entire recording directly in your mail within the 48 hours of time span. So if you think you have been a bit less attentive, that’s the time you can get the entire information. Just stay tuned to the email. Most importantly, Julia, I would like to add that the newsletter that they should subscribe to is for mailjet.com and forvw.com, I believe.
So this is the Yes.
Julia:
Those two are good.
Raghav:
Let me do it. Aastha, we have one slight question for you. Just let me pull that one. So the question is how important personalization is when we consider designing a landing page for an email user.
Aastha:
100%. Like, short answer, it’s 101% important. I think one of the slides Julia also talked about was that about 89% of people prefer key to content or subject lines over a discount code, things of that sort. So I think 110%. It’s very, very important.
And if you talk about how you can go ahead with personalization. I think a lot of, first, just define the parameters that you wanna personalize the experience on. Is it by the demographics? Is it about the age, the gender, the country they are in? I think Slack does that.
Slack code uses your IP address to detect which country you’re from, and it says that it’s the best plan for India and the best plan for teams in the US. I think that’s one thing that they do on demographics. You can do it based on your visitor attributes, whether they’re a new visitor, they’re in returning visitor, or they’re a customer, they’re a subscriber. As I said, to a customer, you wanna show things that have passed in the, there are things that they have chosen in the past.
So you wanna show those kinds of things. You wanna show things from the same category to them. You know, there are endless possibilities that can, you know, probably even be personalized based on the time of the day they’re coming on the website. You see that a lot of
times, good morning, good evening, so that’s all. So 100% important, I think, just seeing that the website knows me, has a word for human connect, then knowing that I’m just connecting over a machine from something of that sort. So for both of them, go for personalization. I think that’s the new thing to be.
Raghav:
Think these are the only two questions that we had, and thank you for the audience. Thank you, Julia. Thank you, our staff, for being a wonderful guest. I think you dropped the value, and you might be getting a lot of questions in your email asking for suggestions and feedback on how to optimize email campaigns and landing pages respectively.
Thank you so much, everyone. This is your host Raghav signing off. Looking forward to seeing you in the next webinar. Bye bye.
Julia:
Thank you.