Email Marketing Essentials: How to Optimize Your Landing Page for Rapid Mailing List Growth

By JOHN FOLEY – April 11, 2017

Your mailing list is your most valuable digital marketing asset. While other marketing strategies can be useful, email marketing beats them all with a potential ROI of 4,400 percent. You won’t get that kind of result with any other form of marketing.

The path to email marketing success starts with a good web presence. You can use social media to pique initial interest in your brand, generating traffic for your landing page. Your success then depends on how well that page performs. If you can convert a large percentage of web traffic into email signups, your mailing list will reach new heights.

The Paradox of Choice

Your landing page must be laser-focused on collecting emails. If you offer other options on this page, you will ruin your conversion rate.

Don’t link to your blog, social media pages, or online shop from your landing page. Resist the urge to wax poetic about your company’s mission or your recent press coverage. None of that is the key to email signups. Instead, create a single choice for the visitor who lands on your page. The only action available should be to sign up for the list.

Convince, Then Ask

You need to teach people about your brand on the landing page. Visitors might have no idea what you do. Worse yet, they could already be skeptical about your brand. Don’t lead with the sign-up box. Take advantage of the top half of your landing page to convince the visitor that your email list is worth signing up for. Explain your value proposition, which outlines what makes your email list valuable for them.

When a visitor considers your email list, they have two main questions:

 – How often will this brand email me?

 – What kind of content can I expect from them?

Answer those two questions as succinctly as you can, then move on to the sign-up form. The goal is to eliminate any uncertainty in the visitor’s mind within the first 15 seconds of their arrival on your page.

Beautiful Design

Your landing page needs to be beautiful. The emotional impression that you make with your design will be a huge part of the user’s decision to sign up or not. The best designs are usually simple. Use a high-fidelity image from a graphic designer. It’s important to get vector graphics, not pixel-based graphics, because only the former will scale to any size screen.

In the case of photography, you need very high resolution. Aim for 4000×4000 pixels at the smallest. This avoids any blurriness on larger screens. Beyond the imagery, pay attention to color. You want your color scheme to be simple and easy on the eyes. Your sign-up form should pop out with contrasting colors that make it impossible to miss.

Iterating Your Way To Success

Your goal should be to blow people away with the quality of your landing page. You can test this with friends and current mailing list subscribers. Invite them to visit your landing page. Ask them a single question: Is this beautiful? You need the answer to be a simple, unequivocal yes. If your visitors offer negative feedback or vague neutral comments, go back to the drawing board.

You probably won’t nail your landing page on the first try. It’s okay, nobody does. Get user feedback as soon as you can to iterate and improve upon your initial design. The more objective you can be and the faster you can iterate on new designs, the sooner you’ll build a powerful email conversion page for your brand.

These tactics will breathe new life into your email list and email marketing efforts. Take action today and your brand will benefit for a lifetime.