Landing pages and email marketing go together like cheese and wine. They complement each other perfectly and work together to be more effective as a team than they do alone.
Landing pages are powerful because they capture people’s attention, clearly summarise what your business is offering, and entice customers to submit their details or purchase a product. They’re a great way to boost your conversion rate, compared to just sending people to your website. Websites can be distracting due to the number of choices a customer has to navigate through, whereas a landing page focuses their attention on the one sole action you want them to take.
After you’ve made a high-converting landing page, your job is not over. You’ll likely need to nurture your customers to reach one of the following outcomes:
- Convert a lead into paying customer
- Upsell or cross-sell a paying customer to another product or service
- Onboard a customer smoothly, to keep them happy
This is where email marketing comes in to save the day. By crafting an automated email sequence that sends to people who have entered their email addresses on your landing page, you can supplement and support your sales goals.
Before we jump into the strategy of creating an email sequence that works in conjunction with your landing page, let’s take a step back. If you’re unfamiliar with what an email sequence is, it’s an automated series of emails which are sent from email marketing software like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.
With landing page solutions like PageWiz, you can easily link your landing page to your email marketing software and create a sequence of emails which send out at predetermined intervals.
Now that you’ve got a clear overview of the winning relationship between landing pages and email marketing it’s time to think about the journey your customers will take from interacting with your landing page to receiving automated emails from you.
This journey is very important because you want to make it a smooth transition so that it’s a good experience for your customers. The main things to consider are
- Email offer
- Email design
- Email writing style
Your offer
This sounds obvious, but it’s a common area to slip up on. You need to think about the specific product or service you offered in your landing page and focus on that in your email marketing sequence.
Maybe you have a plumbing business which helps people with blocked toilets but also does plumbing installations for commercial buildings. If you have a landing page promoting commercial plumbing, the email campaign attached to this landing page should talk about commercial plumbing.
If someone who enquired about commercial plumbing receives an email talking about how they can get their home toilets unblocked, they’ll quickly lose interest and feel like you are spamming them with useless information.
Email sent from Handy. Although Handy offers home services in a number of areas, after enquiring about cleaning I was sent an email specifically about their home cleaning service.
If you’re a business that offers multiple services that are closely related you might start out with one overarching email sequence for all landing page inquiries. As soon as possible though, I’d recommend breaking down your email sequences to match each individual landing page.
It’s also important to reinforce the offer listed on your landing page. Using the plumbing business example again, if you offered businesses 20% off, this is something you need to emphasize in your emails.
Email design
Next, you need to consider the design of your email. This is so your emails flow on nicely from your landing page and so they have the highest chance of convincing people to take action.
As a rule of thumb, either keep your email designs very simple or replicate the design feel of your landing page. Using a basic text-only email can be a good tactic to not appear too ‘salesy’. Basic text-only emails can be introduced into sequences which also have more visual emails.
If you’re going to introduce more visual elements into your email design, you have hopefully thought about your brand’s style guidelines and even created a document which sets out the colors, font, and styles your business uses across its marketing.
[tweetthis]As a rule of thumb, either keep your email designs very simple or replicate the design feel of your landing page.[/tweetthis]
It’s important to use these elements in your emails to reinforce the feeling of your brand and make the transition from your landing page to your automated emails as smooth as possible.
This includes little details like the font you use on your landing page. If you use the same font on your landing page and emails, it will give a feeling of familiarity for your customers. Not sure what font you’re using? Try a program like What Font, to quickly find out which fonts you and your competitors are using.
Also, think about call-to0action buttons (CTA buttons) in your emails. CTA buttons are buttons which prompt customers to take specific actions like ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Get a Free Quote’. Call-to-action buttons work well on both landing pages and in emails. If you’re going to use a call-to-action button in your emails, consider using the same button design you used on your landing page.
Example from Clicktribe of matching design feel and CTA buttons for a landing page and the email sequence it triggers
Email writing style
The last point to consider is the writing style you use in your emails and how this matches the writing style on your landing page. If your landing page uses fun and punchy copy and your automated emails use overly formal and complex writing, your customers will experience a disconnect. Always think about the flow from your landing page to your emails and imagine what it would be like for a customer visiting your landing page and then reading the subsequent emails for the first time.
This relates back to your brand guidelines. Decide on what writing tone best fits your business and then use this across your landing pages, email marketing, website and social media pages.
Now that you have a better idea on how to make your emails flow on from your landing page smoothly, let’s take a look at some tactics you can use in your emails for specific scenarios.
Changing a lead into a paying customer
This is a common scenario for landing pages in service industries. If your landing page captures people’s details so you can get into contact with them and turn them into customers (rather than process a payment on the spot), then this is for you.
The biggest things to consider in this situation are the timing of your emails and thinking about the other channels you will use to communicate to these prospective customers.
Most likely you’ve also captured their phone number on your landing page and will give them a call to try and turn them into a paying customer. In this case, the timing of your emails in relation to your phone calls is very important. The first automated email should just be recognition that you’ve received their inquiry and they can expect a call within the next 24 hours (or whatever time frame you are working with). I aim to send this first email immediately after someone completes the landing page. This ensures that they don’t forget about their inquiry and are prepared for the next steps.
Legal Vision provide a clear timeline for when they will get in contact with customers who submitted an inquiry
If at this point you call them and convince them to become a paying customer, you’ll want to take them out of your automated email sequence.
If the call doesn’t lead to a sale, you’ll want them to continue receiving your automated emails which focus on why your business is great and include sales elements like testimonials and CTA buttons. By focusing on providing value to your customers, you’re more likely to get people opening your next emails, clicking through to your website and even contacting you directly.
Remember the key is timing. You don’t want your customers to get overwhelmed with different messages. Make sure there is a delay for email 2 so that they don’t receive it in the same period you make follow up calls.
Upselling or cross-selling a customer
This is common where your landing page is set up to sell a product and process the payment or where you upsell a service. Now that you’ve sold your initial product or signed a customer onto a lower tier service, how about trying to upsell or cross-sell to them using email marketing?
The beauty of upselling and cross-selling is that it’s usually easier to convince someone to purchase from you if they’ve already bought from you (and had a good experience) than it is to sell to a completely new customer.
If you’re trying to upsell or sell additional products and services through email you need to ensure that what you’re promoting is relevant and try not be too pushy.
If you use this method you need to clearly promote the benefits of the upsell/cross-sell product or service, without going overboard. Make sure you have a clear opt-out button in your email as some people will get angry if they feel like you’re coming on too strong.
These principles also apply to SAAS companies that want to move customers from the ‘Freemium’ model to a paid plan. Here’s an example of Evernote promoting their paid plan by throwing in some extra value.
Example of an email from Evernote convincing customers to move to a paid plan
Onboarding a customer
Our final example is where you’ve already convinced a customer to sign up on the landing page and now you want to onboard them so they have a great experience with your service.
This is common for SAAS products (Software As A Service) where it’s extremely important for customers to understand and enjoy your service, otherwise they will leave.
The key for SAAS product onboarding is to clearly articulate how to use the product and how to get the most out of it. Most SAAS products are used to make people’s lives easier and this needs to be focused on when sending onboarding emails for a SAAS business.
I know I’m guilty of giving up on SAAS products because I didn’t understand them and never used them to their full potential. I’ve also kept using some SAAS products because their onboarding emails showed me things I didn’t know and re-sold me on their advantages.
Keep in mind, you need to also hint at this value in the subject line of the emails. If you don’t get customers opening the email to find out about awesome features, you’ve missed out on your opportunity. Also, make sure you clearly display your customer service details in your onboarding emails. If people have further questions, you want them to be able to contact you easily.
Email tracking software Yesware do a good job in their first onboarding email to give clear links to instructions on using their software and show that their customer service team is available to help.
Example of an onboarding email from Email tracking software Yesware
Try it for yourself
I hope you now have a good idea of not only the value of using email marketing with your landing pages but also how to combine them into a single sales machine. If you really think about the elements of your landing page and bring these over to your automated email sequences, then these emails will work as an extension of your landing page.
To do this, you need to take a step back and think about what you are offering through your landing page and consider how you are going to bring this into your automated emails with consistent style and voice. If you achieve this and create an automated email sequence which smoothly flows on from your landing page, you’ll likely see a healthy jump in stats for your sales, upsells, onboarding or any other goal that’s important to your business.
Mitch McCormick is the co-founder of Clicktribe, a Sydney based digital marketing agency. He loves digital marketing, toasted cheese sandwiches and is a meme connoisseur.
