How to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages with Email Marketing

Landing pages are essential for pretty much any marketing campaign. They help guide visitors down your sales funnel, increasing the likelihood that they’ll convert.

Hoping people land on your homepage and figure out what to do next is not enough. However, a well-designed landing page makes it clear how they can redeem an offer, sign up for an event or engage in whatever other activity you want them to do.

But this raises the question of how to get people to visit your landing page in the first place. After all, it doesn’t matter how great your landing page is — if people aren’t landing on it, it’s not supporting your marketing campaign.

If you have the budget, you can spend money on ads to increase your reach. But, there’s a better option: email marketing.

Email Marketing and Landing Pages

Using email marketing to drive traffic to your landing page makes sense for a few reasons.

First, your email list represents an incredibly primed audience. The people on your mailing list have actively signed up; meaning, at the very least, they’re somewhat interested in what you’re offering. This increases the chances they’ll click through to your landing page and convert.

You also own your email list.

Email is an open protocol where, when you send an email, you can expect that it’ll be delivered to your subscribers’ inbox. There are no algorithms to contend with when trying to reach your audience.

Email marketing is incredibly cost-effective, too.

In fact, it’s one of the most profitable digital marketing channels, returning an average of $38 for every $1 spent. Prices also scale depending on the size of your email list, making it a more affordable option, especially if you’re just starting out.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Landing Pages With Email

So, how do you take advantage of email marketing to get people to your landing page?

It’s not as simple as sending an email blast to your entire list and telling them to visit your page. Instead, incorporate the following best practices to capture people’s attention and get them to click through to your landing page.

1. Send Personalized Emails

Sending a tailored email to people will resonate with them more than a mass, non-targeted blast.

You’ll want to target your emails to a few select segments. Exactly what constitutes a relevant segment will depend on your business. You may segment by demographic factors, such as age, gender, and location, as well as behavioral factors, like where a person is in the customer lifecycle journey.

For instance, if you’ve created an ecommerce landing page for your new summer dress collection, you might consider targeting female consumers in warm climates who have clicked on similar links in the past. This email from OpenTable is an excellent example of the power of personalized email marketing.

This email is attention-grabbing, as it addresses the recipient by their name along with the name of the restaurant they recently visited in the subject line. The clear CTA further increases the likelihood that they’ll engage with the email.

2. Send Emails With a Single Focus

This isn’t only relevant when you’re trying to promote a landing page. Every email you send should be sent with a single purpose in mind.

If you overwhelm your subscribers with too many choices or messages, you risk alienating them instead of encouraging them to click through to your landing page. So when it comes to your emails promoting your landing page, include a single, clear CTA funneling people through to the page.

Just like in this email from Postable.

The clear “See the cards” CTA button makes it obvious where subscribers should go next. There’s very little else, copy-wise, to distract people or lead them astray.

3. Use a Captivating Subject Line

Just as it doesn’t matter how great your landing page is if nobody’s visiting it, it doesn’t matter how great your email is if people aren’t opening it.

So how can you improve your open rate? The quickest and easiest way is to write better subject lines.

On average, a third of your subscribers base their decision on whether to open your email entirely on your subject line. They may report your emails as spam based solely on the subject lines, too.

So how do you write subject lines that your subscriber can’t help but click?  Here are a few general guidelines to keep in mind:

• Personalize your subject lines whenever possible, such as including your subscriber’s name
• Be descriptive and accurately reflect what the contents of the email are — never use deceptive subject lines
• Keep it short — long subject lines are likely to be cut off when people open their inbox on their phone. Six to 10 words is optimal.

Beyond that, try to spark your subscriber’s interest so they’ll want to see what’s in your email. Something along the lines of, “How I Grew My Sales By 236% In One Year” does a good job of this.

There are plenty of other tips on writing better subject lines if you’re interested in upping your email marketing game.

How to Optimize Your Emails and Landing Pages

Now, let’s cover some ways you can optimize both emails and landing pages to increase their effectiveness.

Match Your Email Design With Your Landing Page Design

When you want people to engage in a particular series of actions, such as clicking through to your landing page from an email and completing a form, you’ll want to make the transitions between various steps as seamless as possible. The more jarring the experience, the greater the risk that you’ll disrupt people’s journeys and lose leads.

One way you can make the transition between the email to the landing page as smooth as possible is to incorporate the same design in both places.

For example, take this email from Flywheel.

And its landing page.

When people click through to Flywheel’s landing page, they’re not confused about what to do next. Downloading the ebook makes natural sense.

Match the Language

The design isn’t the only aspect of your landing page you should replicate in your email. You also need to use the same language.

By repeating elements such as your value proposition (for example, “Get started for free”), you’re creating a sense of familiarity and consistency. This ensures a seamless transition from the email to your landing page.

By implementing these tips, you’ll end up driving more traffic than ever before to your landing pages. Be sure to create an email campaign to go along with it, too.

Aaron Wiseman is a content writer and marketing coordinator at SmartrMail. SmartrMail is an app that makes it easy to send emails your customers love and get more sales. The app is available for stores on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Neto.