Marketing trends and tactics may change (and they often do), but one factor remains the same: Everyone needs more leads.
According to the 2019 State of Marketing Report by Growth Marketing Stage, most organizations—72% in fact—say that generating more leads is their biggest marketing challenge. Their second-biggest challenge? According to this study, 53% struggle to provide the ROI of their marketing activities.
See how small business challenges compare in our State of Small Business Marketing guide.
In this post, we’ll explain how to optimize your lead pages to improve conversions and how to maximize your lead gen strategy through email marketing.
What are lead gen pages and why are they important?
Lead gen pages, also called landing pages, are specific website pages designed to convert a visitor into a lead. These pages typically look different than the rest of your website because they are so conversion-focused.
A lead page usually asks the visitor to complete a specific task, like sign up for an email list or provide an email address to download a lead magnet (e.g. free ebooks, downloads, white papers, etc.). Depending on the industry, lead pages may also ask visitors to make a purchase.
Brands usually design pages for lead generation to address questions and concerns associated with specific stages of the sales funnel to increase the likelihood that visitors actually convert.
5 best practices for designing and creating lead pages
When your pages are designed for lead generation, they should be highly optimized for conversions.
1. Set one goal and write a clear CTA.
Don’t try to place as many CTAs as you can onto one landing page. Your visitors will just get overwhelmed and confused as to what they’re supposed to do, leading them to do nothing. This phenomenon is known as choice paradox, just one of many email marketing tactics you should retire.
Instead, present visitors with one clear action to take. Such as:
- Signing up for an email list.
- Filling out a quick form to download a lead magnet.
- Entering a contest.
- Taking a quiz.
- Registering for an event or webinar.
- Creating a free account.
- Completing a purchase.
Don’t worry: You can design multiple landing pages, each optimized for specific actions.
Wahed Invest sent this registration email for an event. Notice how the email and landing page are concise and contain only one CTA.
2. Optimize your forms.
Your form’s design and content both matter tremendously. When your form follows general usability guidelines, people are 2x as likely to submit a form without errors on the first try:
- Only include 100% necessary fields—the shorter, the better.
- Use a single-column layout.
- Sequence fields in a logical order.
- Group any related fields.
- Clearly designate required and optional fields to reduce cognitive strain.
3. Speed is everything.
47% of your visitors expect your landing page to load in two seconds or less.
While each industry’s standard is unique, Walmart found that every one-second improvement in speed increased its conversions by 2%.
4. Write concise and reader-centric copy.
Even though your landing page may feel like it’s about you, it’s still about your visitor.
- Highlight benefits of your product or service, not features.
- Write in second-person as if you’re talking directly to the reader.
- Speaking of which, you should use a conversational and personal tone.
- Get to the point quickly and show you respect your reader’s time.
Your copy needs to be tight, clear, and focused on the reader. Use these same principles for your design.
5. Tell your story through multimedia channels.
Not every visitor absorbs information best through text. Some people simply don’t want to read multiple paragraphs, and others might just skim.
In order to diversify your lead gen pages, take advantage of:
- Infographics
- Video
- GIFs
- Virtual reality
- Interactive content
Tell your story through multimedia on your lead pages and watch your conversion rates skyrocket.
How to merge your lead gen pages with your email marketing strategy
Email marketing is the perfect tool for promoting your highly optimized lead pages. After all, 72% of people prefer brands to contact them through email over other platforms like social media or direct mail. What’s more, people tend to trust email over other forms of digital marketing.
1. Keep branding, voice, and tone consistent in your copy.
Studies show that brand familiarity is important for building trust in consumers. To improve familiarity with your brand, keep the staples of your design consistent—including tone, voice, colors, and imagery.
While many brands get the logo and color schemes right across their various channels, they fail to acknowledge the importance of using a consistent tone and voice in their messaging.
If your email and blog copy is professional and formal, your landing page copy should feel the same.
2. Create personalized landing pages for personas and audience segments.
Don’t send the same lead gen pages to your entire audience—they’ll be too generic, not relevant enough, and won’t entice your subscribers to take action.
Instead, break your subscriber list up into different segments based on different demographics and information like:
- Location
- Job title
- Age
- Income level
- Behavior
- Email client
- Interests
- Parental status
Segmented and personalized CTAs can boost your conversions by 202% and increase revenue by 760% simply because the content is super relevant.
Snappy Eats personalized this email based on the subscriber’s location. The landing page is dynamic and provides restaurants based on the subscriber’s GPS.
3. Use landing pages to educate your audience on complex topics.
Your lead pages don’t always have to call for an action overtly. You can always include a subtle CTA after readers have consumed some informative or interesting content on a specific topic.
Make good use of buttons and optimized landing pages throughout your email campaigns.
Coinbase used buttons to expand on their new support for Chainlink with lead pages while keeping their email body concise.
4. Reduce the number of clicks between opening an email and when they’re most likely to take action.
Click fatigue is real, and the concept is simple: The more clicks it takes to complete an action, the less likely a visitor is to finish that action.
If you have too many complicated steps in a process, you’ll lose conversions.
5. Allow subscribers to complete an action entirely within their inbox.
Always put your subscriber’s experience first. Make it as easy as possible for them to complete an action and they’ll be more likely to do it.
You can improve user experience and subsequently, conversions, by integrating your lead pages and forms into your email marketing code structure, so subscribers can visit a landing page and complete an action entirely within their inbox.
It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Certain tools allow you to design highly personalized landing pages and easily integrate them with your email service provider software. This requires minimal coding knowledge and effort on your part.
6. Take advantage of AMP pages.
Not every email client supports AMP (accelerated mobile page) browsing which makes knowing your customers and their ISPs crucial. While Gmail and Outlook embraced the concept, it doesn’t integrate well with Apple email apps.
If you know which clients your subscriber use, you can design customized AMP landing pages for your leads without worrying about coding blunders.
7. Give interactive content a try (or even virtual reality).
Anything that gets your visitor clicking or swiping improves engagement and can produce twice the conversion rate. People enjoy entertaining and fun emails. Even 91% of B2Bs prefer interactive and video content over static content and plain copy.
Amazon and other companies include virtual reality features in their landing pages, allowing you to “test” products through your smartphone’s camera.
Airbnb understands that transactional emails have some of the highest open rates. That’s why in each confirmation email, they include a link where customers can plan their itinerary.
When customers get to the landing page, they can browse experiences through an interactive map and calendar.
8. Prepare a lead nurturing automation strategy
Your job doesn’t end once a prospect turns into a lead. Get some segmented, highly personalized, and automated campaigns ready to nurture your leads at every stage of the sales cycle.
By automating emails, you can easily continue nurturing your relationship with subscribers through dynamic content.
9. Test, track metrics, and tweak your future campaigns.
We can’t stress this enough: You need to A/B test your lead pages. Campaign Monitor makes it easy to split test your emails and lead gen pages, track metrics, and improve your tactics based on the results.
A/B testing can help you gauge what’s working and what’s not, and you can test virtually anything: subject lines, CTA links vs. buttons, pictures vs. no pictures, and more.
Best of all? A/B testing is pretty simple to implement.
Wrap up
Email makes the perfect channel for reaching prospects and converting them into leads with highly optimized pages. Remember to:
- Set one goal and CTA.
- Segment your subscriber list and personalize your campaigns.
- Reduce any hurdles between taking action.
- Test, track, and adjust.
From there, you just need to figure out a nurturing strategy to convert your leads into clients or customers.
Start optimizing your lead pages. Check out some effective lead generation tactics to increase your conversion rates.