Bad landing pages include four fatal flaws

During a typical email marketing campaign, about half the visitors to a website’s landing page bail out after spending only 8 seconds on the page.

Why?

A crappy landing page that fails to get readers’ attention and keep them reading.

Instead of intriguing them, it causes confusion and forces the visitor to leave. It’s either too cluttered with extraneous information and graphics, or it’s missing key elements that must be present on every good landing page. 

That’s one of the conclusions reached after a survey conducted by SilverPop, a company that provides services for email marketers. The company studied 150 email marketing campaigns and reported these four pervasive problems:

1. Many web pages don’t have the same look and tone of the original email that the website owner sent to prospects, making visitors abandon the site.
2. Too many marketers fail to reinforce the call-to-action that prompted the reader to click a link in the first placee. In other words, the landing page doesn’t tell the visitor to do what the original email told them to do. Thus, missed opportunities.
3. An amazing 17 percent of the email marketing campaigns in the study dumped visitor’s onto a homepage, instead of sending them a page devoted specifically to that email campaign. Can’t you just hear the visitor asking, “Now where the heck am I supposed to go?”
4. About one out of three campaigns studied failed to ask visitors for their email addresses.

Internet marketer Mark Widawer says the very best landing pages—those that either persuade visitors to hand over their email address or lead directly to a purchase—have six key elements. He explained all of them during a webinar we hosted a few weeks ago.

If you missed it, you can watch the replay.