Part 1: Use Landing Pages To Collect Email Subscribers Like Crazy

• Using landing pages to collect email subscribers (for any type of campaign) can help you increase conversion rates up to 50%.
• Landing pages give you the power to apply rigorous conversion optimization strategies.
• You can use landing pages to create data-driven segments within your email marketing database.

Using dedicated landing pages to collect subscribers for your various email marketing campaigns is a smart move.

Landing pages give you a central place to direct traffic, the chance to sell what your subscribers are going to get and the ability to use all of the juicy conversion optimization strategies out there on the internet to maximize your conversion rates.

Also Read: Optimize your email campaigns 

Over the next two weeks we’ll recap how to use landing pages to get subscribers and how to turn these leads into customers, expanding on the webinar we did last week with Unbounce.

Four great examples of email marketing landing pages

To kick things off, here are four great examples of landing pages used to generate email marketing leads.

1. Unbounce

This dedicated landing page for Unbounce’s educational email course on landing pages is one of the best email marketing landing pages you will see.

They nail the key elements here: short, effective selling points, social proof, a big red button and a clear heading to bring the message home. This is a winner.

2. AWeber

AWeber use this landing page to sell their blog newsletter list:

Amongst other places, they link to this dedicated landing page via a small link under their sidebar subscribe page:

This approach gives AWeber more room to sell blog readers on why they should subscribe to their newsletter. Readers that aren’t convinced by the few words in the sidebar can read, in detail, what they’re missing out on if they don’t subscribe.

3. Gregory Ciotti and Andrew Chen

Most blogs use sidebar subscribe forms, popups or headers to attract subscribers. These are all extremely effective in their own right but few blogs use the ‘interstitial landing page’.

There are definitely places where a full landing page can work. Take this example from Gregory Ciotti’s Marketing Strategy for Startups:

Another example comes from Andrew Chen’s blog on startups, tech and marketing. It is super simple and focused:

To implement something like this without detrimentally affecting your regular readers (i.e. without annoying anyone), you should:

1. Only show the landing page to customers that search organically for ‘Your blog name’. E.g. customers who search for ‘Vero blog’. There is a fair hypothesis that these readers are already invested enough to subscribe and continue reading as they searched for you directly.
2. Only show the landing page once. Cookie users so they don’t see it again – even if they don’t subscribe. Use other means to try and get them to subscribe a second time.

4. The Obama 2012 Campaign

The Obama campaign team used email marketing to help raise over $1 billion from supporters leading up to the 2012 election.

That’s a lot of cash.

Using their 15-million-strong email list from 2008 and a rigorous testing schedule the savvy email marketing team behind the campaign were able to grow their list and impact substantially.

Landing pages were a huge part of this success, for two main reasons:

1. Personalized landing pages can dramatically influence subscribe-rates.
2. The right landing pages used at the right time helped the campaign unlock highly useful data such as voting preferences, voter locations, community participation and contribution profiles.

Here’s three extremely different, extremely personalized and extremely effective landing pages:

If these campaigns aren’t a fine example of email marketing landing pages in action, then I don’t know what is.

Top tips for a great email marketing landing page

Each of these pages has one objective: get a visitor’s email address.

Despite coming from different industries and playing different roles all of these landing pages do a few common things well:

1. They relate to specific lists. Whether it’s attracting blog readers, educational course subscribers or potential campaign contributors, each page is very specific with the sort of email subscriber it is selling to.
2. Clear calls to action (CTA) are present on each landing page. A single, big button with a simple field is present in each example. This is standard landing page optimization strategy but that doesn’t mean it isn’t effective!
3. They use social proof. Many of these examples use a quote, a number or an example of awesome content (e.g. “Read how I got 30,000 blog subscribers in 12 months”) to sell their audience.
4. They collect relevant segmentation information. Where it will be genuinely useful, these pages at least collect a name and, in most cases, one extra piece of information such as the size of the subscriber’s business or their location. This data can be used well into the future.
5. They’re short. None of these pages go on forever: they get to the point.

Tools to get up and running FAST

You might be wondering how you can setup a system like this quickly to prove that a landing page will work for you.

To get going super quickly but still have a platform you can grow with it works out, you can’t go past this setup:

1. Build a landing page

Unbounce makes it easy to create visual landing pages without a developer, plus you can create variations to A/B test.

Better yet, they integrate with a bunch of email marketing tools such as Mailchimp and AWeber.

Also Read: Mailchimp Alternatives For Your Jobs To Be Done

Here’s a quick look at their editor, it’s drag and drop.

The other big thing we love is that it’s also super fast to track conversions:

As alternatives – if you’re on WordPress then you might also check out WordPress Landing Pages or the Genesis Framework. These are also great toolkits.

2. Setup a series of emails

Sending your new subscribers a series of automated emails gives you the highest chance of turning them into customers.

We’ll dive into creating an educational email course more in part two next week (subscribe below!) but using a tool that lets you send automated emails and create segments based on the landing page and your leads’ details is a must.

Vero makes it easy to setup this sort of automated campaign:

It also makes it easy to segment customers based on the data you collect:

(Plus, Vero integrates with Unbounce).

Next week: how to turn your targeted landing page leads into customers

Now you’ve got a dedicated email marketing landing page: what do you do with the leads?

Next week you’ll learn how to create an email marketing system that converts whilst you’re asleep and actually put your pages to work when it comes to the big picture.

Things to look forward to:

• How you can lift open and click rates by 400%.
• Examples of segments you can use and how to use them
• How to structure your campaigns for long-term gain.

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