• by Jess Nelson , April 11, 2016

A call to action is a critical component to email marketing and can boost email engagement, but that’s not the last step in an email marketing campaign.

Email marketing is an interesting paradox: it’s the marketing channel with the highest return on investment per dollar spent and yet the vast majority of emails are ineffective.  

The average click-through rate of email marketing messages hovers below 5% according to recent studies by both MailChimp and Silverpop, illustrating how important it is for email marketers to offer a seamless transition for readers to the overall goal.

“Landing pages have one specific goal: to get visitors to follow a call to action,” says Sean Brady, President of the Americas at Emarsys. “Today, you will rarely see a landing page that just includes navigation tabs that goes nowhere without a purpose. Distractions that take away from the call to action are counter-productive.”

Emails should direct readers to a landing page as opposed to a home page, says Brady.

Possible examples include downloading a whitepaper, requesting a demo, a fundraising page or directing consumers to the specific product being sold.

An added benefit of landing pages is that it offers a built-in measuring device for is the ability to measure the success of specific campaigns or content.

“With organic traffic directed to specific content on your website, you can measure and understand which content is performing and which is not – then replicate them for landing pages if required,” says Brady. “With that, you can tweak your landing pages and content throughout your campaign and successfully push visitors through your paid/email campaigns in an effort to get people to convert.”

Emarsys is a provider of B2C cloud marketing technology, including omnichannel personalization, automation, prediction and analytics. The company helps clients ranging from eBay to Toys-R-Us turn data into actionable insights and targeted campaigns.