• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, November 7, 2016

It may seem like an obvious piece of advice, but take a look at your own inbox and get clicking. You will soon find out how so much effort has probably gone into crafting the perfect subject line and conjuring up the right offer to get an email opened. It's likely that some personalisation is involved too, to ensure an appropriate offer that is at least targeted at the customer segment you fit into.

But then, once they've got you, you click to find out more and the magic soon disappears. You really thought they got you, but it turns out they don't. Instead of going to a landing page that builds on the offer or the carefully crafted promise of further information, we find ourselves back where we kind of suspected we would be. We have been hoodwinked once more. There is no special understanding of our wants and needs -- just a generic landing page.

I call it the clicking on an Adidas special offer moment. Wherever you click you just go through to the general sale page. Pressing "kids" is the same as hitting "men" and then you've got to go through a plethora of menu options to get anywhere near the kids' football boots you thought you were originally clicking on.

One expert estimates that nearly a half of all email landing pages do exactly this. They simply don't deliver what the shopper was clicking on. To add a further complication, many landing pages are not suited to mobile browsing, so incoming customers are squinting at tiny print trying to direct themselves to where they thought they were already going. It's annoying to be caught out like this. It's like email click bait. Here's a great offer, but I'm not going to show it to you. Instead, i'm will leave you stranded on a generic offer page where you may chance upon what initially interested you, but i wouldn't bet on it. 

My other favourite at the moment is any click from a BA email that not only brings up a generic offer page, but also an offer to check out the airline's new site. It's then a 50:50 bet whether you get shown the new offering or get an error page saying what you're looking for isn't available. 

So just give it a go. Take a look at the landing pages that annoy you and those that keep your enthusiasm going. Trust me -- you'll soon get the hang of what works and what annoys. Then take a look at your own email marketing efforts. If you're offering multiple options that all just lead to the same landing page or if you're offering a single specific product or service that when selected needs further navigation on your site, you'll see where the room for improvement is.

If one in two email campaigns are fooling people to click through generic "click bait" offer pages, then you know what you've got to do to be in the better half of the email marketing industry's efforts.