Custom Landing Pages: The Unlikely Answer to Low Email Lead Conversion

Did you know the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%?

What if I could help you beat that statistic, raising your probability to 20% or more?

It is possible — if you understand the problem and adopt the simple solution I’ll share with you in just a minute.

First, the problem…

To be honest, this isn’t anything you don’t already know. You experience it in your own inbox every day.

You see, people’s inboxes are more jam-packed than ever before, and tons of it is junk. If a subject line or message doesn’t stand out, it gets ignored. If an email even remotely resembles bad outreach emails, it gets deleted. No questions asked.

The solution is clear: You have to stand out. You have to do something unique. And that’s just what I’m going to show you in this article.

Keep reading to learn how to use a custom landing page and hyper-personalization with your email marketing strategy, so you can beat the bland, copy-cat emails that fill your prospects’ inboxes.

Why an Account-Based Marketing Style Wins

Account-based marketing is the idea of treating each prospect or target client as a market of one.

With custom landing pages, you’ll be doing exactly that.

In traditional inbound marketing, you are putting out content and marketing messages in attempts to wrangle a few sharks in a sea of minnows.

The problem is there are four million blog posts published per day. Inbound for high-level targets just ain’t gonna happen.

While it can work, and it can be extremely cheap, as a lead conversion tactic, it’s not very effective. You end up losing a lot of leads that could have (or should have) converted.

On the other hand, account-based marketing allows you to deeply personalize the marketing content a prospect receives. And personalization is more important than ever: 281.1 billion emails are sent daily.

Personalization can skyrocket email open rates to increase closing potential by 28%.

Audience targeting works.

But I know what you are thinking: how the heck am I supposed to personalize hundreds to thousands of landing pages for prospects?

Fortunately, you don’t need to go that deep on standard leads.

Instead, you just need to personalize landing pages based on audiences, sub-types, and interests.

Let me show you a few examples of this in action.

Three Examples of Stellar Custom Audience Landing Pages

When you send leads an email, how do you stand out? What aspects of that email provide value beyond a generic sales pitch in hopes of landing a demo or even a sale?

If you can’t answer that, it’s time to rework your strategy.

Thankfully, this one strategy is rarely used (making it unique) and takes very little work. But, be sure you do your competitor research to see what ad/outreach copy your competitors use to help you differentiate:

(Image Source)

Slack is a prime example of this. Currently, Slack is an extensible program that just about anyone can use. They have a wildly diverse target market that simply can’t be targeted with basic ads or outreach campaigns.

Their prospecting emails can’t just say “use Slack to communicate with your team.” While that’s a basic summary of their service, it’s not personalized whatsoever.

Instead, they take a vastly different strategy, personalizing email campaigns and landing pages for common audience segments, like IT:

Source: Slack IT Page

And engineering:

Source: Slack Engineering Page

Which lead conversion approach would you prefer if you were an engineering professional?

  1. A generic landing page that says “use Slack as a team workspace”
  2. Or a landing page with laser-focused messaging targeting exact pain points like “deploying workflows faster”

I think you know the answer.

And Slack isn’t the only one doing this. Freshdesk, a help-desk software, is another prime example of audience-based landing page customization. Similarly, Freshdesk targets niche markets with personalized copy and examples, like universities:

Source: Freshdesk University Page

They even go so far as to provide testimonials from customers within that space, further personalizing the messaging to fit their target market.

Now that’s a custom landing page. One of the best out there. They then repeat this process for other segments like healthcare, e-commerce, and more:

Source: Freshdesk Healthcare Page

Evernote also personalizes their prospecting by directing leads to specific landing pages curated for their audience segment:

Source: Evernote Premium Page

For their premium plan, they target office workers and startups with powerful task tools and project management.

For their basic plan, they target a broader market as a generalized note-taking application:

Source: Evernote Basic Page

So, how do you replicate this strategy without hiring a developer to produce expensive custom landing pages? How do you do it without bogging down the design and development team?

Let’s take a look…

How to Create Custom Landing Pages For Prospects (At Scale)

Did you know that only 50% of B2B companies have a properly optimized and responsive website? I get it, creating custom landing pages can seem like a ton of work. In reality, they can be spun up within a matter of hours for a campaign, even without a custom developer or bogging down your staff.

RELATED: Lead Generation Landing Page: 10 Steps to a High-Conversion Page

There are a few different ways to go about developing custom landing pages with your email marketing services.

Here are two of the easiest ways to get started as soon as possible.

Option 1: Use a Website Builder

If you don’t have a custom developer, using a website builder is likely your best bet.

Some good examples of website builders are SiteBuilder, Wix, and Weebly. Using one of these top website builders is one of the quickest and easiest ways to build an online presence for your brand. These services allow you to run quick pages that exist solely for the purpose of your campaign.

And these sites are perfect for launching landing pages for a few reasons:

  1. They are extremely cheap to get started (pennies to the dollar).
  2. They have drag-and-drop building + duplicate page abilities to scale your campaign.
  3. They take zero coding knowledge.
  4. You can customize the pages with dynamic elements like video, audio, podcasts, and more.
  5. They make it easier than ever to start a blog and integrate it into your site.
  6. And they’ve got countless free themes and customization to match your branding.

With a website builder, you can design and customize landing pages instantly using pre-built themes that you can simply tweak to fit your company branding. Case in point: this travel hacking blog.

The great thing about website builders for quick landing page development is the themes. For example, if you want to target medical professionals, there is likely a theme for that.

Want to target lawyers? There is a theme for it.

If you want to spin up campaigns ASAP, there is no better option.

Compared to custom development of landing pages for segments, you are paying almost nothing.

When it comes to your landing pages, they don’t need to be fancy development pages that cost a fortune. Using tools like heatmaps, you simply start to assess what factors on your page are performing (and underperforming):

(Image Source)

With the information these tools give you, you can tweak buttons, placements, and calls to action to improve your results. And with your landing page builder’s drag-and-drop functionality, making those changes is simple.

In short, you can make dramatic landing page changes without waiting on a developer or paying a fortune each time.

Option 2: Go Big With Custom Development

If you have the time and money, custom development is always an amazing option. You can build beautiful back-end fields that help you streamline landing page development for multiple target audiences.

Source: Moz Message Match Post

BuzzSprout excels at this, using templated pages and tweaking simple copy changes to fit new audiences, like new podcasters.

With this approach, you can maximize your custom development without creating thousands of pages and running costs too high.

Custom development of landing pages is often done with conversions in mind first, which can lead to big boosts in your overall sales. But, they often take far longer to develop and cost much more than a simple building tool.

With custom development, time constraints can sometimes be a plus, too. They keep you from trying to scale too fast for your own good. Plus, it gives you time to do some competitor research to see what tactics and landing page offers your competitors are giving.

Either way, you can’t go wrong with creating custom landing pages for your prospects.

Master Your Messaging

Custom landing pages need to be simple, targeted, and to the point.

Just like we saw with Freshdesk and Slack, your audience targeting needs to be laser-focused.

No generic messaging about how your products and services save them money. Instead, you need to speak directly to their needs and specific pain points, even calling out their segment.

For instance, check out these specific questions you should address, customized to each target or segment:

(Image Source)

Start by addressing your audience immediately and giving a short elevator pitch customized to their needs.

Optimizely does this perfectly, targeting Microsoft as their market:

(Image Source)

Below the headline, they craft a simple, yet effective value proposition:

Optimizely makes it easy to test and personalize your website or mobile app.

Their calls to action are based on acquiring more knowledge, rather than a direct and immediate sale:

Learn more. Test it out.

Instead of hard-selling, they aim to educate and show why Microsoft needs their product.

Aim to get the messaging on your landing page right, so you can improve your close rates.

Bringing It Full Circle

Thanks to some of the best email marketing platforms like Convert Kit or Get Response, it’s easier than ever to engage with your audience. However, as we’ve seen, email conversion rates are abysmal at best.

To have good results with email, personalize each email. Try to provide real value by focusing your offer directly towards customer pain points.

That means you’ll need to target your emails too — splitting them up into deeply niche audience segments.

Take notes from companies like Slack, Freshdesk, and Evernote, who are growing year over year through tactics just like this.

If you need to use a website builder, you can spin up pages like these in just minutes with zero web development background.

The point is to do it. Don’t let technology get in the way. Leverage the tools available to you to build custom landing pages that work in tandem with your emails. Whether you’re running cold campaigns or warm, this will send your email conversion rates sky high.

Adam Enfroy teaches 75,000 monthly readers how to blog like a startup, not a writer. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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