It’s estimated that up to 50 percent of visitors to landing pages will bail in the first eight seconds.And while that amount of time can feel like an eternity to a bull rider in the rodeo, it’s a mere blink of an eye to an email marketer hoping for strong conversions and a positive return-on-investment.

Online marketers spend countless hours and untold millions trying to make recipients click on a link leading to a landing page. But delivering only clicks is short-changing the company. Marketers need to convert prospects to customers; clicks need to result in purchases. with online marketing, the bridge between the click and the credit card is generally a landing page.

As online competition intensifies, greater efforts are being placed on maximizing revenues from each and every opportunity. And few opportunities are as rich with possibilities as when an email recipient clicks a link within a message and comes knocking at your online door.

A MarketingSherpa reader survey found that average landing page conversion rates for email campaigns ranged from 5.67 percent to 11 .31 percent for free offers, and from 5.67 percent to 7.63 percent for e-commerce campaigns.If your conversion rates are running near the bottom or below those ranges, consider making changes to your landing page program. A new evaluation by Silverpop of landing pages from 50 companies finds that placing a little more effort on nurturing recipients once they hit those landing pages would be time and money well spent. This report, evaluating landing pages from companies throughout North America and the United Kingdom, can serve as a valuable guide.

Key Findings

Landing pages that pass the eight-second test successfully feature a number of important attributes. Unfortunately, many of those reviewed in this study failed to grab the attention of customers and prospects, leading them down a clear path to conversion. Silverpop found that:

• Successful landing pages grab attention quickly by matching the promotional copy in the email’s call-to-action that yielded the click. Yet 45 percent of the landing pages evaluated failed to repeat the email’s promotional copy in the headline.
• Catapulting a clicker to a Web site’s home page generally fails to deliver on the promise inherent in the email’s call-to-action. Yet 7 percent of email campaigns dumped recipients there.
• Recipients can be taken aback when they click on a link and end up on a landing page without the same look and feel as the email that captured their attention. But three out of 0 marketers risked confusing customers and prospects by sending them to landing pages not matching the email.
• Asking too many questions can lead prospective customers to become wary and frustrated enough that they abandon the process. Nevertheless, 45 percent of landing pages that included forms required more than 0 fields to be completed.
• While the presence of a navigation bar on a landing page can be a distraction that pulls visitors away from the primary conversion goal, nearly seven out of 0 landing pages included them.
• Professional writers know it’s a lot harder to write short copy than long. Apparently some marketers are taking the easy way out, since 25 percent of the landing pages reviewed by Silverpop required scrolling through more than two screens of text.

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