If you’re thinking about or are already using email marketing, this article is for you! With any email marketing, there is a lot going on behind the scenes: this includes finalizing the copy, MarTech software, email cadence, sequences, target list, and other configurations before a single email can be sent. In parallel, your website must be designed and integrated accordingly to get the most out of your email marketing. To get your website primed for email marketing, we’ve identified six areas your web design team must address before launching your email marketing.
1. Implement Email Marketing Tracking on Your Website
Email marketing isn’t just about blasting emails; you need a way to gauge its effectiveness. There are two camps related to email marketing strategies:
- You only give people one option, and that’s to reply to your email
- You let them browse your landing page before they buy
Depending on the customer, we’ve found that either can demonstrate results. In fact, the latter can satisfy both—an email with embedded links can offer browsing and replying opportunities.
When giving customers options to explore your website, you must ensure your website correctly tracks them. Many email marketing platforms provide tracking codes to understand what your targets are doing after they click on your link. Are they only staying on that landing page, or are they browsing other pages? Additionally, how many are clicking your links?
Tracking can also identify which target companies have visited your website. As a result, you can use this information to target more individuals with the same roles from that same company. This can push your sales efforts across the finish line. Similarly, you could target the same roles in lookalike organizations with the same company size, industry, and headcount. This advanced tracking is incredibly powerful for multiplying your lead generation.
However, all of this tracking data comes with one caveat: Data privacy is a huge issue that must be complied with at the local level. Therefore, contact a web design team like Uplancer to help implement your email tracking.
2. Pick Mirror Domains When Sending Emails
You should do everything to protect your email domain. Email service providers like Microsoft and Google are weary of email abuse and will penalize and even block your email domain when they recognize it. That means if you’re running email campaigns, you should not put your business email at risk of rejection.
There are techniques that your web design and hosting team can use, but we find the best route is to pick mirror domains. These domains are slight variations of your primary business domain name. For example, our business domain, uplancer.agency, has the following mirror domains: uplancercompany.com, uplancerllc.co, and uplanceragency.com. Notice how these mirror domains resemble our business domain.
Once you’ve picked out mirror domains, have your web design team set up a redirect from those mirror domains to your primary business domain. We recommend this as a precaution for digital buyers who quickly look up your mirror domain. To illustrate this, we’d set up a redirect from uplancerllc.co to uplancer.agency. By doing this, your email marketing traffic is contained within your own business website.
3. Dedicate a Landing Page for Email Marketing Traffic
In organic search, your customers will stumble across your website, and your homepage will likely do all the convincing. With email marketing, your email replaces your homepage. As such, we recommend treating each email campaign like a paid search experience – build a landing page for each email campaign and link to it in the body of your emails.
To get the most out of your email marketing landing pages, follow these best practices:
- Landing pages should include relevant email content for your end users. For example, an email campaign for tire repair should discuss tire repairs and avoid content related to auto body repair.
- Landing pages should place conversion actions, such as a contact form, download, or lead magnet, at the top of the page. These conversion actions should be front and center and easy to take.
- Less is more for landing pages! Only include the minimum content customers need to convert on the page.
4. Append UTM Parameters to Your Embedded Email Links
From a decision-making perspective, you must know whether your email campaign works. You can uncover this information by leveraging an analytics tool like Google Analytics on your website and appending UTM parameters to your embedded email marketing URLs. With appended URL parameters, you can identify the email campaign traffice source in your analytics reports. Using a tool like Google Link Builder, you can tag your email campaign with the applicable parameters for utm_source, utm_medium, utm_id, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content. You don’t need to use all these parameters, so assign enough information to identify one email campaign from another.
5. Cookie Usage and Storage
What happens if your embedded email marketing link contains UTM parameters and your customer navigates away from that page? Without custom scripts on your website, those valuable parameters are lost! The good news is there’s a workaround where you can store the UTM parameters as a browser cookie. This cookie information is stored temporarily and, based on a specific action, is shared with your analytics tool. A web design team like Uplancer to help implement this custom script.
6. Get Your Contact Forms in Order
Whether using your own or a third-party form, you must confirm that your contact forms work across your website. If you’re using a CRM, sync the metadata so your sales team can quickly engage. For example, if your sales team knows which web page a form was submitted, they can shape the sales meeting accordingly. You can pass other information to your CRM, such as UTM parameters and the referral page, to improve your chances of converting a prospect. Ultimately, a well-thought-out contact form workflow can optimize sales from email marketing traffic.
The Bottom Line / TLDR
To maximize the impact of email marketing, you must align your web design direction with your email campaigns. Implement email tracking on your website for insights into visitor behavior, secure your domain to avoid spam flags, and use dedicated landing pages for targeted traffic. Also, add UTM parameters to track campaign performance, store cookie data to preserve source details, and ensure contact forms work seamlessly with your CRM. These steps are critical for driving conversions, streamlining your sales process, and making email marketing efforts more effective.
Is your web design team doing email marketing the common sense way? Contact us today for a free consultation about your email marketing or website needs!
