Imagine for a moment that you’re working on your next email campaign. You want it to be mobile-friendly, so you’ve designed a great-looking email that’s easy to engage with, regardless of whether it’s viewed on a PC or a smartphone:
- Simple, straightforward, and captivating content? Check.
- A beautiful design that looks great on mobile devices of all types and sizes? Check.
- An irresistible and clear call-to-action? Check and check.
You deploy the campaign, and at first, everything goes great. Your subscribers receive your message and are compelled to click the call to action button (you did use a button, right?). But there could be a big problem for anyone viewing your message on a smartphone.
If you’ve forgotten to optimize your campaign landing pages for mobile, your subscriber will land on a web page that looks a mess and, even worse, is impossible to navigate with their device. And your campaign is dead in its tracks.
While this might seem unlikely after all the work that’s been done on the rest of the campaign, landing pages can fall through the cracks more often than you might think.
So make sure you put as much work into designing and optimizing your landing pages as you do for your email:
1. Use the same responsive design techniques you used to create your email
2. Keep the page design simple and the message clear; use a single-column layout if you can, and as little text as possible
3. Keep priority content at the top of the page (including your call to action)
4. Make the action you want the viewer to take very clear
5. Make sure the page loads fast (in under 5 seconds) and contain less than 20KB of info
6. Design the page so that your reader doesn’t need to scroll, pinch, or zoom in on any content–make sure your fonts are big enough to be legible on a small screen, and use buttons instead of links to make it easy to interact with the message
7. Don’t use Flash or frames–they are incompatible with mobile design
8. If you need to use a form, keep it as short as possible
Following these guidelines will ensure that your campaign landing page is every bit as effective as your email.
We want to hear from you! Feel free to share any additional tips you have in the comments.
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