Emails are the new landing pages
Not too long ago landing pages were terrible. They weren’t optimized for anything, had no clear call-to-action and in most cases it was hard to discern what the product actually did. Then somewhere around the year 2009 something magical happened: Someone had the idea to run a/b tests and build a conversion focused landing page, one that would be easy on the eyes, came with nice product screenshots, customers logos and an ‘As Seen on TechCrunch’ graphic. Signups increased and soon everyone noticed and started doing the same thing, because it worked. It’s now 2013 and this same optimization is starting to happen in another part of the funnel: Emails.
The classic scenario is to send a welcome email to a new user after she has signed up for your service or product. I bet you are doing this right now and you have no idea if the subject line or the layout you chose delights your users or not. Your emails are probably not even optimized for mobile devices, even though it doesn’t take much research to figure out that about half of all emails are being opened on smart phones. Responsive emails are a thing now and every time I receive one I am more likely to click thru to your content.
I know it takes time for this stuff to catch on and I see some cool things out there already. A future where Emails are more personally tailored, easy on the eyes on any device and in general more interesting to me as a user would be amazing. That’s why I help build tools for sending better emails like userfox or experiment with stuff using my personal newsletter. I think the medium Email is worth more focus and every startup or big company should have an interest in improving it.
