E-mail campaigns lead recipients to landing pages for a variety of reasons: to provide the customer or prospect with additional information, a video or registration for events; to get them to sign up for white papers or enter contests; or to request that they fill out a credit card form or take a survey, among other reasons.

Landing pages have some kind of mystique about them. Some e-mail marketers don't really understand the mechanics behind how a landing page is built, so they tie up precious resources of their IT department and Web team to create landing pages for campaigns, or pay their e-mail service provider (ESP) an extra fee for a landing page creator.

There is an easier way. As marketers create e-mails for campaigns, they can use their ESP's e-mail editor to create a separate HTML e-mail that will function as a landing page. The landing page can be stored in a content library, and an e-mail can link to the file.

Besides saving money and resources, there are many benefits to using the “e-mail as a landing page” method.

1. Marketers can reuse html from the e-mail campaign to easily create a landing page that resembles the campaign's e-mails. The benefits of ensuring that the e-mail design resembles the landing page have been written about in a previous Ask the Expert.
2. Because e-mail landing pages are actual Web pages, they are loaded with keywords that can be picked up in search engines, such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. The more these search engines index a company's content, the better its online searchability.
3. Some ESPs allow marketers to incorporate social sharing links on e-mails and Web pages, broadening the reach of the campaign.
4. Because the landing page is created in the same editor as any standard e-mail, it is trackable by the ESP, so marketers can gather important metrics to understand if the campaign is successful.

Finally, when creating e-mail campaigns, think of a hub and spoke. The Web is the hub and the spokes are all the tactics that point to the Web and increase campaign exposure: landing pages, e-mail marketing, social links, blogs, etc. The more marketers integrate campaigns across all these “spokes,” the greater the chance the campaign will be successful.

Carissa Newton is director of marketing for Delivra (www.delivra.com), an e-mail marketing software and services company.