Our new product: How we’ve linked up email and landing page creation

Knak made its reputation by providing a platform for creating beautiful, on-brand marketing emails in minutes, no coding required.

We recently launched a new product, called Knak Pages, that extends that ‘on-brand, no coding’ ethos to landing pages. As far as we know, we’re the first enterprise creation platform that handles both of those functions—emails and landing pages.

This is something we’re really excited about, and we think our customers will be too, because it will streamline and simplify an important part of the work they do.

In this blog posting, I want to showcase what we’ve done, and explain why I think it’s a boon to marketers.

The way things were

It has been traditional in marketing to create emails in one platform, and landing pages in another. (The landing page, in case anyone doesn’t know, is the page that you get sent to when you click on a link in the marketing email. It usually requires you to take some form of action, for example join a mailing list, register for an event, or fill out a form. The landing page is distinct from a company’s website.)

I suppose that when tech solutions first started to be applied to marketing, there must have been a reason for having two distinct platforms. And as time went on, marketers learned to live with the two separate functions.

But it was awkward, not to mention inefficient.

For example, if an email was sent out to invite people to register for an event, the email invitation was created in one platform, which had its own software, editing functions and approvals processes, etc., while the landing page—the page readers land on when they click on the link inviting them to register for the event—was created using a completely different platform, with different software, editing functions and approvals processes.

When you think about it, it just doesn’t make sense! If the email contains a call to action (for example, ‘Please register for an event!’), then creating the landing page that is home to the registration process itself should not require a whole separate platform, with employees having to log out of one, log onto the other, and work with different tools that require a different skill set.

And yet, that’s the way things have been—the yin (emails) and the yang (landing pages) were not connected.

What we’ve done

Our new platform connects the two halves of a marketing campaign. We took our email creation platform, and added a landing page creation component, creating a smooth technical bridge between the two components of a marketer’s job.

This is actually something we’ve been thinking of doing for some time.

Once we moved from the original iteration of Knak (providing marketing email templates) to our current email creation platform, we realized that a lot of the things we were building for emails were completely transferable to landing page creation.

We saw an opportunity. All the more so since our customers were already asking for it. In fact, the ability to create landing pages was the most requested feature in our customer community.

We’re already getting positive feedback.

Phillip Meyer is a digital marketing analyst with Scentsy, Inc., an online seller of scented products. Scentsy already uses Knak’s email creation platform, and Meyer says he is genuinely excited by the arrival of Knak Pages.

Meyer says Knak’s email platform was doing such a good job of streamlining the company’s marketing work, they had asked Knak about extending the platform to landing pages.

He’s pleased to now have that platform.

“As we come into developing our own marketing practices, I’m excited to be able to use the landing page setup to streamline the time and effort and everything that goes into landing pages,” he said, adding that the platform is intuitive and easy to use, even for people who don’t code.

Meyer said Knak Pages will be a big help for things like opt-out pages and feedback pages and other tools used by a direct sales company.

We know that there are a few similar products out there. But we think our features give us a distinct advantage.

Our customers tell us that existing products can require coding, or not allow for rigorous brand control, or that they lack collaboration features or built-in approvals protocols. (Knak Pages doesn’t require coding, and allows for easy collaboration, rigorous brand control and speedy approvals.)

And with existing products, it can be difficult or even impossible to migrate assets from one platform to another, as sometimes happens when a company changes platforms for whatever reason. Why? Because the platforms that allow for creation of landing pages also host them. So you can’t just use cut-and-paste to transfer an existing landing page from one platform to another ; in the worst cases, everything has to be coded from scratch in the new platform.

The way of the future

Why is Knak Pages the way of the future? Quite simply, because it frees up marketers to be creative, which is what they do best. They don’t have to worry about being able to code or stick to a rigid template, they can get their work done much more quickly, and they don’t have to rely on developers or outside agencies to do it. In other words, they can focus their time and efforts on standing out.

Oh, and there are fewer systems to learn and use, which I think is a huge advantage.

In the old paradigm, emails were in one system and landing pages in another. Some employees might have access to one system, but not the other. Having everything in one place creates speed, flexibility and control.

In the old paradigm, landing pages were hosted in the platforms in which they were created. Knak believes that what you create is yours, and that you should be allowed to move it wherever you want. Knak Pages allows that.

We’ve created flexible, one-stop shopping for marketers.

This is a big move for us. We’re excited to tell people about it.

And if you want more information, we recently launched Knak Pages at an online event that attracted 400+ marketers from some of the world’s largest companies. It was the biggest event we’ve ever organized. Click here to see a video.