Whenever you’re designing a campaign, inevitably, one of the steps is launching a landing page. A fast way to get a landing page ready hopefully without much hassle is to use a website builder that is specialised in landing pages.
Leadpages styles itself as a service that “helps small businesses connect with an audience, collect leads, and close sales”. It promises to turn clicks into customers. In essence, it’s a website builder focusing on one-pagers and popups that help you collect email addresses to build your list.
In 2012, Clay Collins founded Leadpages. In the meantime, it has grown to a major player in landing page builders. In its own words, “the number 1 landing page builder”. It offers you a collection of tools for capturing leads, be it email or SMS. The most important is the drag-and-drop editor to build your page.
- Pros and cons of Leadpages
- Who is Leadpages for?
- How easy is Leadpages to use?
- Design and templates
- How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Leadpages?
- Integrations
- What marketing tools does Leadpages provide?
- Payment options
- Security
- Customer support
- Pricing
- Is Leadpages the right solution for you?
Pros and cons of Leadpages
You can subscribe to software as a service with a monthly subscription if you plan on creating a landing page to help you increase email sign-ups or SMS opt-ins. It will help you to increase your list, but you still need email marketing service providers such as SendinBlue or Moosend to regularly send emails to your audience.
Pros
- Easy to use with a user-friendly editor
- You can add a checkout element to your forms to simplify paid webinar sign-ups
Cons
- No forever free plan
- To sign up for the 14-day free trial you need to hand over your credit card details
- Sign-process includes an upsell and has very many steps
- Even though you have a cancel button in your account settings, the cancelling process itself is again fraught with too many steps and dark patterns
- The onboarding tutorial re-appears, even if you went through it
- Leadpages lets you sort the templates by conversion rate but doesn’t show the actual numbers so that it sones necessarily give confidence in the conversion claims
- The templates can look outdated, which may be due to overexposure – you most likely see the same templates used everywhere
Who is Leadpages for?
If you’re running a small to mid-size business and are looking to grow your list, Leadpages could help. That said, if you’re already using a website builder, chances are, you already can build a landing page or one-pager with it. But should you be using WordPress, you’d get more out of it.
If you’re a freelancer, marketing department, or running a smallish marketing agency and want a drag-and-drop builder to build a landing page in your funnel, is a good place to start.
In both cases, you already need to know how your funnel looks like and gearing up for growth.
How easy is Leadpages to use?
When you sign up for the 14 days free trial period, you’d be asked for your credit card details and straightaway Leadpages goes into an upsell so that if you’re not careful, you might be buying a product that you didn’t necessarily want.
Once you’ve overcome this hurdle, you’re going to be asked many questions such as about your marketing efforts and your business model. In the last question, you’re asked if you want to build a
- Landing page
- Pop-up
- Website
- Alert bar
Then you’re taken to the landing page templates gallery and greeted with the onboarding tutorial. When you’ve picked your template, you can finally begin customising. If you’re coming from other drag-and-drop editors, you’ll find your way quite quickly. Leadpages offers a wide range of content blocks as well as elements (called widgets). The interface itself is easy to navigate.
You’re not limited to the elements offered, you can also add custom HTML code. When you’re done, you can publish landing pages or sites on a subdomain of Leadpages or under your domain name.
Design and templates
You’ll find a templates gallery for landing pages and websites. The templates can be sorted by conversion rate, most popular, or newest. They are categorised by page type, industry, style, or colour.
Of course, it’s tempting to pick a template that ranks high on conversion rate. But if want to verify the actual conversion rate, the length of time that people have been using the template, you won’t see the actual data and have to accept Leadpages’ words. Even so, after you and everyone else who uses Leadpages has finished customising, all the pages are so different, you can hardly consolidate them back to the “original” best converting template. Further, even if a page converts well and captures the most contacts, what you really want are (most) paying customers.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Leadpages?
You can sell whatever you like, but Leadpages works best for paid webinars. You can just add the checkout widget wherever you like. Just know that Leadpages is first and foremost a marketing tool to help you get more leads. So, you can’t expect it to be a complete shopping cart software.
Integrations
Since Leadpages is more like an “email capture form on steroids”, it comes with native integrations. These integrations are mostly for email marketing automation and for webinars. For other integration, you can use the practical service Zapier. As last resort, you can add custom HTML code to integrate with any service or product that offers an embedded code or widget.
What marketing tools does Leadpages provide?
To be an effective tool for marketers, Leadpages includes conversion tools such as pop-ups, alert bars, opt-in texts, and trigger links. It also gives you a tool to create your brand style guide with your preferred choice of font and color schemes.
SEO
It’s easy to edit your meta tags (page title, page description, and keywords). It’s similarly easy to add Google Analytics.
Blogging
Blogging is not viewed as essential. That’s ok for landing pages, but you can also build websites with Leadpages. If you really need to blog on lead pages, you have a workaround. Leadpages has the page type called blog article so that you can write your blog post, but by default, any new page you create is added to your navigation. So, you have to rename the menu link for example.
CRM
Perhaps customer relationship management tool is a word too strong. Still, you get a leads library, that is searchable by keyword, email address, page name, and so forth. It can also be sorted by email address or date added.
Lead magnets
Although this is offered by its partner Attract.io, it’s a nifty tool that lets you quickly make checklists, white papers, and more. You can then add these lead magnets to a form to create gated content.
A/B split tests
For you to optimise your landing pages, you get to split test them removing the guesswork form creating one-pagers that work. For you to see what’s effective, Leadpages includes stats for each of your landing pages.
Payment options
Leadpages offers you the option to connect it with Stripe so that you can accept payments.
Security
All pages built and hosted with Leadpages are secured with SSL.
Customer support
When you click on the help button in the editor, it opens a searchable and extensive help centre. You can also start a chat or open a ticket. It depends on which plan you’re subscribed to for you to get a fast reply or one after a few hours.
Pricing
Unfortunately, there is no free forever plan, but you get to try all features for free for a period of 14 days. You have to hand over your credit card number though. You can then choose to pay on a monthly or yearly basis.
Is Leadpages the right solution for you?
Leadpages makes it easy to build a landing page or a website with its drag-and-drop editor. But in all fairness, this makes it sound like the other landing page builders. And if you take into consideration that you need another service to then send and automate your emails it sounds even more meh.
If you already know that you need a landing page or a way to capture emails, you can also go with any of the email service providers such as Moosend, MailerLite, or Mailchimp – albeit you can’t add a checkout element to your form.
Do you want us to review a service? Leave a comment below.
Original post here: Leadpages review
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