If you’re using social media in your marketing mix or driving traffic with PPC, you’ll want to set up landing pages. All the more, if you want better results from your social media and PPC campaigns. Then you want converting landing pages – and it’s not all about having “just” beautiful-looking pages.
Not so long ago, you most likely had to go back and forth with a designer and probably also a developer to tweak something here and change something there to optimise your page for your campaigns.
This is exactly what Instapage wants to help you with and streamlines the process. It gives you the tools to build landing pages, optimise them for search engines, test them with split tests, and of course capture user data with opt-in forms.
Instapage was founded in 2012 by Tyson Quick and is headquartered in San Francisco, USA. It serves known brands such as Vimeo or Soundcloud, but that is not to say smaller organisations can’t use it. It serves companies with employees from 1 to 10’000+.
It’s important to know that you can only build landing pages.
Pros and cons of Instapage
It features not only the basics such as a drag-and-drop website builder with a wide range of templates, but you also get
- Analytics tools
- Split testing combined with heat mapping
- Collaboration tools so that you can work with your team
- Integration with the known email and marketing providers such as Mailchimp
But it comes with a hefty price tag, so is it worth it?
Pros
- Easy to use with a nifty page builder
- You can add custom HTML, CSS, and Javascript code
- A wide range of crisp, mobile-ready templates
Cons
No forever free plan
You get a 14-day free trial, but you need to hand over your credit card details
Expensive
In general, the customer service is terrible
You can’t cancel in the interface within your so-called free- and you can’t get customer service to answer
Who is Instapage for?
When you’re running advertising campaigns, you’ll want a converting landing page, no matter if your business is small or large. It also applies if you’re a marketer, an agency, or running an ecommerce site.
Whichever the case, you’ll want landing pages that convert and so help you generate more leads, increase ROI and expand your email marketing list.
How easy is Instapage to use?
Once your account is created, you’d be taken to your dashboard. It’s designed so that you see at a glance how your landing page is performing. As you see, it’s all about conversions with Instapage and how to tweak your page to get better conversion.
The interface is uncluttered and self-explanatory. Since it’s all about building converting landing pages, let’s look at the landing page builder. Following industry standards, you first choose a template – or as Instapage calls it “a conversion optimised layout”, then customise it by dragging and dropping elements. The last step is to publish your page.
You’ll see that Instapage has grouped elements that are often used together like in a beautiful layout. The blocks are what make up your layout. That is, each section is an independent block that you can move where you want. If you’re happy with how you’ve designed your header, you can save the block for re-use on other pages.
When you’re done, you have can publish your page
As a custom domain
Through WordPress
Through Drupal
On a subdomain of Instapage as a demo page
Design and templates
You not only have a choice of over 200 templates but also a myriad of pre-designed blocks. All of them are mobile-ready, so they fit the size of any device. This is an important factor to ensure your conversions don’t fall on mobile and tablet devices
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Instapage?
The goal of Instapage is to help you create pages that are geared towards the goal of your marketing campaign. In most cases, you’re probably collecting user data via a form and not trying to manage an online store.
Integrations
Not in all cases do you need to connect with an email marketing company. You can also collect all of the leads and download them in a spread sheet when your campaign has concluded.
Obviously, it’s more practical to connect Instapage with a service such as Autopilot, or the jack of all trades Zapier.
What marketing tools does Instapage provide?
A landing page is an integral part of a campaign. And without analytics, you can’t improve and optimise your page.
SEO
Some campaigns only last a few days to weeks. And then some run for months or always the same weeks every year. This means, you’d still want to optimise your page for search engines.
You’ll add your meta tags into the head section of your page with the custom code editor when you’re designing the layout of your page.
Tracking, testing, and reporting
When a page is published, you’d want to track it so that you can see what’s working and what isn’t and optimise for better results.
One option is the heat map tool that shows what your visitors have been doing while viewing your page. Heat maps help you find potential issues, such as a form that is too far down the page and visitors don’t scroll to that point.
The second option is to split test your landing page. You can also split test specific elements by simply cloning a page and only changing one element.
Since it’s all about conversions, you can enable conversion goals from the page builder. And lastly, you can easily add Google Analytics.
Payment options
Accepting payments is not within the scope of Instapage.
Security
All pages created with Instapage are secured with SSL and GDPR compliant.
Customer support
All subscription plans include customer support by chat and email. The support is described as available 24/7. But it’s actually inexistent. Worse still, if you try to cancel within the 14 days free trial, the interface will display an error message and you can’t cancel. Contacting support doesn’t yield results as there’s no reaction. In short, you can’t cancel within the time limit and Instapage will automatically charge your credit card.
Pricing
Instapage has 2 subscription plans and you can choose to pay monthly or annually. The annual fee saves you 33%. It says you can try it free of charge for 14 days but you need to hand over your credit card details and you will be charged if your landing pages are viewed by more than 2,500 visitors. And worse, you can’t cancel the subscription in the interface as you’ll only be shown an error message.
Is Instapage the right solution for you?
If you’re running many campaigns and need sleek and mobile-ready landing pages, you’ll find that Instapage’s builder is a pleasure to use. Albeit expensive, you get the tracking and analytics you need to optimise your page for better results.
If you’re trying your hand with campaigns, then you may want a cheaper lead page builder like for example Leadpagees.
But, there’s a big BUT: Even if the user interface is well-designed and uncluttered, in the case you should decide to leave, you can’t get out. You can try its so-called 14 days free of charge trial period but it can’t cancel your subscription. If you try to search on the internet, you’d find many horror stories how dreadful the customer service is and it how difficult it is to cancel your subscription, if you’re one of the lucky ones.
Original post here: Instapage review
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