Leadpages Review

Detailed Reviews

Leadpages was primarily a landing page building platform. It would help marketers create engaging pages without the need for any coding knowledge whatsoever. The platform now provides a lot many ways for lead generation. Along with landing pages, one can create business websites, popups, opt-ins, and so much more using this tool. Leadpages takes care of a wide array of marketing needs of any growing business.

Pros

• Comes with a wide array of landing page templates.
• Has an intuitive editor for building landing pages and websites.
• Easy to build responsive pages.
• Split testing helps refine the campaign.
• Various conversion tools aid in lead generation.
• Integrates easily with a wide range of other applications.
• Provides detailed analytics for the campaign.

Cons

• No template options for pop-ups.

Introduction

Taking the business online and attracting a bunch of visitors to your website is not sufficient to grow it anymore. One may have loads of visitors on the website, but until you don’t give the visitor to come back again, all it will be is just a random viewer.

Collecting visitor’s contact information is among the best ways to make sure the visitor stays in the loop and turns from a random visitor on the website to a customer. The more visitors you can convert into your leads, better are the chances for growth and expansion of the business.

There are various ways which one can implement to convert a visitor into a lead. The one thing common among all the methods of lead generation is that the marketer needs to provide something in return for the contact information.

It can be anything ranging from a free coupon to a free e-book. The chance of the visitor participating in the exchange increases a lot more if the marketer offers something of value to the user. The product or service should also be relevant to the business to attract only the relevant leads.

Leadpages allows its users to implement a wide range of lead generation strategies right from the platforms. The processes don’t require the user to know how to code or have a lot of knowledge of computing languages.

These strategies can help one notice exponential growth in the number of clients when implied correctly.

As we mentioned at the beginning, Leadpages used to focus on landing pages for lead generation and for making sales. It allows one to control every part of the process right from creating the landing page to publishing it on the internet.

Landing pages are excellent not just for lead generation but for making sales, as well. A lot of product and services websites redirect visitors to landing pages for making purchases.

Leadpages is still one of the more prominent players if we talk about landing page builders. It is highly likely that you must have come across a landing page created on Leadpages at some point in your life.

They have now expanded their services and help marketers in more ways than ever. The platform allows one to create marketing websites. There is no doubt about how a website can do so much more than a landing page.

If you happen to have a website already, then Leadpages may help you with lead generation and opt-in forms for the website.

We will go through all the marketing and promotion solutions that the platform provides. Since it is no more just a landing page builder, we will compare the performances of individual sections with the best tools of that category.

By the end of this review, you will have a much better idea of the capabilities of this platform, and a clear sense of its competence in various sections.

Landing pages

Even though Leadpages has expanded into so many other sections, landing pages are still at the core of this tool. And since the platform has been helping users create and publish engaging landing pages for so long, you can expect it to be a pretty decent one.

Landing pages are more like one-page websites, which focus primarily on the call-to-action. If it’s a landing page created for lead generation, then the call-to-action would be for the visitor to provide her contact information.

If it happens to be a landing page created for sales, then the intended call-to-action would be for the visitor to purchase the product.

A landing page usually contains information around the final action, but one needs to make sure that there aren’t a lot of distractions. If the piece of information you provide on the landing page takes the user away from the landing page, then it is counterproductive for sure.

The position of the call-to-action button on the page has also got some role to play in the conversion rate for the page. There is no need for the user to get rattled by all the guidelines which help one create better landing pages.

Leadpages comes with a lot of landing page templates. The templates not only include all the necessary design elements for a landing page but also contain the right kind of marketing text and media to help the user even more.

The landing page categories

As we just mentioned that landing pages could be used for a variety of purposes, the platform also provides the landing page templates under various types to keep things simple for the user.

When you start creating a landing page, the tool will let you choose the purpose of the landing page. There are three options at this stage. One can choose to build a landing page to generate leads, to make sales, or for something else.

The three categories offer the user with various templates making the template selection process a lot easier.

Depending on the category you pick, either you will get more types or the platform will serve you directly with templates in the subsequent stage.

For the lead generation category, the templates have further been classified based on product or service that the marketer offers in return of the contact information. Some of the options listed are free resource, webinar or event, discount or coupon offer, etc.

The user can then pick any of these categories to browse relevant templates.

For landing pages created for making sales, there is no further categorization of templates. The platform takes users directly to the template section when they select this class of landing pages.

Finally, we have landing pages which can be used for purposes other than lead generation and making sales. This section comes with a lot of possibilities; hence, it is followed by more sub-sections.

One can create bio pages, webinars, events, and other kinds of landing pages under this section. The proper categorization of landing pages on the platform also gives one idea about the flexibility of landing pages.

Those who prefer creating things on their own can choose a blank page and build a landing page from scratch. There is also an option to browse all the templates at once if you are more focused on design and layout of the page.

The landing page editor

Once you choose the template of your liking or decide to create a landing page from scratch, you will reach the editor.

The landing page editor on Leadpages follows a two-panel design. All the editing tools and menus are available in the collapsible panel on the left. The rest of the screen is occupied by the canvas, and the user can interact directly with the elements to modify them.

Landing pages are one-page websites, and it can be an excellent strategy to break it down into specific sections rather than randomly throwing elements all over it.

The first item on the panel helps the user do precisely that. It will show you a breakdown of the layout of the page. It will show you different sections dealing with specifics of the page such as countdown, details, logo, footer, etc.

The user can simply drag individual sections up and down to change the layout. There are also options to add and delete sections from the design. If you want only to have a look at how the page will appear without a particular section but don’t want to delete it, then the hide section option can come in handy to you.

After the layout section, we have got widgets. This is from where you can drag and drop all kinds of elements on the landing page. There are elements for text, images, headlines, buttons, icon, etc.

Most of you might have some idea about how drag-and-drop editors work, and how easy it is to add elements on such editors. Features such as social share buttons and embed code elements help add a lot more flair to the page.

Once you add the element on the canvas, you need to click on it to modify it. For instance, if you want to change text, all it takes is to click on the text and type in whatever you want.

We liked it how simple it was to edit and modify the landing page on this tool. One doesn’t need to do or learn much to change the appearance. The templates do most of the work for the marketer anyway.

We are still not done with the editing process. The third section on the panel is page styles, and it lets the user deal with font styles, backgrounds, favicon, etc. You can bring about some changes in the overall theme of the page using this section.

Finally, we have the settings button on the editor. It is classified under three sections. The first section deals with SEO. The user gets an SEO preview of the page in this section and the option to make changes in the title and description of the page.

The next section is dedicated to social media settings. You can adjust how the page will appear when shared across on social media websites, and once again manage title and description of the page.

The final section is for taking care of the analytics settings. The user can paste tracking codes from various analytics tools to gather all sorts of information related to the page.

Leadpages provides a Leadmeter at the top of the editor to keep the user informed on how much progress has been made in the direction of creating the best version of the current template.

It comes with specific guidelines and checkboxes which one can follow to make sure that the landing page created in the end brings in best results.

The user can publish the landing page after the building process. The publishing process is relatively simple, and user has the option to publish the page either on a private domain or with Leadpages.

Creates responsive pages

More and more people are using mobile devices to browse the internet for all kinds of purposes. Depending upon the niche or the type of website, the proportion of people using a desktop or a mobile device to visit a website may vary a lot.

Since almost all the landing page creation process happens on desktops, it is difficult for marketers to keep in mind the needs of all the visitors on the page using a mobile device for the purpose.

Leadpages help one get through the issue by providing the user a preview of the page for mobile devices, as well.

Having a way to look at how the page will appear on a screen with different aspect ratio is not a complete solution to the problem. The pages you create should be adaptive enough for the various screens.

The landing page templates on this platform response well to the different screen ratios. When you switch the preview between different screens, you will notice that everything conveniently fits into the kind of screen on which it is being displayed.

Page responsiveness can turn out to be a significant factor when it comes to the success of a campaign, and Leadpages didn’t miss out on it.

Split testing

During the editing process, we saw how there could be different ways to go about creating a landing page on this platform. There were so many options right from the point one gets to pick the template to until the point of publishing the page itself.

It is only natural for one to feel torn between two options or variation at times. Since any change that you do or do not introduce on the page can affect the overall success of the campaign, and therefore the revenue, one should always be sure of all the design and other strategies implied on the page.

Split testing can turn out to be an excellent aid for those who want to find out which method works best for the campaign. It allows the user to launch two variants of the same landing page and determine which one does better.

The whole split testing process is easy to orchestrate. Leadpages have divided it into four clear steps. It starts with you identifying the page. You can then choose to edit the same page to create a variation or create a new landing page altogether.

Some users might be confused with only one or two features of the landing page while there might also be some who are confused between the templates. The split testing section allows the user to incorporate all kinds of differences, big or small, in the two variants.

Once you are done taking care of the variant, the next step is traffic distribution. The rules of testing dictate that both the variants should be provided equal exposure to determine which one performed better.

However, you can vary the percentage of traffic for the variants in this case. So, if you want to test out the waters for a specific variant, and want to keep the other one as the primary component of your campaign, you can set the percentage accordingly.

The final step is to make the test go live. Right from the point of you making the test go live, the tool will record all the performance stats for both the pages and present it to you.

The pages will be shown randomly to visitors taking care of the traffic ratio you decided for the variants. The stats available within the test will include information such as visits, conversions, unique visits, etc.

It is then up to you to stop the test at the time you want and pick the winner. Split testing is just a convenient way for one to keep refining the marketing campaigns and carry forward the learnings from one campaign to another.

Once you have carried out a few split tests for some campaigns, you will have a much better idea about what will work better for the campaign.

Websites

Creating a landing page may seem like a good enough idea for various kinds of marketing and lead generation campaigns. But some of the campaigns may encompass more than what a landing page can handle.

It is in these situations that it makes more sense to create a website rather than just a landing page. And yes, Leadpages lets its users create websites, as well.

It is quite a steep jump from a mere landing page creator to a website builder. But before we get into the website building part of this tool, there are one or two things we need to clear.

The kind of websites one can create on Leadpages is dedicated mostly to one purpose, and that is to get more business. It can be a restaurant’s website offering the bookings or some agency’s website offering free consultation to potential customers.

Nothing much will change from what we were doing in the landing page section other than the fact that this time it is going to be a website with a lot more content and options compared to what we saw in the case of landing pages.

In case of landing pages, we tried to keep the page free from any distraction or info that would make the visitor think of anything other than the call-to-action. In the case of a website, the user can be a lot more open when it comes to sharing information.

Ideally, the website should answer all the questions that the visitor may have about the business or the service. There can be internal links within the site, but there should still be a lot of emphasis on the call to action.

Leadpages lets users create a single page as well as multi-page websites. You can decide on the kind of website most suitable for your business or campaign.

Creating a website on the platform is surprisingly similar to creating a landing page. You will have the same editor, the same kind of choices, and a similar end product in so many ways.

We don’t expect Leadpages to have the capabilities the same as leading website builders, but we do expect it to come with all the properties to help the user create a satisfactory business website.

The process starts in a way similar to what it was for landing pages. You will get template options in the beginning. There aren’t a lot of templates when it comes to creating a website. But there are enough options for one to get started, and the fact that we had a lot of template options in case of landing pages, might make one feel the need for more website templates.

Templates are the only way to create a website. You can’t create one from scratch as it was an option in case of landing pages.

The editor is virtually the same for website building, and you will find it a lot easier to create a website if you have already built a few landing pages on the platform.

The one noticeable difference this time is the presence of the ‘pages’ section in the left panel. This part was absent in the lading page editing section.

The section allows one to create new pages, manage the order of existing ones, merge pages into each other, and so on.

As you add or remove pages from the website, you will notice the changes being reflected in the navigation panel of the website. If you want the page to be there on the site but don’t want it on the navigation panel, then you can place the page inside another one.

Leadpages has got plenty of page types already prepared for the user. When you try adding a new page to the website, you will get various page types in options. The options include pages for testimonials, teams, events, image gallery, blog article, etc.

All these pages come populated with relevant content for the page already. In most cases, one can do away with only replacing the images and texts.

However, if you don’t like to idea of pages with content already present on them, you can always insert a blank page and customize it the way you want.

The widget tab will come in handy for the purpose. It is the same as what we encountered in case of landing pages. All the elements that you can add on pages are the same. It allows the user to add different features to the page and structure it the way she wants.

The ‘layout’ tab on the panel is for the user to manage layouts of individual pages on the website. Depending on the element you add to the page, the tab will break down the page into multiple sections. It is where you can decide if the current scheme of things looks good enough for the business or not.

The ‘styles’ tab can once again be used to manage fonts, backgrounds, and other similar features. Like we mentioned earlier, everything is virtually the same as we encountered while building a landing page.

The settings section will serve you with the same options to take care of SEO, social sharing, and the analytics part. There is nothing complicated about the process at all.

Leadpages can keep things so simple because the website builder does not deal with some of the complicated parts that we usually see on a website builder. For instance, the arrangement of items depends entirely on the template you pick. The prominent website builders allow the user to take care of everything including the structure of the page.

However, such limitation won’t affect the user’s ability to create the right kind of marketing websites. There are a lot of factors that affect the search engine ranking of a website, and one such factor is the loading speed.

One significant advantage of using templates provided by Leadpages is that such websites are already optimized for search engines. It won’t take much longer for the website to load up. It would help you both with improving the user experience and ranking better on search engines.

It is a good-enough platform to create simple marketing websites which in turn would help the user to gather more leads and get more customers.

The publication options for the website are once again the same. You can either host the website with Leadpages or put it on a domain of your choice. Choosing, either way, is not supposed to be problem with this platform.

Once the website is live, you can then even host the landing pages on it.

Conversion tools

Leadpages is all about marketing and reaching out the right kind of people. Landing pages and marketing websites are surely great ways of getting the job done, but then there are so many other easier ways to get the job done that it would be foolish to ignore them.

The platform comes with some conversion tools which provide the user with even more ways for lead generation. The good part is that implementing these lead generation strategies is a straightforward task, yet it benefits the campaign a lot.

The first kind of conversion tools are the ‘pop-ups.’ All of us have some idea about pop-ups and also know how annoying or helpful they can be depending on how the webmaster has implemented them.

Pop-ups might be the most used tool when it comes to lead generation. What better way to remind the visitor to sign-up to that newsletter other than displaying the message on the screen?

There is a lot more to pop-ups than what one usually thinks. The timing, design, content, call-to-action button, and a lot of other things affect the success rate you have with the pop-up.

There is nothing much to the process of creating a pop-up on Leadpages. We are disappointed by the fact that the platform does not provide the user with template options for this class. Even though it is just a message displayed on the screen, the appearance of the box always has the potential to affect how the visitor reacts to it.

The tool will straightaway thrust you into the editor when you go for pop-ups. It is once again the same editor that we found in case of landing pages as well as websites. All the design changes you want to bring in the pop-up are possible using the widgets available in this section only.

But adding more widgets to the box is more likely to take away a lot from the aesthetics of the pop-up. There will be only a few options at user’s disposal when one sets out to publish the form.

You can have the pop-up appear on the screen when the visitor clicks on a link. The link can be text, a button, or even an image. There are separate tabs for all three kinds of links.

The platform also allows the user to time the pop-up. You can not only set the time after the which the pop-up will appear but also set rules such as how many times one has to visit the website so that the pop-up appears or after how many visits should the pop-up appear again for the user. One can also set the pop-up to appear immediately as one visits the website.

Exit-intent pop-ups are preferred by a significant fraction of marketers and website visitors. An exit intent pop-up does not interfere much with the user experience. One can go through the contents of the website for as long as she wishes and there won’t be a pop-up in this case.

It is only when the visitor decides to abandon the website that the pop-up will appear reminding the user to sign-up for the newsletter or more amazing offers.

You can set the recurrence rate for the exit intent pop-ups too.

The next type of conversion tool on Leadpages is the alert bar. These ones are always present on the screen and let the visitor know about the subject matter. Alert bars can be used to gather leads, to inform visitors about new offers and products, for event registration, and so much more.

Unlike pop-ups, alert bars convey the message without interfering much with the user experience on the website. It will just be present on the screen, and the visitor will always have the option to either interact with the bar or continue browsing content.

Another thing we liked about alert bars on this platform is that it comes with more design options, to begin with. There are four kinds of alert bars for the user to select, and then you can also decide the position of the bar on the screen.

It can either be at the top of the screen or the bottom, depending on where you want it to be. You can change the color for the bar, but there aren’t any other modification options.

Leadpages allows the user to paste code in the tracking section to keep the bar in tune with any analytics tool that you might be using.

For publishing, you will get the code for the bar, which you can paste along with the website code.

The third kind of conversion tool we have are the opt-in texts. With the use of this tool, you can allow the audience to opt-on for newsletters, events, webinars, etc. by the simple act of text messaging.

Once you set up opt-in messages, the audience can reply to the text with email address, and they will automatically get added to the mailing list you have created for the purposes.

Opt-in messages make it convenient for both the marketer and the audience to take care of business at their respective ends.

The final kind of conversion tools you will get on Leadpages is the trigger link. One of the ideas behind marketing campaigns, especially the lead generation ones is that you can expect the visitor to take action only if the task is simple enough.

It is therefore recommended to make the task at the visitor’s end as straightforward as possible. The idea behind trigger links is that instead of making the user type in forms and fill up entries, trigger link makes it a single-click process for the visitor to sign-up or register for the service you are offering.

Since it makes the task so much simple at visitor’s end, it becomes highly probable for the visitor to react positively to the call-to-action. The conversion rates see a significant improvement whenever one uses trigger links.

However, one should not try to trick the audience into signing-up up for things using such links. One can send the trigger links along with emails with the information that it will take only one click for them to sign-up.

The one thing we liked about conversion tools on Leadpages is that all of them had something of value to offer. A lot of lead generation tools would only offer you different kinds of forms in the name of diversity.

All the lead conversion tools on this platform are unique. We would have also liked to see some more customization options, especially in the case of pop-ups. It hardly makes sense to provide an option if you are not ready to go all out on it.

Integrations

No online marketing tool is complete without integration these days. There are just so many tasks to care of that it is next to impossible to find a platform which would account for everything from the beginning to the end.

Leadpages is no different. Since lead generation is a significant part of this platform, it only makes sense that it should be easily integrable with email automation tools. It becomes a lot easier to take care of all the new contacts and leads with such and integration.

If you have the new contact directly added to the mailing list, then you won’t have to worry about missing anyone during the outreach campaign. The integrations also help in sorting since you can have separate lists for the different pages and campaigns.

Leadpages integrates with most of the popular email automation tools making life easier for the marketer. Most of them have direct integration options, and if not, then it is highly likely that you will find Zapier integration for the same.

Let us also not forget that there is a website builder on this platform, as well. One may need to integrate so many different tools and utilities for better website management. There can be analytics tools, chat widgets, digital advertising platforms and so much more.

It might make you feel better to know that Leadpages offers a wide range of such integration options. You can use it along with CRM tools, payment gateways, social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, and so many more.

There are plenty of direct and indirect integration options available on the platform to assist the user in all kinds of activities revolving around marketing campaigns and website management.

Analytics

We don’t think we need to discuss the importance of the analytics section for any campaign. You must already realize that it is a numbers game, and what better to monitor the numbers other than a detailed analytics section.

There are only a handful of stats that a marketer would be interested in while taking care of a lead generation campaign. It will be the number of visitors, conversions, conversion rates, and other related data.

Leadpages provides both a superficial as well as an insightful look into all these numbers and how they modify along with time. Once you launch the form or page, you will start seeing the numbers for the campaign.

The dashboard will give you an overview of the stats, and then for more insights, one can always get into the analytics section for individual pages and campaigns.

The graph gives a better idea of the pace of the campaign. There are options to switch the axis of the graph between views, conversions, and conversion rates. The platform also allows the user to change the timeline of analytical data.

Those who feel like getting deeper insights for these numbers and go beyond visitors and conversions can always take help of third-party analytics tools. Those ones can even help you take care of demographics and regions.

Leadpages comes with enough statistical data around the campaign so that the user can always steer it in the right direction. It is these numbers which let the marketer know if all the measures are working the way they were supposed to work.

Conclusion

Let us begin this conclusion with what brings most users to this tool- the landing page section. Right from the point you start creating a landing page to the one where you publish it, you will not feel missing out on anything.

Leadpages does a great job making sure that things don’t get intimidating for the user even during deploying landing pages for the most complicated of tasks. The option of choosing the purpose of creating the landing page right at the beginning makes the subsequent processes a lot easier.

The editor comes with all the tools necessary for the business. It is the same editor that one gets while creating a website. And it should be enough to tell you much about the capabilities of the editor.

The preview mode for screens with different aspect ratios help the marketer take care of everyone in the audience. The landing pages you create on the Leadpages work well on both on desktop as well as mobile devices.

Publishing the landing page was never supposed to be a problem on the tool anyway. One can make the page go online however way he pleases. The split testing feature helps users make sure they always put the right foot forward for campaigns.

Moving on to the other sections available on the platform, creating a marketing website using Leadpages is as easy as it can get. The whole process is conveniently similar to creating a landing page and doesn’t even take a lot of time.

There are both ups and downs in the conversion tools part. Some may consider it as a bonus that there are even the options to deploy pop-ups and other lead generation tools from the platform.

But some may also complain that Leadpages could’ve made this section a lot more efficient for the user. We felt there is a lot of scope for improvement in the pop-up section. There can be a lot many options, especially when it comes to appearance.

The alert bars, opt-in texts, and trigger links can all be valuable additions to anyone’s lead generation campaigns. The fact that there is nothing much to the process of using these tools sweetens the deal even more.

There weren’t disappointments on the integration front too. There is a high probability that you will find all the integrations you need while using the various sections of the platforms.

Leadpages is an excellent tool for lead generation and creating landing pages for other purposes as well. It brings in all the features that one may need for a successful campaign, and does not require one to spend too much time figuring out how to use the tool.