Leadpages review: Depth and brutally honest a full review of Leadpages (what you should know): the Top Popular tool for creating Leadpages
Leadpages review: Depth and brutally honest a full review of Leadpages (what you should know): the Top Popular tool for creating Leadpages
Leadpages Review: an overview
Leadpages creates home pages and pop-ups that help you collect email addresses.
In other words, if you have difficulty creating an email list, Leadpages is a product that you should consider.
How does the tool make your life easier when it comes to finding qualified leads? The answer begins with a word: templates.
Leadpages gives you access to more than 150 professionally designed templates. Choose one of those and you will not have to create a home page from scratch.
These templates, by the way, cover a variety of industries, including:
Real estate
Travel
Photography
Fitness
Electronic commerce
There are also templates available for various types of campaigns. Among them:
EbookLead capture
Opt-in
Web seminar
Informational page
Thank you
If you do not find any of the standard templates suitable for your marketing efforts, you can always choose from the more than 130 drag-and-drop templates.
In addition to offering free templates, Leadpages gives you access to more than 300 premium templates. These will cost you an additional charge beyond what you are already paying for the service.
Like most "build" tools on the market these days, Leadpages offers a user interface designed to facilitate the assembly and customization of the perfect landing page.
In addition, the platform also offers split tests. That will give you a better opportunity to maximize conversions.
Finally, Leadpages generates a responsive user interface. That means it will look great on any device, such as a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet.
Leadpages Review: Facebook Integration
Leadpages plays very well with Facebook.
For starters, the platform offers a built-in Facebook ad builder. It will extract the content of your landing page to create a message that will resonate in your market.
In addition, Leadpages offers guidance tools so you can reach the right audience. That way, you will not waste money showing your ads to people who will not participate.
Finally, the tool offers automated pixel placement. You will not have to fight to place the Facebook code on your landing page.
WordPress integration with Leadpages
Leadpages also has a WordPress plugin. This will allow you to configure your landing pages and pop-ups from the administration console.
For example, you can use the add-in to specify one of your landing pages as a standard WordPress page. You will even get your own custom URL.
You can also use the add-on to make the home page your home page.
If you want to specify that your popup window is the exit attempt or a delay, you can also do so from the WordPress backend.
Leadpages Review: Other Integrations
In addition to compatibility with Facebook, Leadpages also works with other tools.
The most important of these tools, perhaps, is Zapier.
Why is Zapier so important? Because it is a tool that is designed to connect different applications to each other.
At this time, Zapier supports integrations among more than 1,000 applications. In other words, once you have integrated with Zapier, you have almost integrated with everything.
Beyond that, Leadpages also integrates with other popular tools, including:
StripeAweber
Calendly
Get an answer
Google AdWords
Analytic Google
Hubspot
Chimpanzee
Marketo
Paypal
Salesforce
Shopify
Checkout creation
If you are running an e-commerce site, you will be pleased to know that Leadpages allows you to cancel a payment on any landing page.
Even better: you can put a checkout in a pop-up window.
That is a great feature if you have an attractive product in a niche market and believe that your potential customers may be interested in making a purchase immediately.
Leadpages Review: the highest conversion template
One really interesting feature of Leadpages is that it allows you to sort the templates of the destination page by conversion rate. That way, you can choose a template with a success story.
Remember, the tool has more than 43,000 customers. That means there is a lot of data to extract.
In addition, the company has existed for years. It was founded in 2012.
So you can be pretty sure that the statistical analysis of the platform is accurate.
However, Leadpages will not give you the raw data in terms of conversions for each template. If you are looking for the actual conversion rate, the number of time people have been using the template or the standard deviation information, you have no luck.
Also, keep in mind that users personalize their landing pages. They include their own copy and images. These elements can influence the conversion rate more than the design.
Leadpages Review: Premium Templates
As I mentioned earlier, Leadpages offers premium templates that you can buy. Unfortunately, you probably have to spend that extra money when you register with the service.Why? Because the standard templates seem a bit too familiar.
With 43,000 customers, it's safe to say that you've probably seen the standard Leadpages landing pages somewhere. That's how your customers have it.So, if you want your brand to stand out from the crowd, you will have to choose a template that everyone else is not using. That's going to cost you a few dollars.
In addition, the high-end templates have a better design in general.
Leadpages Review: Two editors
Leadpages has two editors: the standard editor and the drag-and-drop editor.The standard editor was the only publisher that was offered on the platform until 2016. That was when Leadpages added the drag-and-drop editor.
Use the standard editor to customize most templates. It is easy to use but lacks flexibility.
For example, you can not move the widgets. Also, you can not add items (but you can hide them).
Leadpages Review: drag and drop editor
Therefore, if you want to use a template as a starting point and review it considerably, you probably will not be able to do so with the standard editor.The standard editor also makes it difficult to match your own brand with the landing page. Obviously, that is a significant limitation.
This is what you can do with the standard editor:
Change text font and verbiage
Change the colors of the elements.
Change images
Embed video
Alter the background image
Include a hyperlink
The drag-and-drop editor, on the other hand, offers more flexibility. Unfortunately, it's a bit clumsy.
To begin with, you must have the objective in your "fall" exactly right. Otherwise, your item will land in the wrong place.
Unfortunately, with the Leadpages user interface, it is easy to get lost in the right place.
In addition, sometimes the elements will change their size depending on where you place them. To add insult to the injury, you can not change the size of the elements afterward.Here is what you can do with the drag-and-drop editor:
Anything you can do in the standard editor.
Add a widget (such as a progress bar, icon, title, text, comment, countdown, image, video, space, form, line, HTML element or calendar)
Move the widgets around
Browse through the icon library and include an icon
Access some Google sources
Include alt text for images
Set a cover overlay for a background image
Create new sections
Duplicate existing sections
This is what you can not do with the drag-and-drop editor:
Split tests (yes, seriously)
Change the size of widgets (most of the time)
Superposition of widgets
Add a parallax background
Add header tags (H1, H2, etc.)
Access a library of images.
Load additional sources
Align widgets
Includes advanced fields such as gender, date of birth, etc.
Leadpages Review: A / B Testing
As I mentioned earlier, Leadpages supports split testing. That is a must with a tool that is designed to maximize conversions.
The platform follows the standard A / B test pattern. It allows you to display different versions of your homepage or pop-up window so you can see which one offers you the most clicks.
However, there are some caveats.
First, the split test is only available with the standard editor. You can not use it with the drag-and-drop editor.
That is quite worrying.
In addition, the lowest level of service does not even offer split tests. So, if you decide to go to the "cheap" route, you'll have to find some other way to test your landing pages or pop-up windows.
Lead boxes
Lead boxes are opt-in forms that include a call to action (CTA).
You can configure a Leadbox that is activated with a simple click on the button. You can also create one to start a two-step subscription to your email distribution list.
The platform facilitates the creation of Leadboxes. However, you are limited when it comes to style options.
In fact, there is only one type of Leadbox style available. You may have seen it before: it is the one with the animated progress bar.
Leadpages Review: Leaddigits
Are you in SMS marketing? If so, then you will probably appreciate Leaddigits. You can use this function to capture emails through a text message.
Here's how it works: a potential customer sends a simple phrase to a five-digit phone number. The platform sends a text message to the person, requesting an email address. The prospect answers with your email address (ideally).
This is how you could use it in real life: let's say you're in a conference. You are running a stand where you meet a lot of people and talk about your business.
Obviously, it would be difficult to ask all those prospects for an email address on the fly.
Instead, he publishes a poster on his stand that hangs a carrot in front of his best prospects. That sign could say: "Get your 15 points free SEO Guide in 2019! Learn what professionals know you do not know! Text SEO SECRETS to 43434. "
Your prospects see it and send the text message "SEO SECRETS" to 43434. They will receive a response requesting the email address where they wish to receive a link to the PDF document with valuable information.
Of course, when you provide that email address, you will add it to your distribution list.
That is a way "out of the box" to get more potential customers. It is much less disruptive than the pop-ups that appear on almost every digital marketing website these days.
Leadpages Review: Leadlinks
Lead links make it easy to increase your conversion rate.
They are special links that are included in a broadcast email. When users click on the link, they "convert" automatically.
For example, suppose you put a lead link in an email so people can register for your next webinar. When the recipients click on that link, they are automatically registered. No other action is necessary.
However, keep in mind that you can not use Leadlinks with the 1ShoppingCart or AWeber platforms. Your terms of service forbid it.
Leadpages Review: Prices
As with most marketing tools, Leadpages charges you per month. Prices vary from $ 25 to $ 199, depending on the level of service you are looking for.
That's at the annual turnover rate. If you want to go from month to month, it will cost at least $ 37 per month.
The lowest level of service does not even offer division tests. So probably not worth the investment.
The next level of service, which will cost $ 48 per month, offers A / B testing. But it does not support advanced integrations with tools like Marketo and Salesforce.
Leadpages offers a free trial. However, you will have to provide a credit card.
Wrapping it: the pros and consI will conclude this review of Leadpages by reviewing a summary of the pros and cons of the platform.
Pros:
Easy to use. The learning curve is minimal.
Save time. This is because it is much easier to create a landing page with GUI than with plain HTML.
Beautiful templates Although some of the templates lack flexibility, they are really nice from the start.
Easy sorting Leadpages allows you to sort landing pages by conversion rate. That means you can find a winning design in a matter of minutes.
Integrations The tool is integrated with many popular marketing platforms.
Cons:
Not very flexible. If you want to make significant changes to some of the templates, you have no luck.
Limited style options It may be difficult to create a landing page that matches your brand.
Notable errors All the tools have their flaws. The errors in Leadpages seem to be more noticeable than in other platforms.
High prices. You do not get much for the money.
Bad user experience Do not be surprised if you get frustrated with the user interface. Although it is easy to learn, it does not always respond the way you believe.
As we entered Leadpages, we wanted to know more about the conversion rates. Leadpages does not provide the percentage of conversion, the variation of the conversion percentages or the time that the template has been active. We do not necessarily expect this level of detail, but it would give us more confidence in the conversion claims.
We also do not know if these convert something better than the landing pages of the competitors. After everyone customizes their templates with new copies, images, and other styles, they are very different pages, so it is difficult to group them all in the same cube. In addition, the page that captures the most emails may not be the page that takes the most paying customers at the end.
We begin to look more closely at the conversion rates after seeing for the first time the free most-converted template. It's pretty ugly The template looks outdated, messy and borderline. Perhaps the most attractive pages are not necessarily those with the highest conversion. Would you use an unattractive page that is highly convertible to represent your brand? Most would not.
Many free templates of standard Leadpages seem outdated. Partially because they suffer from overexposure: you see the same templates and Leadboxes everywhere. These templates vary in style from a decent appearance to too crowded, some horrible. This is a subjective view, but we believe that it is validated by the fact that the most recent Leadpages templates and the best premium ones are cleaner and more modern. Anyway, we'll let you decide: here are the main standard templates:
Then we found the Leadpages premium templates. Better. These are the Leadpages templates that users can sell on Leadpages. The best premium templates are more modern and pleasant in general. They often have full image backgrounds and a simpler design. Premium templates can also be classified by conversion rate. Eight of the ten standard editor templates are premium, cleaner in appearance and more modern. Like this:
In addition, the new templates created for the new drag-and-drop editor of Leadpages are also of a simpler aesthetic. But if some of the crowded and busy templates become better, why not create a drag-and-drop version first?
Destination page editor
The editor (or constructor) is where you edit the template to be yours. Here you can make all style changes, such as the color of the button, the images and the copy of the title. Leadpages has two editors! It is important to understand this for this review, as well as your purchase decision. So be patient with us
The standard editor (the only editor until March 2016) is its original and principal publisher. This editor offers few customization options, which makes it easy to use but limiting. Some say that it is so that people can not alter the templates that are designed to convert, we are not so sure.
We know that the main complaint of Leadpages customers is inflexibility. To offer a more customizable editor, they recently launched a drag-and-drop editor.
Both leadpage homepage editors disappointed us. And since those are the heart and soul of the software, we can not recommend Leadpages in this review.
Standard editor
Next, our review of Leadpages will cover the standard or classic editor. The classic Leadpages editor is what users typically use with Leadpages. Most of the templates are for the standard editor and only for the standard editor.
Yes, it is quick and easy but at a significant cost in flexibility and power. It does not achieve the correct balance between ease of use and power. Others thought that the same thing as Leadpages is to build a second from scratch.
The editor severely limits style options. We knew this was going to enter our Leadpages Review but we were still surprised by the scope of the limitations. There are few options to make even basic changes. You can not move or add new elements, or widgets. Elements include elements such as headlines, Leadboxes, maps and countdown timers (anything you can add to the page). So if you like a template but want to add a timer, you're not lucky. Examples of frustrations: you can not replace a video with an image, you can not undo the button, you can not delete the 3D shadow of the text. You can only hide items (which can leave a big hole in your page).
The biggest problem is that it makes it difficult to match the brand. Sometimes, a lead page will seem so disconnected from the rest of a site that it is discordant and confusing.
Drag and drop
Next, we tested the new drag-and-drop editor of Leadpages. We think "well, the standard editor is scarce, but the drag-and-drop editor will compensate." No way.Leadpages describes the drag-and-drop editor as an "editor" for those who want maximum flexibility to customize the layout of their page. It will allow you to add more elements (text, images, functions) and move them instead of just hiding them. "
Yes, the new drag-and-drop editor is more flexible. You can add and move elements. It has more customization options. But it seems half-way. Sometimes it was painful to use, especially after using better tools. The clumsy and intuitive interface was frustrating. We do not see it approaching the best builders/publishers for years or months. We expected something better since Leadpages has been successful for a while and is well funded. Dragging and dropping is not an insurmountable task or a new innovation that came from nothing. Others have had drag and drop for years. The prices of Leadpages are at a higher level and the constructor should reflect that.
The problem is the lack of smoothness, precision, and predictability. It's not really dragging and drop. If you drag an element to a point on the template, it will snap to the closest open point. 9 out of 10 times that place is not where you dropped it or where you want the item to be (March 2017 update: Since then, Leadpages has improved its location). Then it's more like dragging, letting go and seeing something unexpected happen. The elements suddenly change in size depending on where they are. The size of the elements is not even an option. There is no corner to drag to size. Easier to see this in the video.
There are other things that are not quite ready. For us, these are more acceptable in an early release. There are still no A / B tests and not all integrations are available. There are advantages such as an icon library, the ability to design the countdown timer and customizable Leadbox to name a few. More details about what you can and can not do in the "How Leadpages works" section and in the video.
So he has a long way to go before getting caught up with the competitors. But even worse, nothing is better or more innovative than others outside the market. If it reaches parity from a usability point of view, we do not see any important differentiator to use it.
Tests A / B
Pro subscribers have the option to perform A / B tests (or split tests) of their landing pages or Leadboxes. This feature allows you to create alternate page versions that appear randomly for visitors. The version that performs best is the winner. The A / B tests are currently only available in standard templates/editor, not in drag and drop. So what you can try is limited. A / B tests usually involve changes to the copy, images, and styles of the buttons, which can be done in the standard editor.
It seems to be a perfectly fine tool that is like others we have seen in the creators of landing pages.
Leadboxes are emergent boxes. They are activated with a click of the button on a landing page (two-step entry option), time on the page or exit of the intention as a separate pop-up window. We really liked the configuration of Leadboxes. He achieved the right combination of power and ease of use. You can do several things in a Leadbox, such as sending a magnet of leads, selecting a sub-list to send leads and registering attendees to webinars. All this can be done in the configuration so you can see the changes live without leaving Leadbox.
We would like to have more style options, as we mentioned several times in this Leadpages Review.
But what surprises us is that there is only one type of Leadbox style. Do not we need a 100 but 3 to 5 would be good? The animated progress bar was novel when it came out. But it has not seen many updates since then and it is becoming obsolete. Fortunately, you can now customize Leadboxes in the drag-and-drop editor.
Leaddigits
One of the most original aspects of Leadpages is Leaddigits. This captures emails through SMS text messages. Customers can subscribe to their list by sending a text message with a phrase to a 5-digit phone number (for example, PASTELAS text to 35544). Leadpages sends you a text message to ask for your email, which people need to answer. It can automatically capture the prospect's phone number as well.
This is great for certain unique situations, including:
a speaker at a conference can provide the audience with a phrase/text number to get the slides
the owner of a restaurant can put a Leaddigit in the menu (or any signal) to obtain subscriptions to a newsletter
Only a subset of clients will need Leaddigits, but for them, it can be invaluable. We wonder how effective this method is with conversion rates. It is much harder to track since they appear "in the real world". Many hesitate to opt for the test, as they may fear to receive commercial messages or calls to their phone.
We also question how widespread the need is. Leadpages mentions that it is for when it is away from your computer or web browser. This is almost never since we have smartphones. And if it's far from your phone, then you can not use Leaddigits anyway.
Lead magnet management
Many options are for lead magnets: synchronized information products such as an electronic book. Leadpages stores the lead magnet file so you do not have to link it, connect to another system or its servers. This is very convenient. It is not exclusive to Leadpages but it is a good feature. Basically, it allows the main magnet to be automatically sent to a subscriber. You can choose the single or double enrollment option (which requires confirmation by email).
Analytics
Analytics to understand how your pages are converting. Very basic but sufficient for most customers. It shows visitors, unique visitors, opt-ins and conversion rate.
Leadlinks (Pro and above)
Lead links are very powerful. They are a special link that you can paste into a broadcast email. When someone clicks on the link (for example, to register for a webinar), it is automatically registered without any additional action being necessary. You can even add them to a sub-list and deliver a digital asset by email.
Contact links do not work with AWeber and 1ShoppingCart due to their terms of service
Benefits of Leadpages: Why use Leadpages?
Save time, money and effort
Like all landing page builders, Leadpages can generate landing pages for various purposes quickly and easily. Maybe even faster than others because of its simplified editor. It is very easy to use, but it has a cost of power and flexibility.
Regarding speed, a new landing page can take a few minutes to be configured once you are familiar with the tool. No specialized resources are needed as designers or developers.
Other tools such as Leadlinks and Leadboxes can make your marketing more efficient. Potential savings of additional time, money and effort when performing multiple automated actions with little general information needed.
Improve conversion rates/lead generation
We discussed this in detail in the templates section of our Leadpages review above. Let's summarize quickly. Leadpages has tons of conversion data in its template conversion rates across many customers over the years. You can use this to order templates by conversion. This is powerful information and a great feature.
You can also test whether tools like Leaddigits or Leadlinks (Pro and higher) increase the conversion. Maybe a different approach could lead to many more conversions.
Optimize design through A / B testing (Pro and higher)
We've all heard stories of a salesperson changing the color of a button that increases traffic in a crazy number. This is determined by A / B or split tests. A / B Testing is available in Pro plans and in the standard editor only (do not drag and drop). A / B Testing compares alternative variants of a page that are displayed randomly for site visitors. Calculate the difference in performance so that you can choose a winner. With the split test, you can continuously improve the design, copy and performance of your landing pages.
Final opinion: Meh. You should definitely opt for the free trial option before spending money on Leadpages. You are likely to find some of the problems I have described here.
