A landing page is a single, standalone web page that is designed to grab a visitor’s attention. Unlike a complex website, a landing page has a specific purpose. If it’s designed correctly, visitors to your landing page will know exactly what to do. Landing pages take your customers straight from point A to point B.
Landing pages can be used to present visitors with a specific product, gather leads, announce a particular promotion, or offer a discount. No matter the content, every landing page has a clear call to action, so your customers know just what to do.
Table of Contents
- Landing Page Bulder Basics
- Elements of a Landing Page
- Free Landing Page Builders
- Top Paid Builders for Landing Pages
- Cost of Landing Page Builders
- What's Next?
Landing Page Builder Basics
Landing pages focus on achieving one goal. You want your audience to take a certain action, and your landing page revolves around completing that action. For example, you might want people to sign up for your email newsletter, so you could create a landing page designed to encourage people to sign up to receive your emails.
The best landing page builders will have the following qualities:
Ease of Use
The whole point of using a landing page builder over hiring a web designer or doing it yourself is the ease of use, superior ROI, and guarantee of a professional end result. Unless a builder offers landing page templates which are visually appealing and a tool which makes it easy to edit them, move on.
Consider that the less editing you do to your landing page, the better. You’re getting a better ROI and not wasting hours of your time essentially rebuilding the landing page from scratch. So long as you go with a platform that follows existing best practices, the templates should be optimized to begin with.
A good "add" button or drag and drop features for widgets in the builder tool is nearly essential to be considered easy to use. This includes any forms and form fields so you can get all the info you need from a contact.
Design Options
Some design elements that every landing page product should have include:
- Simple, drag and drop editor with a lot of design capability (you never know what you might want to do down the line) as well as a draft version and shortcuts to undo/redo, delete, copy and paste.
- Features which improve conversion, like countdown timers, color-changing CTA buttons, FontAwesome icons and text, and parallax images.
- Built-in website popups, which have, in several instances, shown to increase opt-in rates by more than 1500%.
- A comprehensive analytic platform which shows your landing page’s performance, traffic and A/B test results.
- A preview function which allows you to see exactly how your landing page will look on each device.
- The ability to publish your landing pages to different subdomains, as well as host your landing page for you. This should be an easy copy and paste of a snippet of code into the backend of your site/page. Anything more and the software company is complicating things for no reason.
Great design options can be found with most landing page builders. If you want to get inspiration from templates instead of building from scratch right away, check out TruVISIBILITY's templates you can use.
Integrations
You may love the landing page builder you choose, but unless you have a strategy to do something with the leads and customers you generate, paying a single dollar is pointless.
Let me put it another way: Generating a lead without an idea of how to turn that lead into a sale is like buying a Ferrari and forgetting the wheels. Sure, it might look good in the garage, but garages aren’t where Ferraris are meant to be.
To take your leads onto the highway, you need to have them connected to something capable of hitting the gas and getting it to 100.
Integrations are that something. They allow you to connect your lead-generating landing pages with lead-nurturing software and customer relationship management systems.
The alternative to integrations like the ones you see on the right is to choose a software provider which has the tools built into it.
Templates
You want options as well. Some landing page builders organize their templates into type (squeeze page, contact us, pre-launch, demo, etc) and that’s great. Honestly it doesn’t matter all that much, so long as your landing page builder gives you a few dozen possibilities. The more landing page templates offered, the more landing pages you’ll create.
And remember, companies with 30 or more landing pages generate, on average, 7x more leads than those with 10 or less. Those with 40 or more generate 12x more leads than those with 5 or less.
Some common landing page templates that most marketing software companies should give you for free are:
- Event invitations
- Sharing a video presentation
- Invitation to download a free ebook
- Share a product special offer
- Invite those who are landing on your page to join your email list (newsletter, special deals, etc.)
- Confirm an order placement
- Send thanks to customers
- And, of course, blank templates so you can get a high conversion rate from a page you personalize yourself.
Elements of Landing Pages
The visitors to your sites will not be professional website builders, so your product should make it seem like it was not necessarily SEO optimized or be a clearly designed domain. Your landing page should naturally pull in your audience, new and old, without having too many bells and whistles that look "scammy" like a lot of website builders can do.
What elements of a landing page will help it not look like a stoic landing page template or marketing ploy?
Marketing Tools
There are tons of email tools that allow you to automatically add email addresses to your contact lists. You'll, of course, want to segment or mark which contacts belong to which lists. Or you can do that with particular landing pages. These are just examples of marketing tools that you can add to make sure your landing page functions to fit your particular business perfectly.
Some other marketing tools you can get are:
- Downloadable button (for ebooks, videos, etc.)
- CTA buttons to redirect your audience anywhere you like
- Ads on the sides of your landing page for other marketing purposes
Forms
The forms are the most important part of the landing page if you're trying to collect contact information. This means the forms should be able to collect and store a visitor's information automatically into your software, digital marketing platform, or wherever you want to direct it to.
This is not a feature just the top builders have. Forms are essential to a landing page, even if there is just one of the fields you need: email address. And all builders will have this option. If there is a builder that requires payment for an extra vital feature like this, it is likely a scam. Forms are the basic necessity to any landing page.
Reply and Give Offers
A visitor will get an offer, likely, from your landing page if you're an ecommerce business. What comes next is the welcome email. This email may have more emails to follow or include a thank you note to the new lead.
You can give them the option to reply to your business directly, which gives your audience feel like they have agency (or a say) in how they communicate with your business. Reasons a lead may want to reply to an email is if the automated email asks the lead to reply with either a survey, any questions or concerns they have, or simply to confirm their email address so that future emails can be sent to their address.
Cookies Option
Cookies, sometimes referred to as HTTP cookies or browser cookies, are small files stored in a web user's browser data folder. Ecommerce websites place cookies on visitors' browsers to retain login credentials, identify customers, and provide a customized shopping experience.
For example, if someone was looking for sweatshirts, you may want to advertise that on your landing page. You can also collect data from your landing page using cookies, but you must give visitors an option to allow cookies or not. A landing page builder should either have this implemented in at least one of their templates or have it as optional tools. It may be under pop-ups or some other tags in the builder.
Page Redirect
Your landing page should take the visitor to another page once they fill out a form, download the free ebook, or whatever other marketing goal you created the landing page for. If there isn't automatically an option to put a link to redirect the visitor to another page, then your builder is missing one of the most vital tools.
The content on the landing page for the new subscriber, lead, or customer, is important. But it's important to also learn that your goal is to have the landing page visitor stay loyal to you and your business. One of the best ways to do that is to have your new leads taken automatically to a page from your site that either offers more valuable content or gives valuable information.
Some page ideas to redirect them to could be:
- A "contact us" page to give them an opportunity to ask questions or voice more personalized comments to your business
- A page of text that is either a guide on how to use or read their downloadable content
- A page on your site where visitors can see the latest sales of the season
- An educational video page for new leads to learn something about the business or recent purchase. This may also be a welcome video if they signed up for a newsletter or software download.
Free Landing Page Builders
Many landing page builders have free trials. But we won't talk about those just yet. There's only one great truly free landing page builder with the best design options that everyone should add to their 'Top Landing Page Builders" lists.
TruVISIBILITY
TruVISIBILITY's landing page builder app, called Sites, also allows you to make websites in addition to landing pages that you can select to integrate with any webpage you create. They have landing page templates that are optimized already for high conversion rates, but you can always explore the widgets and tools to see how you can make your own landing page from scratch.
The drag and drop features makes it easy to design any dedicated landing page. You can also optimize them for SEO, which in itself is worth the price of $0. The creation is not the only easy thing, it's also simple to connect any email service you currently use. Or you can check out TruVISIBILITY's Messaging app to also create email.
With forms that have countless fields you can add, this one app rivals any paid plan out there.
There are a few landing page builders we like for small businesses and large companies alike — Instapage, Unbounce, Leadpages and HubSpot. None of which, howevver, are truly free for life. For entrepreneurs who want an all-in-one solution — one that’s reminiscent of a website builder — take a look at ClickFunnels, Systeme.io. and Ucraft if you want to pay up.
Of course, there’s only one landing page tool we endorses…
[truvis]
Top Paid Builders for Landing Pages
Hubspot
Hubspot makes a variety of tools for digital marketers and salespeople, but we noticed the ease of use of their landing page tool. They describe their marketing service as: everything you need to launch effective marketing campaigns that make people interested in your business and happy to be your customer. HubSpot is an enterprise marketing solution that has an excellent solution for creating landing pages.
Especially if you’re a SaaS company, real estate company, or marketing agency, HubSpot is an awesome platform to manage your landing pages, CRM, email marketing, and a whole lot more.
The HubSpot offer continues to gets more sophisticated as their product grows and expands into different territories. The landing page tool along with the smart content and CTAs is a huge benefit and the cost is low enough that it makes this offering worth a try.
Wix
Wix enables you to create different types of sites, from portfolios to ecommerce stores. It makes it easy to customize and make your site (or page) your own.
While many people use Wix to host their blog or ecommerce store, you can also use it to create landing pages. Wix makes it easy to create landing pages that drive results. It’s a quick and efficient way to produce a landing page for your campaign.
It is free to sign up with Wix and start using it. The basic account allows you to create a site or landing pages for your business. For serious, business-minded people, you’ll want to opt for a premium account.
Wix offers numerous pricing pages for their customers. The following three packages are suitable for business focused people.
It's fairly easy to use, but it costs a minimum of $14/ month to upwards of $25/ month.
Unbounce
Unbounce was the first landing page builder software. You could actually say they invented the category.
Used for various projects, it promises to stay one of the best landing page software tools out there. It’s perfect for optimizing performance marketing campaigns, creating “coming soon” pages, capturing emails on site, and describing those hard-to-explain elements of your product offering.
Unbounce continues to add features too. The recently launched a “conversion intelligence suite” that uses AI to inform landing pages, so that your ad spend goes further.
Instapage
Instapage allows you to create stunning, on-brand, mobile-responsive landing pages from one of 200+ templates. No developer needed.
Instapage is incredibly powerful. It’s a simple drag-and-drop landing page builder that creates pixel-perfect pages. Unfortunately, it’s quite expensive. As such, it’s more of a large company and agency tool.
It takes about 2 minutes to set up and it has an extremely user-friendly, customizable editor, which will undoubtedly earn you more leads, cheaper.
Cost of Landing Page Builders
As landing pages continue to bring profits to business owners, many new entrepreneurs are keen to find out how much it takes to get a landing page developed.
Many think that landing pages creation is much cheaper than website development. Web developers need a preliminary time estimate to give a price quote. How many hours does it take to create a landing page? Landing page creation can take more time than website development. Honestly, the price of landing pages is volatile as it depends on various factors.
The cost of developing a landing page with the help of online web builders can vary from 2 to 250 dollars per month. Depending on the selected tariff, the user is offered a number of functions that can improve one or another part of the future landing page.
The easiest option is to buy a ready-made landing page. Here you need to put a minimum of effort: change the USP (Unique Selling Proposition), the content and part of the page design if for some reason it does not suit you. It’s simple and this option implies a number of undeniable advantages:
- This is an absolute saving of time and effort. No need to look for a developer. It is enough to choose the template you like, make minimum changes, run an advertisement and get the first visitors to the landing page;
- This option is much cheaper than ordering the creation of the landing page from scratch. The average cost of templates is $10 – $20, although there are design options where the price of a template can reach $ 50;
- There are a lot of templates on the Internet. But most free trial apps offer free templates you can use for future reference. Even if you don't stay with that particular software.
What's Next?
Hopefully that’s given you some insight into what makes a landing page builder worth paying for.
And they are. They save you time, money, and make it so much easier for your business to generate leads and drive sales online. The question is just how much you should put towards a landing page builder and how you can choose the best one for your business and marketing goals.
If you want to try a free landing page to deploy on a site you already have, look no further. You can try out TruVISIBILITY's platform for free or keep it free for life!
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