Leadpages Review 2014

Contents

A Details Leadpages Review

The original reason that I signed up to Leadpages was actually because Andrew Warner said to me how much he liked to use Leadpages. I was disappointed when I first signed up because I got used to Unbounce and its powerful drag and drop system. I wanted to cancel a few times but didn’t out of sheer laziness (I keep telling people that the money’s in the continuity business!). When I was launching a new product and wanted to create a quick and dirty landing page, confirmation page, & thank you page, the thought of going through Unbounce’s painfully slow interface was giving me a headache. Then I remembered about “that Leadpages software” which I subscribed to but never got around to using. I suppose part of the reason that I never really used it properly was because once you start creating a lot of pages with a system like this, you’re kind of “committed” to paying their monthly fees.

But what the heck. I needed to create all of the pages for the product launch like yesterday. It turns out that creating new pages is quick and easy. You can’t really change the designs too much (you can play around with colours, fonts) nor rearrange the layout. But it’s really fast. Easy to publish. You can create a sales page in a few minutes, press Publish and be advertising the thing on Facebook PPC watching the leads coming in. That makes testing really easy.

Facebook Campaign with Leadpages -- 44% Conversion Rate
Facebook Campaign with Leadpages — 44% Conversion Rate!

 

Leadpages then became my default go to tool for creating high converting lead pages, webinar registration pages, sales pages without the hassle that it usually entails. I use it for video landing pages also.

Here are the template categories (and number of templates) that you get access to:

leadpages review

Here are some of the Leadpages templates that you can choose from:

leadpages templates
Leadpages Example Templates
More Leadpages Templates
More Leadpages Templates

Leadpages Conversion Analytics

Having conversion stats is obviously very useful and Leadpages has them. But on this point, I think that Unbounce does a much better job.

Firstly, the conversion graph looks a bit messy:

Leadpages Conversion Graph
Leadpages Conversion Graph

Unbounce smoothens the lines so at least you feel like you’re understanding what’s happening with your conversions over time. But I don’t mind that too much. What I do mind is the fact that I can’t assign a specific percentage of new traffic in the proportion that I want. Let me explain.

I have 2 Landing pages. Here are the conversion rates:

Landing Page 1: 16.76%.
Landing Page 2: 18.20%

So naturally I want to direct more traffic to Landing Page 2. Now I want to test another variation. Here are the new results:

Landing Page 2: 18.20%
Landing Page 3: 2.88%

Yikes! Don’t want to send to send any more traffic to Landing Page 3. I want to send 80% to Landing Page 2. Can’t be done. Watch me try in this screencast:

In this respect, Unbounce performs a lot better.

Leadpages Pricing

Leadpages charges $37 per month for their Standard Plan or $67 for their Pro Plan. There’s also a discount available if you pay annually.

At the pro level, the things you get over the standard plan is that you get access to Leadlinks (which I talk about below), you can export the HTML file (which means that you can keep the template even after you cancel Leadpages), you get the split testing feature (very important if you ask me!), and you get access to their affiliate program.

You can learn more about their pricing structure here.

The features include:

  • Hosting of Pages — it will in the format of yourcompany.leadpages.net or something similar
  • Lead Magnet DeliveryIf you don’t want to use an autoresponder or you use Aweber (they force double opt ins), then you can use Leadpages to deliver the goods that you promised your leads in exchange for their contact details
  • Automatic Redirects — once you’re done with your page, you can set up an automatic redirect so that they go to your home page (e.g. for launch offers) instead of getting a 404 page.
  • Sort by Conversion Rate — You can sort pages by their opt in conversion rate which is nice to have as a guide
  • Bookmarklets — I really like this feature. You can bookmark the template so that if you can return to it anytime and start editing it immediately.
  • WordPress plugin — you can set a default 404 page as an opt in page which is useful and also set a welcome gate for your home page.
Welcome Gate of Jon Morrow's Website
Welcome Gate of Jon Morrow’s Guest Blogging Home Page using Leadpages

Learn more about the rest of their features here.

Integrations

Here’s a list of the Email Services that Leadpages integrates with:

  • AWeber
  • MailChimp
  • Infusionsoft
  • OfficeAutopilot
  • SendReach
  • iContact
  • GetResponse
  • GetResponse 360
  • 1ShoppingCart
  • ConstantContact
  • MadMimi
  • Interspire

I use Infusionsoft and I can say that the integration works beautifully. And unlike Unbounce, you don’t need a higher plan to integrate with Infusionsoft.

Leadpages with Infusionsoft
Leadpages with Infusionsoft

 

One of the things that you can do now (as Clay Collins commented in my last review) is allow for hidden fields. This is very useful because it means that you can pass additional information such as where the user came from, store extra information about the user, store affiliate information:

Store Affiliate Information with Leadpages
Store Affiliate Information with Leadpages

You can even have your entire order page with Leadpages like Daniel Wagner did and then submit credit card information directly to Infusionsoft. This would have taken custom programming and some additional styling but it shows you what you can do.

Ultimate Templates for the Lazy Marketer

The thing I love most about Leadpages are the ready made templates. A lot of other landing page software also includes some form of ready templates either through WordPress themes/plugins or third party sites like Unbounce, 10 Minute Pages, etc.

But the key difference is that a large chunk of the template library were designed for/used by well-known marketers including James Schramko, Patt Flynn, James Wedmore, and of course, Clay Collins himself (founder of LeadPages). You get to use the exact same template. And they convert. I know because I use them all of the time on paid traffic. And that, my friend, is where the money is and the team at LeadPages knows it.

Honestly, I hate having to create an entire landing page from scratch. In very specific situations, I still do it (e.g. custom survey/quiz funnels). Maybe you know the kind of pain involved in having to do this? Where should I put the headline? What font should the headline be? Where should I put the image? Where should I put the text? Where do I paste the opt in code? How should the opt in box look?

With LeadPages, you can throw together a Facebook to a Leadpages Webinar Registration page (see this Webinar Registration landing page that Clay Collins/Tim Paige uses for Leadpages) campaign very quickly.

Just a few clicks here and there, amend the details like the name of the Webinar, hit publish and boom! — you’ve got a high converting landing page where you can start driving tons of traffic. You don’t even need to bother putting the registration page on your own website. You can just advertise the direct LeadPages link on Facebook which is actually what a lot of marketers are doing these days.

It’s a bit sad but I do like to click on a lot of the FB ads that show up and see what kind of landing page they use, the funnel (if indeed there is one) as well as how they advertise and I’ll swipe any good ones and keep ’em all on Dropbox/Evernote.

Speaking of which, this model of generating FB leads using Leadpages Webinar Registration Pages and Webinar Thank You Pages is very popular at the moment largely because it’s actually working ridiculously well. If you manage to get 100 attendees at $2 per lead (if you can get ’em at this price, you’re doing very well), your total cost is $200. Let’s say that half actually attend (50 people) and then only 14% (7 people) of those people that attend purchase your product. If you’re selling a $297.00 product, that’s $2,079. Then you’ve made 10x your cost of advertising. You can use this same model for service businesses also since you can easily laser target different verticals using Facebook. I have a friend that’s selling copywriting services on retainer for $997 per month using this exact method and he’s killing it.

Afterwards, for the live webinar itself, some people such as John Lee Dumas (of Entrepreneur on Fire) continues to use Leadpages to host a Google+ Hangout. Leadpages has one template at the time of writing which allows you to embed the code for your Google+ Hangout so that attendees can watch and interact in the live chat box (if you’re interested in a more powerful platform specifically for hosting with Google+ Hangouts, check out WebinarJam).

Leadboxes

This is a really useful and smart idea. It allows you to create a clickable link anywhere on any website and when you click the button, you see an opt in box. The following link was created using Leadboxes:

Click here to SEE what I mean

Part of the reason that Leadboxes was originally created (I think) is because Clay Collins saw that a 2-step opt in (where you click and link, then you opt in) works better than a 1-step opt in (when you just see the opt in).

But there are actually more ways that you can use Leadboxes. For example, one way that I like to use Leadboxes is as part of a 2-step checkout process to reduce cart abandonment.

In this specific screen, I’ve used OptimizePress 2.0 to create a sales page for a product that’s promoted on Clickbank (note that you can use Leadboxes with other landing page creators like OptimizePress, Unbounce, etc.). I capture their email first and I also store affiliate information in case they were referred by a Clickbank affiliate.

2 Step Checkout with Leadpages
2 Step Checkout with Leadpages

This information then gets transferred to Infusionsoft and then to a custom script which checks if the customer was referred by an affiliate. If they were, then they go to the Clickbank checkout with the affiliate information.

If they don’t complete checkout, there’s a check on Infusionsoft 5 hours later (you can set the time) which reminds the visitor to complete their checkout. And you can remind them a few more times afterwards (I remind them again the next day and one more the day after).

You can get pretty creative with this. For example, one way to grow your list is by asking websites visited by your target audience to display your Leadbox code for a monthly fee. You’ll get some hesitation but some website owners will agree.

Leadlinks

Leadlinks will give you the option to put a link in your email and automatically register that person with just 1-click. You’ll need to let the person know in the email that “When you click the link, you’ll be instantly registered for the webinar.”

It doesn’t work with Aweber or 1ShoppingCart presumably because it violates their Terms of Service.

I prefer people to go to a form to register for Webinars where they get extra details and for everything else, Infusionsoft can handle with the use of “tags”.

Watch How A Landing Page Can Be Made With Leadpages (Video)

Conclusion

Last year (2013), I would have said that Leadpages is nice to have but not essential for marketing. They’ve come a long way since then and making a lot of improvements. In the “trying out” phase, I generally don’t make too many pages in case I decide to cancel and save the headache of recreating all of the pages in my funnel. I’ve got over 400 pages created in Leadpages. I think that’s testament to how easy it is to create pages and the fact that I’m going to be sticking with them for the long haul.

I have upgraded Leadpages to be a core part of my marketing “toolkit“. It’s used by everyone in my mastermind group including Amy Porterfield. It’s used by top marketers such as Frank Kern. Certainly it’s not perfect, but it gives the ability to get up and running in a few minutes, and see results. In short, it’s a must use tool made by marketers for marketers.

 

Bonus

If you decide to subscribe with Leadpages through my affiliate link here, then you can download my guide (to be released shortly) on how to use Leadpages and do some ninja stuff.

Make sure to use this link here.

7 thoughts on “Leadpages Review 2014”

  1. Fabrício Fujikawa

    Thank you for the great post! I tried to click in your Leadpages affiliate link, but it didn’t seem to work. Maybe because I’m using a mobile browser?

    Do you know if Leadpages accepts file field in their forms?

    Best regards,
    Fabrício

      1. Fabrício Fujikawa

        Hello Rui,

        Just to let you know that I’ve signed up with LeadPages using your link. 🙂

        Best regards,
        Fabrício

  2. I *REALLY* wanted to make Leadpages work for my clients.

    They do such much really right , and with a lot of polish. The way they implmented getting variables from a URL is so easy and well-implemented.

    Not being able to add a cutom drop-down menu to a from or use my clients Brand’s web-fonts – were deal breakers for me.

    BUT, the integration piece, and a lot of really arbitrary limitations ( no FORM design – that’s ALL 3rd party integrations) and the shallowness of many of the integrations ( WordPress integration is a plug-in that does the same as any redirector to marry an URL in your domain to a leadpages one) just made it really difficult to integrate LeadPages into my cleint’s ongoing business requirements without another huge investment on another 3rd party that could handle the business logic required.

    Their system seems focussed narrowly on e-mail list acquisition – I can’t understand why they do not integrate with a survey provider like wufoo or survey monkey etc.

    I they upped their game in terms of the form design flexibility and the Lead Notifications capabilities/limitations – I’d reevaluate.

    Going with implementing the Content Experiment in Google Analytics, which allows us to really integrate with both the wordpress site AND Analytics- plus, it’s free.

    If you have specific brand requirements, and complex business logic – LeadPages may not be for you.

    PS. LeadPages support is really friendly and helpful – but they cannott overcome the deliberate limitiations of the functionlity of the platform.

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