Do I need a dedicated landing page service?

In the beginning…

The enlightenment process of understanding landing pages; as told by nixxie. It starts a little something like this…

“Our Google Ads are too expensive, digital doesnt work for us.”

If you are a marketer, how many times have you heard the above statement from a client? If you are a business owner or decision maker you will probably have heard that from a team member at some point. To be frank, it’s the number 1 reason people reach out to us and it’s a great way for us to engage with potential clients to see if we can help at all.

The first question back to our potential customer is usually some form of…

“Are you using dedicated landing pages and have they been extensively A/B tested?”

The answer is always very interesting and it is at this specific moment, we at nixxie, will know how much of a positive impact we can have on someone’s business.

We talk to so many founders and marketers who are trying to understand why the conversion rate and ROI of their campaigns are low.  Quite often the truth of the matter is that not enough love and care was given to these pages in the beginning.  Most marketers will remember the heady days of starting out, you know, that time, when the possibility of all of that traffic that is begging to be bought, today, it’s just sitting there ready to make you millions! All of that traffic that must be scooped up right now before it’s gone and you missed your opportunity. Those were fun times, the promise of everything and the delivery of disappointment!

There are many ways to cut a landing page and they can all be great. Some people prefer to custom craft a page from the ground up, some like to use templates from landing page service providers and some like to duplicate a page and change a bit of the text.

Our suggested method will depend on the desired outcome, audience and of course budget. However, one thing remains a constant, a landing page is never finished. Through A/B testing you can get a better return of outcomes on a consistent basis.

This is where a landing page service provider really plays its role in the marketing machine. It automates A/B testing and reduces the overhead on manufacturing the next B, sometimes, bringing the production of B down to mere minutes.

Where do landing page service providers excel?…

Another area landing page services providers excel is in speed, uptime and responsiveness.

Let’s take a look at speed first. Google already tells us a few things, page speed is a factor in deciding which pages it shows for any given search. Why? Because, users have a poor experience when they are waiting around for the page load. Simple. For marketers, this is the number 1 sin to commit. Why put all of the effort in crafting those pages, all that time and sometimes cash into enticing a user to click for them to just close the page before it even loaded your logo? It’s just madness!

Secondly and similarly, uptime, some small businesses just don’t know when their websites will go offline. Some medium sized businesses cannot guarantee uptime. Those large businesses? Well, they are using landing page service providers already!

Thirdly, responsiveness, 80% of research search is done on a mobile device and your current implementation might still be a little clunky. We have already mentioned that Google has put emphasis on user experience and it has a mobile first approach. Quality responsive design is a must.

We have a few favourite providers

Who are our favourites and why?

We have a few favourite providers:

1: Unbounce

Unbounce’s biggest advantage and the most well-known feature is its set of A/B testing tools.

As well as this, Unbounce also have many other important benefits, they can bring more traffic to your promotion specific landing page to give you higher conversions, they can send collected data to your other software (keep all your information accurate and up to date).

They make everything quicker and easier for their clients, no need to wait around for changes to be made and published. Unbounce can also give you real-time reports immediately, so you can measure how well your campaigns are working.

2: Leadpages

Leadpages offers an affordable, effective service with multiple benefits and plans to tailor to your particular needs. Within this tool you can created an unlimited number of landing pages, all of which can be redirected from your old landing pages or 404 error pages.

They have a basic plan with unlimited landing pages and over 150 templates so you can tailor your design to your industry. Their landing pages are also all mobile responsive and compatible with Facebook. Leadpages cater to a range of different purposes including sales pages, live webinars, promotions and product launches.

They have the ability to perform A/B split testing and Leadpages can be used in conjunction with many other analytic tools, keeping all of your stats and history accurate and all coming from the same source.

3: Instapage

Instapage helps organisations that need to create a new landing page fast, and do not require the money and effort of hiring a developer. As with the other two, Instapage offers easy A/B testing. Duplicate your page, make a second with a design you want to try out and then you can see the data of which page is converting better.

They offer over 200 templates to cater to your design needs, and they are all fully flexible and customisable in the drop and drag builder. They also make all of their landing pages mobile responsive and you have the option to specifically edit your page for mobile.

Instapage also offers optimisation and an analytics dashboard, so you can see all of your conversions for each of your landing pages. If you don’t want to use this feature, they also work very smoothly with other analytic tools, meaning you can keep all of your historical and new data in one place.