Lead page builders: your automated sales team

As the old saying goes, in business, oxygen is cash.

A business needs money to survive. If your expenditures outpace your income, you won't be in business long.

Your sales team's ability to close new clients and convert new leads is critical for your survival.

What if you could have a 24/7 sales team working for you, bringing in new leads and potentially closing deals?

We would be hard-pressed to find a business owner who wouldn't be interested.

How to use landing pages for your business?

Carefully designed lead pages aim to be the equivalent of an automated lead generation team. A well-crafted lead page can be a money maker that single-handedly makes a business.

Lead pages are not a new concept and should always be part of your pipeline in one way or another. However, how to build them efficiently is always a heated topic of discussion.

When considering how to build a new lead page, the subject of lead page builders is bound to come out.

What are lead page builders? What's the best lead page builder?

Do we need to build our lead page builders? Is there an existing tool we can leverage?

If you are considering any lead page builders, read on! This article will help you cover your bases and ensure your choice is right for your use case.

What are landing page builders?

Simply put, they are minimum configuration WYSIWYG tools that aim to make creating new landing pages seamless.

Let's face it: not all companies have the capability or desire to maintain a proprietary tool. Even if the company can handle it, it usually means that a team will need to be in charge of constantly updating and looking after it.

With that in mind, different providers will offer diverse capabilities and prices. Any solution that you choose should cover some basics.

1) User-friendly interface

If you are paying for an out-of-the-box tool, make sure that the UI they offer is easy to use and makes sense for you.

The last thing you want is a product so hard to use you'll need to hire an expert or train staff.

If the UI is not flexible enough to accommodate your needs, you might as well go with a custom lead page builder.

2) Good (and ideally extensible) template library

When evaluating competitors, you should also check what the community around it is like.

Is it a popular tool? Are there multiple people contributing and building based on it?

Let's face it: having a good amount of templates is very useful if you need to get something out quickly to market.

Ideally, you want the tool to allow the creation of custom templates in it. This way, you can create on-brand pages easily.

3) Tracking capabilities

When using lead page builders, having tracking capabilities baked in can be helpful.

If the provider doesn't allow for integration with the most common tracking tools and doesn't offer some tracking of their own, then you should probably stay away.

It can be hard to improve your conversion rate without data about where and when things are going wrong!

These are some basic features that we like seeing in lead page builders. With these in mind, let's go through some popular choices in the market.

Swipe pages

A simple no code, WYSIWYG tool. It offers a good selection of mobile-friendly templates.

Pros:

  • WYSIWYG tool.

  • Templates

  • A/B testing feature

  • Google Analytics integration

  • Mobile-optimized (responsive) 

  • Extensive 3rd party integrations

  • Stripe checkouts

  • Custom domains

Cons:

  • Server-side A/B testing is only available on the highest-tier plan

  • No heatmaps

Hubspot lead page builder

Hubspot needs no introduction. It's a household name and a long-time player in the CRM space.

Among other tools, Hubspot offers a lead page builder.

Pros:

  • A/B testing

  • Connected with Hubspot CRM

  • Drag and Drop builder

Cons:

  • Limited functionality on the free tier

  • Hubspot branding on the free tier

Wix

Technically, it's not one of the lead page builders, but you can use it to create something that works as one.

Wix is a drag-and-drop page creator with multiple templates and forms.

The main downside is that it's hard to adapt for specific use cases as the templates are not extensible.

You could use it as an entry option to test ideas out. 

Pros:

  • Easy to use

  • Free templates

  • 3rd party app connections

Cons:

  • It's a website builder, not a lead page builder. You'll need to let go of some of your expectations.

Now that we've covered some available options, you have a general picture of what's out there.

But what if this is not enough? What if you want a heavily customizable and extensible lead page?

Then, we need to discuss custom lead pages and lead page builders.

Custom lead pages: Creating a sales digital army

If you are a big enough player in your space, chances are your sales and acquisition pipeline is a well-oiled machine.

You already know that ready-made solutions do not fill your needs.

So, what do you get from custom implementations that you don't get from existing solutions?

Pros:

1) Designed and optimized for your funnel

It doesn't matter how good a service is. It will never fit your particular sales strategy.

Especially if your strategy is on the "unconventional side". The more custom your lead page needs to be, the harder it will be for lead page builders to fit the role.

If the entry to your funnel is looking to shock or surprise your viewer, it might be hard to accomplish this with template solutions.

We've found that the more complex and mature a company and its process get, the harder it is to escape going the custom route.

2) Maximum analytics granularity

No matter how many integrations a provider offers, it's very likely that, at some point, you'll want to track something specific to your users.

Leads are not coming in even when you see people click through?

Maybe something is off with a form.

Or maybe you are getting views but not clicks. How far are they scrolling on the page? Where does the attention drop off?

The more specific your tracking needs to be, the harder it is for no-config providers to fit the bill.

3) Quicker rate of improvement

While some tools offer A/B testing, it doesn't mean you can act on it.

You might be able to offer two versions of your lead page. However, what if you want to twerk specific things of a template or baked-in component?

It might get much trickier to make gradual improvements.

The good thing about going the custom route is that you can easily break down required improvements into smaller chunks. You can do partial changes that are easy to deliver and test.

4) You are in total control

Connected to the last point: when you go down the custom route, you have total control over your landing page.

No unwanted consequences from a general update, no waiting for customer support to get back to you with a fix.

Of course, with total control, you get some cons, which we'll list below.

Cons:

1) Maintenance

Maintaining your lead page builders can be expensive. You might need a dedicated team to keep things going smoothly.

It's great to be able to request a new feature and to be able to have it done. The flip side is that you and your team are the ones that need to do it!

Generally speaking, the scale of your company will determine how feasible this is for you.

2) Cost

Creating custom lead page builders is cheaper than a subscription to a service. At least in the long run, it should be.

Hosting and serving your solution can be as cheap as pennies.

Your main costs will come in on the maintenance of the page builder going forward.

It's certainly something to consider when comparing the two options.

3) Time to launch

If you need to launch a new landing page ASAP, the internal route might not be the best choice.

As limited as current providers might feel, they are ready to go.

If you have a time-sensitive launch or your strategy needs lead page builders 'for yesterday', it's better to use a tried and tested tool.

You can always revisit the decision later and build an alternative. You can even do both: start with commercial lead page builders while you develop your own.

If you want a more in-depth explanation of the costs and risks of custom software in general, you might want to read this article.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this gives you a better picture of how lead page builders work, what they do and what the best lead page builders look like.

How to create great lead pages is an art in itself and something outside of the scope of this article. We might cover it in other posts soon.

If you have more questions about lead page builders, contact us.

If you want to learn more about what we do, find more information about us here.