2 Best Leadpages Alternatives You Should Use Now

Lately, online ad campaigns are being directed to the landing pages the web visitors could arrive at. In the purest sense, landing pages capture a visitor's contact information like name, email address, phone number or the like.

They have the form already embedded on the page that would have the content or can even contain an enticing call-to-action to make the visitor click and jump to the page where they could fill their information out. These kinds of landing pages are called " Click through pages".

Here is the example of click through page: Some common uses of landing pages are:

• Event or webinar registration
• Contest or special promotion of a product
• Requesting a consultation of strategy session
• Account sign up of "Coming Soon" pages.
• Offer reminder
• Survey etc.

Landing pages can be used with Facebook ads as well. We can retarget the visitors and remarket the traffic. Facebook also has this excellent feature in its campaign that will allow the visitor to claim an offer or providing a coupon code. Facebook's display feature could help tease the user to a dedicated landing page. Here is an example how ShopMob started a contest on Landing pages and successfully used a landing page for collecting leads:

Marketers also use Twitter to receive inbound traffic to their website. For a more customized experience on social media. Twitter landing pages can be used.

Better quality scores can be achieved when a more targeted, optimized, well-designed landing pages are assigned to the campaigns that we are running, ultimately will have a better return on investment.

There are certain best practices to stick around to make the landing pages more attractive to the visitors. Even though landing pages carry a vital importance in the part of digital marketing, it is not that simple. A landing page should have a clear concise and well-arranged design that will help the users instead of deviating them.

One single irrelevant data in the landing page could yield in loss of a prospective client or... Click To Tweet

The purpose of landing serves a critical conversion goal and doesn't allows the users to deviate to other website functionality and helps make conversion easier.

Landing pages gained their popularity in usage since the last six years and, looking at the advantages it serves, the demand is only growing. Landing pages have certainly made the lives of digital marketers easier by not only capturing prospective leads but also have helped segregate the campaigns from the products. Just getting a landing page won't open a floodgate of leads, we need to optimize them according to the Landing Pages Rule books. We have pointed out some of them here:

1. Write a catchy headline that your buyer persona would search for

As the rule goes, your headline is the first thing that your visitors will read, and it SHOULD be catchy enough to get the attention of the visitor. Making it easier, think as if the effective headline should not only talk about the product or service that you are selling but rather should tell the visitor why he clicked it in the first place.

2. Match your call to action to the campaign that the visitor clicked on

An average internet user has an attention span of seconds, to make it count, we need to solve the visitors problem quickly by taking them to the solution. The rule here says - marketers should match the expectations of the visitors by making the copy and the headline similar to the solution that you are offering.

3. Make the visitors journey easier

How can we do that? Use hidden menu bar so that your visitor doesn't deviate from the site. Use lucid and attractive designs for the visitors to go about.

Check out these excellent high CTR google web designers template to make high converting landing pages. These templates have already been used by me in my previous projects and there is no doubt that they won't work. Have a look!

When did landing pages gain its importance?

Thanks to Google trends we got some data regarding the same:

As we can see, marketers have used the landing pages in late 2008 and how there is hike in demand. According toMarketingSherpa, a whooping 68% of B2B marketers use landing pages to optimize their sales lead for better conversion. And as we can see, how the trend is growing in the year 2016.

Do you wanna create landing page for your marketing campaigns with having a degree in design or technology? Check out our suggested 5 WordPress landing page "drag and drop" builders for marketers.
In this post we will highlight the best uses and pro cons of two best alternative for LeadPages Landing age tool - Clickfunnels and Instapage.

Let's start with InstaPage Landing Page Platform

Creating a high converting landing page, can be a daunting and protracted task for the marketer. Which is why can use Instapage for better and manageable landing page creation. Instapage is known for its drag and drop interface that makes creation of landing pages easy.

Marketers don't have to worry about learning coding to get the landing page right. Instapage provide seamless integration with CRM tools, social, email marketing and other optimization tool, so that the marketer doesn't have to worry about keeping too much of information stored in different tools. Just integrate and you are good to go. Currently, Instapage supports integration of more than 20 marketing tools. Instapage also camouflages your website so that the functionalities work like just your own website.

Instapage squeeze page

80% of marketers believe that email addresses form the foundation of marketing their business in a better way.

A squeeze page generally "squeezes" the email of the visitor in return of something valuable to them. The visitor sign up using their email address and you promise to provide them the service that is featured in the main landing page. You can provide important information in the form of ebooks, whitepaper, newsletter, video or webinar information, case studies, decks etc in return of their emails. Before deploying the squeeze pages you must decide on the creativity and the determine the usefulness of the information provided by you in the main page of the landing pages so that it will be enticing enough for the visitors to enter their emails.

Here are some of the examples of squeeze pages.

Here is one of the creative squeeze pages I came across:

Isn't it creative enough to attract emails?

And oh! I almost forgot to mention that squeeze pages can also be made through your facebook or twitter campaigns. Check out Instapage's blog on How to Use a Facebook Sqeeze Page to Capture Email Addresses.

Want your facebook page to live upto it's potential?

Instapage splash page

Landing pages are an excellent way to let the designers and marketers think out of the box. Splash page informs the visitors about the exclusive launch, it contains the mix of texts, videos, or gamification or music to entice the visitors to explore the rest of the page. In a way, splash pages act as some interaction between the website and the users. Some splash page automatically redirects the visitors to the home page of the website, or some will require the visitor to click on the home page button.

Look at how Minute race uses splash page to create a landing page that will allow an user to enter their email address in one minute! See how Sony Ericsson uses splash page that forces the visitors to learn some geography! 😉

Sometimes splash page is used to welcome the visitor to the site. Those kind of pages appear just once. Forbes actually take the advantage of the feature and let the visitors think upon of the "Thought of the day" :

Instapage sales page

Creating professional landing pages has never been a difficult task when you are using Instapage. Startups and ideas on the net could use the landing page to promote. Instapage offers lot many features that make it too good to miss out.

Let's check out some of the features that Instapage offers

As I said Instapage lets you build your landing page with it's simple drag and drop technique, A/B Split test can also be done for your campaigns to see the performance of the campaign and then going ahead with it. A/B testing is an essential element to the digital marketer as we all know that only in a perfect world ALL of your visitors will get converted. To see how the campaigns perform by applying certain variation, like changing the image or changing the headline, we could see how the conversion rate vary.

It not surprising if we tell you that

Google ran 7000 A/B tests for its campaigns in 2011 alone! Click To Tweet

Yes, 7000! And yes, Instapage's drag and drop helps you tweak your campaign as per your need easy.

PPC advertising

Imagine how frustrating an experience would it be if your prospective lands on your website after clicking on the ad that said you will provide him "x" and he starts searching for it on your website. Meeting our potential customer's experience is one of the reasons why landing pages came into existence. To reduce the bounce rates, marketers who are using landing pages should use match the search intent of the visitor through the landing page. Unlike 2008, where codes were required to create a site consistent with the website that would direct the visitors to land on, we have a simple platform to set up and manage our PPC landing page in an efficient and persuasive manner.

One great tip to go to the PPC landing page is to align your ad text, keywords and the ad copy to the landing page headline and content so that it would give the visitor a consistent experience.

Lead Generation System

Instapage's straightforward system helps you generate lead through video ads, PPC ad, Facebook ad or Twitter ad. Lead generation has always been an essential part of online marketing, and we cannot ignore it. Some of the new, out of the box ideas to generate more leads are to:

Create a Tweetup/ Meetup in Twitter

Use annotations in your YouTube Ad like " Get your free demo here" or " Get your first free sample from here ". This kind of call to action boost engagement.

Creating a gated post with half the content showing and another half on download is a proven way to pull more leads as well. For Example, in a post containing 10 free email templates, you could make available 3 templates on the site whereas other 7 in an ebook that would require the visitor to enter their details.

Webinars are becoming extremely popular among the marketers that will not only educate their customers but also, generate quality leads who are interested in their products.

See how Digital Marketing guru Neil Patel uses webinars to attract clients for his business:

On clicking the orange button, the page straight goes to the form where the schedule for webinar and lead details will be given:

Podcast is also very useful to prospective customers as they can listen to them when reading is not very convenient or while driving.

Integration ecosystem

Digital marketing can be very exciting to work with minus the tools that needed to be worked on a daily basis. Implementing your marketing campaigns in different sets of tools can be very cumbersome. Thankfully, Instapage's standalone integration page allows the users to locate and manage all the standard integrations in a page. Tools like Mailchimp, WordPress, ActiveCampaign, GoToWebinar, are some of the important ones that Instapage supports.

All these without analytics won't be good, right? Instapage provides analytics for A/B test campaigns and running campaigns to make your numbers strong. To coherently assemble and accumulate the ever pouring data into the art of analytics is something that Instapage specializes in. Important metrics such as view conversion rates over time, view conversion vs unique visitors have been added in the analytics dashboard to help users set benchmarks and review them.

Pricing and support

A no frills no credit card account is available to the first time users for 30 days. The free account holder will hold a Basic Account pack feature to evaluate the landing pages created using Instapage. Instapage updated its pricing system in early June 2016.

Instapage has three account type-

The basic ones come at $29/month if paid annually. With this pack, a user can have unlimited pages, unlimited visitors, unlimited domains and email support from Instapage.

A professional pack will charge $55/month annually which has all the feature the basic one has plus live chat support, read only permit for team members, unlimited traffic to users. Upon that, you get one free client account.

The premium pack will allow a user to have one dedicated client account to separate your projects in Instapage. If you are creating a "Client" on your dashboard, then Instapage will separate your personal projects with other customers. Your client will be able to view your project as well. Users will also get full access to the team members with Phone, chat, and email support. They can also enjoy 5000 custom web fonts with expert design consultation from Instapage's team.

All of the Instapage's plans has the following features:

Drop in pixel tracking, CRM integrations, and Mobile Responsive landing pages. They will also receive SEO friendly features, Marketing Automation Integration, Email Integrations and all the landing pages are WordPress compatible.

Let's talk about the next alternative for LeadPages: ClickFunnels

How is ClickFunnels helping marketers out there with their extremely efficient sales funnel?
Before going to the functions of ClickFunnels, let's see what is ClickFunnels? Think about it: when you first started out your business, what were those necessary tools that you used that would help in your marketing effort? Let me list out some:

• Website Hosting
• Landing Page Software
• Email Autoresponder
• Affiliate software
• WordPress
• Webmasters and more

Now imagine a tool that would consist of all the tools listed above (and more than those) in one single tool. Yes, you read it right. It is possible now with ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels allows to build the entire funnel for your sales that can help you track your prospects, leads or drop off rates across the funnel that makes is easy for you to see what's working and what is not. A/B split testing allows testing different versions of your marketing campaigns and the behavior of your target audience. ClickFunnels is equipped with email autoresponders and a payment gateway that makes it one of the best tools to go with if you are running any kind of marketing campaigns.

Clickfunnels helps you create a website that has a built in the lead page that will attract leads for your business. You can easily plan a product launch, a webinar or podcast or any campaign launch with this tool. Funnel is a kind of Sales process engineering that integrates sales, marketing, and CRM in one go, thus, creating a funnel that goes with the type of business that you are running. Clickfunnels is extremely non-tech friendly that just requires a simple drag and drop system to build the landing pages.

Let's explore the kind of funnels that Clickfunnels offers:

Sometimes the business struggles with the sales and is not able to do any upsell.

While statistics is the fact that it is easier to sell your existing customers than acquiring new customers, very few businesses or start-ups are concentrating on following up the customers and make an upsell.

Clickfunnels helps those businesses identify their customer retention pain points and contributes to making an excellent sales funnel to generate the income that they deserve.

Here are some of the sales funnel offered by Clickfunnels:

Best seller book funnel:

Best seller book funnel starts with an online free video demo of the ebook that you are selling. Authors can make use of Clickfunnels to make more money and do some upselling as well. If you have two or more books to sell then, you can use Clickfunnels's upsell page and create a page for upselling. After capturing the prospects to the landing page, Clickfunnels cleverly pulls them to the upsell page and attach two or more books to sell at a price that would look enticing to the visitors.

The Product Launch funnel:

Product launch funnel helps the business to create a need for the prospects in the right way. The funnel consists of four pages where four videos will be shown - page by page-

1. "Wow+How" - this page typically will educate the visitor about the problem that the product that you are launching, will answer. The How question and Wow-ing the prospects.
2. Transformational Education: Educate the customers about the product.
3. Ownership Experience: By taking real life examples of your visitors
4. The offer - No explanation is needed, we guess!

The whole journey is taken care of by Clickfunnels.

Design the "real stuff" funnel:

We have been talking about upselling a lot. Do you know that McDonalds increases their profit by 8x with the process of upselling? With the sale of one burger, it makes only $0.18 profit, but when it sells the burger with fries and a coke, it makes a straight profit of $1.32. This is the power of upselling. The real stuff is centered around upselling Look at the picture below and get the clear vision of how it works!

Perfect Webinar Funnel:

As we mentioned earlier in the post that webinars are gaining popularity and more people are coming on board for the sessions. Clickfunnels's funnel consists of:

• Webinar Registration page
• Thank you page
• Live webinar page
• Webinar replay page
• and a sales page.

Not only this, this tool allows you to segregate your mail as the prospects who registered but didn't see the webinar with the replay link.

The prospects who saw but didn't see the offer, etc. And like that will help you send personalized mails to prospects concerning their behavior in the entire webinar session. If the prospect is making a purchase, then Clickfunnels takes care of the billing too. So, we can say that Clickfunnels got you covered throughout the entire process and you don't have to worry about a thing!

In all, there are 15 types of sales funnel that Clickfunnels currently offers. There is a funnel for any business - whether you are an author, a dentist, a teacher or a digital marketer. You can create a funnel or delete an existing page from the funnel if you like, to suit your marketing needs.

Clickfunnels comes with a robust analytics platform that helps the user to check on what is clicking and what is not. The dashboard is in front of them to see which A/B split test is working and which one need more push. Also, helps measure the open mail rates and sales conversion metrics. In short, all kind of analytics is taken care by them.

Clickfunnels vs Instapage:

• Clickfunnels and Instapage are both different tools that have a standard feature, and that is, to create, test and optimize the landing pages. However, let's check the differences between the two for their shared feature.
• Clickfunnels is building for the ones who want them to take care of everything from
  Although Instapage's landing page builder is more powerful, both the tools come with A/B testing feature.
• Clickfunnels are highly flexible and clean, but this is where the problem arises as simplicity doesn't help marketers to play around and build landing page of their choice. Instapage eliminates this limitation. Experienced designers will find it challenging to use Instapage's.
• If you have a service to market, a product to sell or an event or webinar to host, then Clickfunnels will be a great host that will make email marketing and landing page creation incredibly simple for you. However, if you are a PPC marketer, interests lie in building landing pages primarily and already have an email marketing platform, you will get more clicks for your ads through Instapage.

Clickfunnels offers a 14 days trial while Instapage provides a 30 days free trial version. Clickfunnels vs Leadpages:

• On the pricing front, Clickfunnels allows you to access all the feature based on your chosen account - not to forget that all the feature are available only at $97. While LeadPages helps you access everything from $37. However, we would like to mention that split test are not available for LeadPages users.
• An easy to use, a clean dashboard will be found in LeadPages while Clickfunnels dashboard uses flat icons and images throughout the pages. After all, display and orientation matter. Clickfunnels has highly customized options for the landing pages with lead pages doesn't have that feature. As a result, the marketers could easily recognize the pages made from LeadPages from space.
• Click funnel receives only email support if you are a regular email holder while the enterprise account holder gets priority phone support. LeadPages customers receive better support if compared. While regular members receive only email support, Pro members enjoy live chat and email support, and Enterprise members gets all three: Live chat, email and phone support.

Clickfunnels integration: Clickfunnels provides integrations with the following tools for the funnels to work.

Payment gateways are integrated with : Stripe, Ontraport, ClickBank, WarriroPlus, Infusionsoft among few others.

For email autoresponders Clickfunnels integrated with: aWeber, GetResponse, Mailchimp, GoToWebinar form, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, Constant contact API etc.

Clickfunnels have also stated in their FAQ section that if the integration is not to be found by the marketers then they can mail the support and they make it work for them. If not, then money back guarantee.

Clickfunnels Pricing: Clcikfunnels currently has a 14 day trial period for all their new customers. They provide a yearly subscription with 2 months free usage if the annual plan has been chosen. Clickfunnels also comes with monthly contracts options which can be canceled anytime you want. With all the features listed above, Clickfunnels comes at a price of $97 to get all the features of funnels at your fingertips.

Since Clickfunnels will host every effort related to the funnel, there might be a small risk associated with availability or hosting of the service that could affect the campaigns.

So we compared at length, the two best tools we can rely on for capturing leads through landing pages. These two tools - Clickfunnels and Instapage are the best alternative to LeadPages.

Instapage is to be chosen as the first alternative keeping in mind the one best service that the tools provide - Lead Generation. While Clickfunnels maybe chosen as the second best option to let it handle your marketing efforts.

There are many more alternatives to LeadPages like Unbounce,.Convertkit, Thrive, Optimizepress, WordPress etc. Which one do you use? Comment in the post below.