Landing Page Builders

In the context of digital marketing, a landing page is a part of your website that’s designed for users to ‘land’ on after clicking a link on an ad on another site or in their emails.

These pages are typically separate from the rest of the site, and are designed with a single focus or goal, known as a ‘call to action’ – usually to sell a product, push sign-ups or otherwise encourage conversions to some marketing goal.

Landing page builders are a tool or service designed to make creating these specialised pages easy and make them more effective at what they do.

Why do you need one?

Here’s the most common objection to using landing page builders:

Why would I need a separate tool for building just one page of my site, when I already use something to build all the other pages? Why not just make a custom landing page instead of using a templated one?

While these points all have some degree of sense to them, there are several good reasons for using specialised landing page builders. Let’s go over them now.

Landing pages aren’t like the rest of your site

Every page on every website has some goal.

Most of the pages on your company’s site will either try to inform the user about your company, let them do something (such as buy a product) or link them to other parts of the site. In practice, almost all pages do many of these things at once – they’re multipurpose and interconnected.

Landing pages are unique in that they’re meant to be separate and do precisely one thing: encourage the user to take some action.

While you could create a landing page using the workflow you used for the rest of your site – making a new page in the WordPress dashboard, adding images and copy, so on and so forth – this likely wouldn’t get you the results you want.

Your standard page template, even if it works great on the rest of your site, likely wasn’t designed with maximising potential conversions in mind.

The templates offered by landing page builders are, and they come with designs and features created by experts with many years of experience in crafting strong landing pages.

Using landing page builders is cheaper than getting a custom design made

If you’ve seen the light and decided to not use one of your old templates for your landing pages, there’s still something else that can trip you up.

When you realise you need a unique, one-off page, it’s tempting to simply hire a freelancer to make it for you.

The issue with this is that high-quality custom design isn’t cheap – and you don’t want to be skimping out on the design of your landing pages, as they’re often the first thing users are going to see of your site.

For reference, experienced designers can often charge anywhere in the ballpark of £200 per hour for their work.

If you’re a small or medium-sized business, your budget very likely just can’t afford that kind of expense for a single marketing campaign.

Landing page builders bridge the gap between using past templates and an expensive, fully-custom bespoke design.

The templates they offer are created by highly experienced designers and can easily rival the work you’ll see on the sites of multinational corporations.

Without the need to hire outside labour to design, plan and implement your landing pages, you can easily save thousands of pounds per campaign.

When a builder service costs less than £30 a month – as many of them do – it’s really a no-brainer to make the most of them for what you get back as return-on-investment.

Landing page builders are almost always faster

Another drawback to having custom landing pages made is that the quality they provide takes time. In contrast, landing page builders let you deploy stunning pages in under an hour, from preparation to design.

Rather than having to plan out the visual style and design you want for the page, which can often feel like stumbling around in the dark, you can instead simply pick one of several dozen premade styles that are guaranteed to look good on your site.

And if one is close, but not perfect? Then you can simply take five minutes to tweak the minor things you dislike, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater and coding a page from scratch.

They’re mobile-optimised

If you don’t want your website to feel like it’s come straight out of 1999, it needs to be responsive, i.e. it looks good no matter what device you view it on.

These days, a majority of people view websites on their phones and tablets, rather than desktop computers, and every site that wants to feel modern has to account for that.

This is especially true for landing pages, where first impressions and design quality are paramount.

If you’re working by yourself, it’s often very tedious to constantly check whether any of your changes have broken how the site looks on one of the dozen devices you should be testing.

If you use landing page builders, though, that’s all taken care of for you. Every template offered by a landing page builder will have been tested on more devices than you can count, using advanced responsive web design techniques.

What do I need to have ready for my landing page?

While landing page builders can do a lot of work for you, you’ll still have to do some work of your own – sorry!

The biggest thing to take care of is your copy, which is simply the text the user will see on the page. You want to ensure it’s direct, to the point and has a strong call to action.

Besides that, while builders often come with libraries of web-safe images you can use to enhance the visual appeal of your page, you’ll likely also want to prepare other graphics, such as your company logo.

What features can these builders offer?

The basic selling point of landing page builders is to make it quick and easy to craft a one-use page that users end up on after clicking links dispersed by one of your marketing campaigns.

To that end, they offer numerous other features which might need some explanation.

Templates

As mentioned before, landing page builders almost always come with pre-furnished libraries of templates that you can use as a launching-pad for your own content.

Customisability

While templates are usually enough to get you an excellent-looking landing page, you’ll often want to add a few extra tweaks to it – if only to add in your company’s personal information and copy text.

As such, landing page builders come with fully-featured editors which let you change the images, text and design elements of the page to your liking. Some, like Unbounce, even make a point of letting you inject custom JavaScript for extra functionality.

Integrations

A builder wouldn’t be much good if it didn’t make it easy to slot the page it gave you into your actual website. As such, it’s painless to publish the pages you make with them to your domain – usually with special features enabling one-click uploads to popular content management systems, such as WordPress.

Optimisations

Beyond making a nice site, landing page builders usually go a step further and offer optimisations and analytics tools to ensure that it’s doing its job correctly.

They often offer A/B testing, for example, where you present different users with different variants of the same landing page. The builder will keep track of which variants saw the most success – most clicks, most conversions – so that you can make an informed decision about what direction to take your marketing from then on.

Another useful feature, offered by Unbounce, is dynamic text replacement. Rather than serving up a static landing page that’s the same for every user, it’s much more effective to insert personalised content that can capture their name, email address or even a product they’re interested in.

Dynamic text replacement, and similar features offered by other builders, make this process easy – simply mark out sections of your copy you want to be dynamic, and they’ll take care of the heavy lifting for you.

How do I decide which are the best landing page builders for me?

Every landing page builder has its own strengths and weaknesses. One that’s the perfect choice for another company might not be right for you. As such, the best way to decide which tool to use is to consider these factors.

Pricing

Landing page builders unanimously follow the standard monthly-subscription model of pricing, where you can buy into higher ‘tiers’ that enable more advanced features.

The key thing to consider when it comes to pricing is not paying for stuff you don’t need. If you’re a new start-up running your first campaign, for instance, you likely won’t get much use out of advanced analytics features that you need to pay an extra £100 a month for.

If all else fails, make use of the free trials commonly offered by landing page builders to see which one has the feature-set closest to what you need.

Template library

Since most of the time you’ll be working closely with a builder’s library of templates, it makes sense to check how big that library actually is before you buy in.

Don’t let yourself get impressed by sheer quantity, either – ask yourself if you’d be happy with each template if you’d hired a professional freelancer for it.

Integration

While every builder tries to make it easier to upload the pages it creates to your live site, some do better at this than others.

If you use a popular content management system or webhost, like WordPress, try looking up tutorials for how the two integrate to assess how simple or complicated the process is.

Remember that the key benefit of landing page builders is the time they save you. If its process for uploading pages seems too complicated or unwieldy, that’s more than enough reason to start favouring other options instead.

Use our comparison tool above to find the best landing page builders for you! Also, check out our guide on how to design the perfect landing page.