Custom Landing Pages Vs Landing Page Software

If you’re not quite sure what a landing page is, think of it as a one page website. Landing pages focus your customer’s attention on your key selling points and usually don’t have distracting features like navigation bars or links to other pages on your site. If you’re using paid traffic (such as AdWords or Facebook), a landing page is a great way to boost your conversion rate.

If you’re thinking about getting a landing page for your business, you might be feeling overwhelmed with choice. There are many options to consider like how to display your contact form, how much copy to include and whether or not to include a video. Before you make these important design decisions, you first need to take a step back and consider if you’re going to get a custom landing page designed and coded or if you’re going to use landing page software like Leadpages or Unbounce.

Broadly speaking, there are the two main options for creating your landing page:

Have a custom landing page designed and coded from scratch.
Use landing page software to create a landing page based off a template

To look at these choices, we’re going to compare custom landing pages to software options like Leadpages, Instapage and Unbounce. These are subscription based services where you get access to an array of templates which you can edit with their web based software.

Both custom landing pages and landing page software have their pros and cons depending on your business, budget and goals. To decide what’s best for your situation, we’re going to consider the following:

Design choice
Ease to create and customise
Price
Integrations

Design Choice

In the competitive world of paid traffic and landing pages, design choice is important. To get the most out of your advertising budget, you need to send traffic to a page which is highly aligned with your business, gives your customers the best experience possible and is better than what your competitors are using. To do this, you need to choose a landing page which is a good fit for your business.

Custom Landing Pages

A major benefit of a custom landing page is that design choice is infinite. You don’t have to worry about the restrictions of existing templates and can create anything you want.

However, with so much choice it’s important that whoever designs your landing page has a good understanding of UX (user experience) design and conversion rate optimisation. Ultimately a landing page should be judged on its conversion rate. To make sure your custom landing page isn’t a failure, you need a team experienced in conversion focused design.

Landing Page Software

Most landing page software options give you the choice of many different templates. Some of these are more general and some are designed for certain industries and applications. You don’t have the same level of choice as a custom landing page, however this can be a good thing if you’re not quite sure what you want.

Leadpages template options

Price

It’s important to remember that there is a very big difference between price and value. Considering that your landing page will be a big part of determining how much money your business generates online, the best value landing page is the highest converting landing page that you can afford.

Custom Landing Pages

Depending on who designs and develops your custom landing page you are probably looking at around $800 – $2,000. If you choose a reputable company this should include a thorough consultation process, purpose written sales copy, user experience focused design, design adjustments and responsive development.

Landing Page Software

Landing page software options use a subscription based price model with the cost increasing for additional features. Keep in mind some options allow monthly billing, but others require yearly payment.

Pricing options for Unbounce

For example, Instapage have a basic package allowing you access to as many landing page templates as you want, but not access to their A/B split testing or the ability to customise the templates html code unless you upgrade.

Ease to create and customise

The process for creating your landing page needs to be painless. You also want to be able to edit the page so that you can improve its performance and react to how your customers are interacting with the landing page.

Custom Landing Pages

Unless you’re an accomplished designer and developer, it’s likely that someone else will create your custom landing page. Keep in mind that timeframes may vary depending on the complexities of the page and that it takes time to write compelling sales copy, create a UX based design and code the page to display in all devices and browsers.

Once your custom landing page is live, to edit it you will need some basic knowledge of html. If you’re with a marketing agency who performs conversion rate optimisation and split testing, they will take care of updates for you as they test specific features on the landing page to improve its conversion rate.

Landing Page Software

One of the big benefits of landing page software is that it is generally easy to use. Drag and drop functionality allows you to build your page fast.

However, it can also be frustrating to use landing page software due to design limitations. Maybe you want your call to action button at a specific location, but your template doesn’t allow it. This can be overcome through editing the code, but this requires coding knowledge and is often not accessible through the basic pricing packages.

Also, remember that most landing page software services are subscription based, so you don’t actually own your landing page. Once you stop paying your subscription, you’ll no longer be able to use the landing page.

Integrations

Connecting your landing page to online software is important for streamlining your sales process and automating your marketing. For example if you’re capturing contact details on your landing page you probably want to push your customer’s information into a CRM (customer relationship management tool) or push their email addresses into your email marketing database.

Custom Landing Pages

Similar to design choice, the options available for integrating your custom landing page are endless. You just need to ensure that whoever develops your landing page has the skill to setup your integrations properly.

Luckily programs like Zapier, make connecting to different applications simple with their easy to use app connection software.

Integration options with Zapier

Landing Page Software

Instapage, Unbounce, Leadpages and most software options integrate with online software solutions like Mailchimp and Paypal. Keep in mind troubleshooting software integration can be a tricky business. If you run into trouble and can’t get your integration to work, it can be a nightmare to try and figure out the problem. If you’ve purchased the cheapest landing page software plan, you might only have access to email support and not be able to solve your problem through chat support or over the phone.

The Winner…

Both landing page software and custom landing pages can be a great solution depending on your situation. There’s no clear winner between the two as in some ways it’s like comparing apples and oranges.

If you’re getting a custom landing page made you need to ensure that whoever creates it is awesome. They should really understand your business, find your unique selling points, create some inspiring copy and match your new landing page to your existing branding. They should then design the page based on best practice conversion principles and be able to explain to you why every part of the page exists, the reason for its placement and the customer journey when they land on the page. Finally they need to develop the page so that it looks and works great on all devices and browsers. If you can tick all these boxes, it’s likely you’re going to end up with a great custom landing page.