Should you use Mailchimp, Leadpages or WordPress for your Landing Page?

Firstly, what is a landing page?

A landing page is a single web page / destination page that users (your ideal audience) are directed to in response to clicking on a social media post, marketing email, or an online advertisement, inviting them to perform an action that makes them sign up to a newsletter, download something or buy from you. In a nutshell, it’s where a consumer ‘lands’ after clicking a link.

As a bit of a techie VA, with a penchant for content that gets read, I often get asked to create landing pages. But with quite a few options out there I thought I’d put it into a blog post why you might want to consider using your website to create a landing page, and compare the two popular alternatives; MailChimp and Leadpages…

First off, MailChimp. MailChimp is a superb software platform for all things hooking, nurturing and engaging with a newsletter audience as far as I’m concerned. I find it incredibly easy to use and love the drag and drop system; and more importantly you can monitor where subscribers are landing from, what links they’re clicking, etc and set up a range of automated systems to engage with everyone while you sleep. However, there are some drawbacks. Their templates are difficult to brand and their ‘help’ pages are okay if you’ve been gifted with a MailChimp jargon busting thesaurus (doesn’t exist). Plus, they’ve recently changed their pricing structure so it’s not ideal for those with a small audience and/or budget.

Leadpages; this blog post is in no way suggesting that Leadpages is inferior or not worth working with, but again you may need to invest in that extra piece of software for all the bells and whistles that make it worth having over using your website! Leadpages marketing is superb, to the point that when people shout ‘I need a landing page’ some people cry ‘Leadpages’ without actually having used it. Have you ever bought something that everybody is raving about, you’ve seen it advertised everywhere so it must be great, only to find that once you invested in it you didn’t need it, you could have gone without, but you’ve got FOMO and shiny object syndrome.

Leadpages have done an outstanding job at marketing themselves and getting known for what they do. With its easy to use drag and drop builder, colourful templates and easy to read insights you can’t go wrong, right? Wrong…

The BIGGEST drawback with MailChimp and Leadpages landing pages in my opinion is you’re not taking people to where you ultimately want them to land – with you, your website, your 24/7 shopfront!

After all, everything a potential client needs to know about you is on your website, isn’t it? Your services, contact details, rates, social media links, blog, etc – it should be anyway! A landing page is usually only somewhere for people to do one thing, and that’s to leave their details or buy something and off they go.

However, you can do all of that with a single page on your website, like I’ve done here: How, what and when to outsource to a virtual assistant.

• It’s cost me nothing but my time to set it up
• The user is now on my website even if they decide not to complete the desired action of the landing page

If my potential clients were sent to a landing page on Leadpages or MailChimp they’d not be anywhere near my website (yes, you can reroute the final page to your website, but that’s hassle and means you need to get that MailChimp thesaurus out again), so… that’s why my tip is to… have your landing page on your website! Get people where they’re able to find out more about you and ultimately make a decision as to whether they want to work with you. It could reduce the nurturing process massively.

But what about tracking and analytics if you use your website for a landing page?

C’mon, there’s always a plugin for everything! Or, set up Google Analytics – don’t know how? Google offer free training, and it’s superb!

You can also adapt the URL of the website landing page and see which ones convert well, for example:

www.delegateva.co.uk / facebook-landing-page

www.delegateva.co.uk / twitter-landing-page

I do this with one of my Instagram accounts, check out the link in the bio here. If I then create an exact replica of that page for Facebook but with ‘facebook’ at the end of the URL I can check my Google analytics to see which one is performing better.

To summarise, the benefits of using your website are:

• Branding – you can easily keep your branding if you use your webpage
• Price – no extra expense to create an additional page on your website
• Control – complete control over how it looks and the URL
• Reliance – you don’t always know if an external piece of software has gone down, but with your website (if you have reliable hosts) you’ll know when it is malfunctioning

What do you think?

Need some help setting up a WordPress landing page or anything MailChimp. I’m here!

I originally posted this blog on my website, head on over there for more ramblings...