Why you should be building your landing page within your website builder…
…And not on a third party site!
Do you know how many business owners I onboard who have emails built here, then landing pages there, then their website is over here, and their CMS is somewhere else, and they schedule through this… And do you know how many of them know the password to each (presuming it’s not always the same thing!)? Well, if I had a pound… I’d have like, a hundred quid!
This leads me very nicely onto my first reason for building landing pages within your website builder.. it’s one less login to remember! I think we can all agree that there are too many passwords floating around our heads and having to learn how to use the back office* of multiple different platforms stresses even me out and I’m pretty good at it.
If your website is built on WordPress, and you use Flodesk to send your emails (as I do) – why oh why would you add a third website into the mix to create landing pages? Any newsletter provider worth it’s salt will allow you to create landing pages there (but I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t in a mo) and of course, your website should allow you to create as many pages as you want. So adding a third place into the mix only confuses things.
To put it bluntly, it just doesn’t make sense to me why you’d add yet another platform into the mix. There’s also a high chance you’re paying for all of these, so save yourself some money and maximise on your investment with those you’re already signed up to.
Okay Becka, I’ll just build them all on my newsletter system – happy now?
Sorry but no, not really. More often than not a newsletter system is wonderful at creating newsletters because that’s what it was designed to do, but take MailChimp – it’s just not… pretty. You’re having to copy your defaults* over again and essentially design a webpage on a platform that isn’t really meant for designing webpages. No shade to them, but it’s just not what it was built primarily to do.
You also need to consider what happens if 1. MailChimp goes down, you’ll have enough of a headache recovering your CSV file with your subscribers, let alone having to recreate all of these landing pages elsewhere. But also you may just want to move newsletter provider (I did last year and it was a mammoth task, because I’d built my landing pages there!) Or 2. Once you hit a certain amount of subscribers or sends, the price can jump astronomically for this exact reason – they want it to be too much hassle for you to move, so you just pay it. So you don’t want to feel stuck with a hefty bill and like you don’t have time to move providers because you’ve built an entire digital ecosystem within your newsletter provider.
(Side note and somewhat contradicting this particular point but Flodesk is the same price for unlimited sends & subscribers which is why I love it, but for the other reasons in this post I still wouldn’t build my landing page in there)
Obviously here I’m presuming that your landing page is being created for email collection, but I do know of many, many business owners who’ll build any and every landing page on their newsletter system because that’s just where they think they belong.. hopefully this blog post is convincing you otherwise!
Right, so where should I be building them?
Inside your website!
You can have them as hidden pages so they’re not within your header menu, and any decent website builder should allow you to make as many pages as you want.
Why? Apart from all of the reasons listed above – traffic. I possibly should have put this one first as from a technical point of view it’s the most important but honestly – stop sending your traffic* all over the flipping internet! You know that SEO thing you hear is really important, traffic is one of the biggest determining factors. If people are visiting your website, your SEO score gets better. If you make your website bigger with more (landing) pages, you’re naturally putting your keywords on your site more frequently, your SEO increases….
The same goes for Linktree, stop sending traffic to Linktree and send it directly to yourself instead! Create a landing page with your Instagram links – magic!
People can also see the URL at the top of their screen, and we’re all getting savvy to suspect URLs stealing our data. Visiting www.yourbusinessname.com screams trustworthy far more than www.thirdpartysite.com/page/yourbusinessname/thissalespage
Your website should be your hub, your main point on contact, your biggest and most robust touchpoint on the internet. Your website is the only thing you own on and can fully control. Your website goes down? You have every right to get onto your developer to get it back up ASAP. Your newsletter provider goes dark? You have to wait for them to fix it and you’re one of thousands with zero control over what’s going on.
I know you might be wondering how you connect your Landing Page with your online booking/calendar/subscription form but any of these things should have an inline embed option. Which means you embed JUST the bit you need onto that landing page and it talks directly to your booking system/calendar/newsletter. It means you can have full branding control over the page surrounding it (and your developer should have set your defaults up correctly so everything automatically appears in your branding) so you build even more trust within that page.
If you’d like help auditing an existing landing page, or you’d like me to create you one then just get in touch! Prices start from £55 for an audit or £75 for a build!