A landing page, also known as a “lead capture page” or “splash page”, is a web page that visitors “land” on, in response to clicking on a search result or an online advertisement. Their purpose is to get people to take action.
Even though they are a crucial ingredient of any sales funnel, WordPress doesn’t naturally have such a function and it is fairly difficult to build landing pages in it, unless you have a paid plugin, such as Thrive Architect, which can be used for building Landing Pages with Thrive Themes or any other theme.
The other problem bloggers face is that they don’t have the design skills or “talent” to compose such a page.
Even if they do, the probability is that the landing page they build won’t be optimized for conversions, which is the main point of landing pages – to convert casual visitors into subscribers.
Thrive Themes has a mini course that shows you How to Build & Deploy Landing Pages in Record Time.
Why Do We Use Landing Pages?
Because, if correctly built, they increase your conversion rates.
The main reason for this is that targeted promotion or product specific landing pages are focused on a single objective that matches the intent of the ad that your visitors clicked on to reach your page.
When You Should Create a Landing Page
A landing page is an independent page that only has one goal. It stands alone, completely separate and doesn’t not rely on your website to succeed.
Some successful websites/brands don’t even have a traditional website, just a landing page. You don’t have to be that drastic though. You should still have a traditional website/blog.
There are no distractions on that page.
No links to other pages.
Splash pages are tied to specific marketing campaigns/goals that you have, i.e. a Google Ads campaigns, or Facebook Ads campaigns, or maybe an email marketing campaign.
Focus on one clearly defined action that you want to guide the visitor towards. That’s your call-to-action.
The only thing a visitor can do on that page is take the action for which the page was designed or leave.
Such examples are signing up to a mailing list or a webinar, download a PDF, buy a product, etc.
The Best Converting Landing Pages
What are the features of a high-converting landing page?
- A clean design
- A great headline
- A call to action
- The only options are to sign up or leave the page
- And let’s not forget that you need an offer that is irresistible…
What do you think about this one?
Requirements for the splash page:
- No header
- No footer
- Styling completely different from the rest of the site
- No sidebar
- No distractions
They need to focus in on one type of person who is in your ideal target audience. If you don’t know who that person is, you need to do the research to figure this out, before you build a landing page.
I cannot stress this point enough. You need to know who you are trying to appeal to, and what problems they are trying to solve.
How To Create a Landing Page in WordPress Easily
If you would like to build a lead generation page, manually, you would have to add a title, some bullet points, an image.
And you would have to copy paste the HTML code for an opt-in form from your email marketing service.
Chances are the results won’t be that pretty.
You can also pay a developer to create this page template for you.
However what if you need a page with a different style next time?
Are you going to pay him again?
Alternately you can use a plugin to build a landing page.
Fortunately the Thrive Architect plugin (thrive landing page builder) makes this a breeze.
You can take a look at all the available landing page templates, pick from the over 230 templates and all you need to do is change the the text and the colors, then press “Publish”.
Thrive Architect Landing Page Templates – Creating A Lead Generation Page Is Super Easy
The procedure to create a landing page with an opt-in form using Thrive Themes is the following:
- Create a new page, give it a title and a URL like you normally would.
- Click on “Launch Thrive Architect” or “Edit with Thrive Architect” from the Pages menu.
- Click on the gear icon in the top left corner, right next to the text “Thrive Architect”.
- Select “Template Setup”.
- Choose the landing page that fits your purpose. In addition to squeeze pages and lead generation pages you will also see various thank you pages, home pages, download pages. They are all mobile responsive.
- Customize your page. Change the colors, the text, the picture, etc. Watch the video below to see the entire process.
- Connect it to your autoresponder service.
Note: Thrive landing pages and opt-in forms are fully GDPR compliant.
The philosophy is rapid implementation – to be able to create high quality pages with the minimum effort.
On most of these pages, there’s little more than a few lines of text and one call to action.
You can edit these pages with your own copy and your brand colors in minutes and rapidly publish them for your next opt-in page, live webinar or even for selling a product.
An important aspect of this rapid customization approach is that they don’t rely on graphics or images that would require any custom design work or any editing with a tool like Photoshop.
Modifying Pages with Thrive Architect
The templates don’t restrict you at all from building your own desired page if you want to.
If you don’t want a section, you can delete it.
You can also add infinitely customizable buttons, images, backgrounds, testimonials, countdown timers and lead generation forms that integrate with your favorite email marketing tools. Click to tweet, Google Maps, social shares, star ratings, videos, guarantee boxes are some other elements you can add.
Build Mobile Responsive Landing Pages
These days, most websites get more than half their visitors from phones and other mobile devices.
Every template in Thrive Architect and everything you build with this plugin is mobile responsive, out of the box.
In most cases, if you just create your page and don’t worry about it, the result will look good on mobile phones and tablets as well.
However, I know you want more control than that. And if you’re building complex and unique layouts, you want to be able to ensure the best possible experience, regardless of screen size.
You can instantly preview your page on different screen sizes. No page reloads needed, just click on the Mobile or the Tablet icons.
If you want, you can even tweak the layout and position of elements to appear differently on different screen sizes.
Currently Available Thrive Architect Blog Landing Page Temlates
- Blank
- NotPS
- Coming Soon
- Chic
- Icons
- One Page Site
- Click Journalist
- Bright
- Atomic
- Atomic 2
- Home Pages
- Thrive Biz
- Foundation
- Mini Squeeze
- Copy
- Copy 2.0
- Video Course
- KnowHow
- Confluence
- Review
- Corp
- Serene
- Edition
- Fame
- Elementary
- Vibrant
- Lime
- Phonic
- Storyteller
- Rock Star
- Flat
- Simple
- Big Picture
- Vision
- Element
- Bonus
Best Splash Page Examples
As an example, here are the Mini Squeeze 2 page templates.
- Simple lead generation page
- Video sales page
- Video opt-in page
- Lead Generation 2 page
- Download page
- Email confirmation page
And here’s another lead generation page from a different set.
And a video tour of the Bright lead generation page set:
Creating Home Pages With Thrive Architect
Of course your home page is a special kind of landing page.
This is important, because your home page is usually your blog’s most visited page.
You can have have an opt-in right above the fold, then show additional text when people scroll down.
Creating a home page for your blog is similarly easy – you just take the template and change the text.
That’s exactly how I built the home page for FunnelXpert, and at that time I was a complete beginner.
I could have also picked HomePage 1 or HomePage 3 instead, I included them just so that my readers can see them in original unaltered form.
Homepage Templates for Teachers and Coaches
New templates get added all the time, like these ones (Language Lessons, Guitar Lessons, Cooking Classes Homepage), that got added in December 2018:
WordPress Coming Soon Landing Page
A “Coming Soon” page is a special type of landing page.
Launch pages like these can play an important role to get leads before you launch your product or website.
Thrive Landing Pages vs LeadPages
Thrive Landing Pages is now a part of Thrive Architect.
Thrive Architect and LeadPages do many of the same things, but at their core, they are different.
LeadPages is a hosted solution on someone else’s platform, which makes it very expensive.
Thrive Architect is a WordPress plugin hosted on your own blog.
You can use LeadPages without having to build a website. On the other hand, Thrive Architect will only work if you have a self-hosted website running WordPress.
These two products are beginner level products and if you’re interested in them, you’re probably building an online business.
As a beginner, a larger decision factor is price, especially if the products are similar feature-wise. For a buyer trying to cut down on his budget, Thrive Architect is clearly a better choice.
Import And Export Landing Pages
Thrive Architect also makes it possible to export and import landing pages from one WordPress blog to another.
Is There A Free WordPress Landing Page Generator?
I have done a search for this far and wide, and I unfortunately found that there isn’t one.
Prices range from hosted landing pages like ClickFunnels and its alternatives, where you can pay up to almost $300 a month, down to the Thrive Themes family, where $218 includes a lifetime access to not only unlimited landing pages, but also to lead capture forms, home pages, A/B testing, etc.
In my opinion, Architect is the ultimate landing page plugin.
Landing Pages That Convert
Don’t think that once you have set up your landing page, your job is all done.
You need to drive traffic to it and you need to monitor how it converts.
Thrive Leads has a built in feature to monitor your conversion rates:
Thrive Headline optimizer even lets you test different headlines.
Every Blog Post Is A Landing Page
It should be noted that even though you have specific landing pages that comply with the above requirements, all your blog posts should be designed to direct your readers to sign up for your email list.
You need to put opt-in forms onto the sidebar, after your blog posts, you can create an exit pop-up, etc. You should monitor which one converts best.
The easiest way to set up your opt-in forms for your blog posts is Thrive Leads. You have a choice of several templates:
All opt-in forms also have an email confirmation page and a Thank You page that goes with them.
Don’t forget that thank you pages can be used to present a low-ticket offer to your audience – a tripwire.
Pop-ups
How much does your online audience hate pop-ups, and should you use them or not?
A 2013 survey says that 70% of internet users rated irrelevant pop-ups as the most annoying type of advertising, putting them on a par with lottery scams. They’re intrusive and sometimes infuriating, but they’re also impressively high-converting.
A web page with a pop-up typically has more conversions than the same page without. More important, a page with a well-designed and thoughtfully implemented pop-up converts better.
A crappy pop-up can drive a large proportion of your audience away, their perception of your brand tarnished.
The ideal is to create a win-win in which a pleasant (or, at least, inoffensive) user experience supports a conversion rate increase.
To improve user experience, your pop-up must offer something your reader believes is worth the interruption. The best way to do this is by focusing on relevance.
Aside from the offer itself, timing is crucial. Pop up too soon and you prevent your readers from ever seeing enough of your content to decide they want more. Pop up too late and you’ll miss them entirely.
Probably the best way to implement is using an exit pop-up or a timed one that goes off after 45-60 seconds.
In any case, you need to test, measure and analyze the effectiveness of your pop-up campaigns.
The elements to test include:
- Your pop-up’s headline copy.
- Headline design.
- Pop-up box design and images.
- Pop-up form field labels. (Test different fonts and placements)
- User escape routes. Should your pop-up have an exit button, a “No Thanks” link, or something else?
- Body copy.
- Call to action copy. Don’t stick with the default “Submit” button copy. Test some more specific copy options like “Get Your Free Report,” “Download Now” or “Sign Me Up.”
- Action button design.
Test everything: shape, size, color, texture and any other attribute you can control.
More importantly, Thrive Leads already has the winning designs figured out based on the tests of successful marketers, therefore you get a head start if you use their plugin.
Conclusion
The subject of landing pages may seem easy, but it is not entirely so.
It requires lots of testing and a lot of experience and it is only one element of a sales funnel.
If you want to know more about it, sign up for my free course below.
Recommended: How to set up an email autoresponder for free.
