How to Find the Right Landing Page Software

Whether you’re in the market for a landing page management software or exploring what’s available, you’re probably wondering where to start your evaluation and which features or capabilities are the most important.  The best answer to this question starts with you and an introspective look at your own requirements, processes, team capabilities and goals.  It starts with you, because what’s most important is to find the right platform that will support your specific organization’s needs.

Before you start to talk to vendors or try to narrow down your list of options, here are five key points to discuss with your team first.  Use your answer to these points to evaluate which landing page platform is the best right choice for you.

1. Your business realities

What does your company actually require from a platform?  For instance, many industries have to follow strict regulatory requirements concerning data collection in regards to what information can be collected, how it can be transferred and stored. Data collection is just one of many examples. Other things to keep in mind are uptime, software security, system scalability or whether the platform has a single or multi-tenant architecture.  If marketing is leading this search, then this is definitely a conversation that you should have with your tech team too.

2. Plans for growth

What are your marketing plans for growth over the next year or so? Testing your landing pages, launching a new brand, or creating localized campaigns are just three of the many things that become easier when you have a landing page platform that enables you to quickly create and test specific, targeted landing pages. You’ll be surprised by how soon you’ll have double (or more) the number of landing pages you have now. It’s important to ask vendors about any limits in page creation, users, data storage, traffic to your pages that may inhibit your growth in a few months or a year from now.

3. Integration requirements

How will you need data to flow in and out of your landing page platform? It’s important to think through this step thoroughly and to outline how you’ll need your landing page platform to work with the systems you already have in place. Some systems you may need to integrate include one or more of the following categories of marketing technology:

• Analytics
• Marketing automation
• Shopping cart
• Email
• CRM
• Third-party proprietary systems

Sometimes with this step, it’s too easy to focus just on where we want to send information. Don’t forget to think about whether you’d like to create more personalized landing pages by passing information into your new landing page platform via a query string or in an exchange of data using a web service or API.

4. Training and ongoing support

Although landing page platforms are designed to be very friendly (even to a non-technical user), we all have the occasional question or want advice on how to best implement an idea.  Don’t assume anything about a platform’s support services.  Make sure you think about your team’s culture and how much support you expect to have available from a vendor.

5. What do you want to be able to do with your landing pages?

This is probably the most fun question to think about- it’s your chance to dream big.  If you had the ability to do whatever you wanted with your landing pages, what would you do?  For instance, do you want to launch A/B and multivariate tests, add social widgets to a page, create mobile-optimized pages or a microsite with interactive content like an image rotator? If you’re not sure how to start thinking about this, sometimes it’s easier to start on a project-focused basis.  For example, think about how you would like to improve your PPC  or nuture program landing pages.