Close the Loop with a Native Landing Page Builder
With the dozens of software systems out there dedicated to creating websites and landing pages, you may be wondering why an all-in-one platform like Ontraport would bother to add a native landing page builder like Ontraport Pages.
Here’s why: An all-in-one system closes the loop. It makes Ontraport a one-stop-shop.
When you have everything you need in one place without the need for complicated integrations, you can launch all of your marketing and sales funnels very quickly and smoothly — especially if your tool offers pre-built templates available for landing pages, emails and campaigns.
Ontraport Founder and CEO Landon Ray talks about why he chose to include a native landing page builder into the app. “With Ontraport Pages plus Campaign Builder, any entrepreneur can get up and running right away without the burden of technological hassles. The setup experience is dramatically slicker and delivers value immediately. This allows us to fulfill our mission to support entrepreneurs in delivering their value to the world because it allows them to get set up and running much faster.” Having all your assets, including your landing pages, in one place also comes with another significant benefit: having your data in one place.
When your landing pages — and all the information you gather on them via your forms or through tracking — live within your CRM and marketing automation platform that also hosts all your other customer touch points, you’ve got a single source of data that allows you to connect the dots between all the pieces of your business and marketing. With that, you can understand how to create better experiences for your customers as well as make data-driven decisions about your budget, your resources, and how you’re going to grow and scale. Without it, you’ve got a business that you’re running blindly.
THE ROLE LANDING PAGES PLAY WITH DATA
Your landing pages are a main conduit to getting the data you need to understand your customers. This is because landing pages are typically where you place your forms, which are where you collect information. The information you gather on forms can be related to both demographics, such as gender, age, or occupation, and to the challenges your leads are facing that draw them to your products. Either way, that information goes right from the form into your contact records and becomes the source for understanding your audience segments. This enables you to then provide highly targeted and personalized communications with your leads and customers.
That, in turn, enables you to do many things, including:
- Get smarter about where to allocate your advertising budget. With knowledge about which ads are bringing in more customers via your landing pages, you can decide which ads to keep running and which to turn off. You’ll only pay for ads that work.
- Improve your marketing. When you understand which landing page messaging or offers your customers respond to, you’ll know what resonates with your audience and can use that to adjust your marketing earlier in the customer lifecycle to attract the right type of leads.
- Follow up in targeted, personalized ways. By assessing which landing pages your customers visit, you can understand what each visitor is interested in and follow up via email, retargeting ads or a variety of channels in relevant ways, which is the only way to gain attention and sales.
THE REST OF THE PUZZLE
Use a landing page builder to take advantage of the benefits described above so that your landing pages are seamlessly integrated with your CRM, payment system, email tool, marketing automation software and all the other pieces that play a role in communicating with leads and customers.
Consider this common scenario that illustrates this concept:
Say you’d like to email a special offer to anyone who has visited your landing page within the last 90 days and didn’t buy your product. This would be a smart move, as it’s a targeted offer to a relevant audience of people who are interested in your product; your chances of getting this group of people to purchase are much higher than your chances of getting cold leads to purchase. But how would you do it without an integrated all-in-one system such as Ontraport?
You’d first need to figure out who visited your landing page within the past 90 days, so you’d go to your landing page tool to see if it stores visitors’ names and emails (often, it doesn’t). If you’re very lucky, you can gather a list of names and emails of the visitors, and you can hopefully export that into a spreadsheet.
You’d need to export it is because you’ll need to compare that information with the information you pull from your payment system. That’s where you’ll need to go to pull a list of everyone who has actually purchased the product in the past 90 days. Once you have that list, you can cross-reference it with the list of page visitors to ensure you aren’t going to send your special offer to those who have already bought the product.
When you’ve got a list of people to email, you can upload it into your email marketing tool, write the email, and send it to that group of people.
You’d have to do all of that over and over again any time you want to send a targeted offer. That is a hassle and, in real life, it probably wouldn’t happen. People often fail to target customers in the ways that make a difference for their business.
MAKING IT SEAMLESS
To perform that task — emailing a special offer to page visitors from the past 90 days who didn’t purchase — with Ontraport, it’s a simple matter of creating a quick group and sending the email. You can go even further and completely automate this process going forward with just a few clicks.
The beauty of this repeatable process is that any time people visit your landing page and submit their name and email on your form, that information goes right into a new contact record in Ontraport. Any time people make a purchase, that information goes into their contact record. Since your email system is also inside of Ontraport, you can easily pull the right group of people to email based on the information in contact records. And this doesn’t require you going in manually and creating groups or sorting through the data; it’s all done automatically based on your settings when you build the campaign, and you never have to touch it again.
This particular example portrays the critical role landing pages play in terms of your ability to understand your audience and communicate with leads and customers in personalized ways. You need to know not only who visited your landing page but also what actions each individual took on the page — i.e., who purchased and who didn’t. If your landing pages aren’t completely integrated, gathering this information and performing this kind of activity is impossible or very time-consuming and frustrating.
WHY ALL THIS MATTERS
Having the data required to deliver relevant, personal experiences to your customers is an integral prerequisite for your business growth. But you don’t just need to have the data; you need the ability to access that data easily and act on it quickly.
As an entrepreneur, you don’t have time to be pouring through spreadsheets and crunching numbers to make all your data from multiple software tools sync up. That’s not the best use of your skills and your passion.
“What’s the thing that gets businesses to move forward? The ability to try smart ideas fast. Since no one really knows in advance what’s going to work, what separates the successful from those who spin their wheels forever is the ability to move quickly, implement, test things and see what works,” Landon said.
Trying smart ideas is rooted in an ability to access your data — all of it — so you can be smart about what to do next. Doing so “fast” means you can easily view and analyze your results in one place and then easily make the necessary adjustments in your systems.
When you use your data analysis to experiment with your products and your marketing quickly and regularly, you learn over time what sticks. This kind of testing and constant analysis will reveal to you what parts of your business need improvement and what parts are your biggest opportunities for growth. With an integrated landing page builder you can easily accomplish this kind of testing and analysis regularly.
“You have to use trial and error and persevere through the inevitable failures — this is the game of being an entrepreneur,” Landon said. “You learn to stop doing what doesn’t work, and keep doing what works — and scale it up. Then rinse and repeat until you find yourself on a Caribbean island with an umbrella drink in your hand and your business is running at home even better than before.”
“That’s why we built Ontraport,” he added.
