Leadpages v. Shōgun

Welcome to the final week where we will be discussing landing pages! These last few weeks we have shared some ideas of what your landing page should include in order to persuade visitors to act. Hopefully at this point you’re anxious to take all that you’ve learned and begin to capture those customers with your own landing page. But creating a landing page can be difficult and some generic website builders might not offer the features and widgets you want or need. Two websites, Leadpages and Shōgun, simplify the landing page experience, but offer different options depending on your needs. This week we will be comparing these two websites and discussing when they should be used.

As another quick disclaimer, neither of these landing page service sites are sponsors or affiliated with the Hatch Project. We are just giving a brief overview of these two popular landing page service sites.

Leadpages

Leadpages has become a leader as a landing page resource in the marketing world. They’re goal is to help “small businesses connect with an audience, collect leads, and close sales,” the three major purposes of a landing page. This is accomplished through Leadpages’s user friendly, uncomplicated interface. The drag-and-drop page design makes setting up a landing page easy for small business owners. While Leadpages does not offer the ability to create a landing page from scratch, they ask you questions like “What would you like your landing page to do?” and “What are you offering your visitors?” to help you pick out the best layout for your needs. And there are still plenty of opportunities for custom layout design throughout the design process with the various widgets and section settings. 

As we’ve discussed throughout the month, the major function of a landing page is to get information, which is typically collected through forms. The good thing about forms on Leadpages is that they are clear, easy to set up, and easy to integrate with services like MailChimp, so gathering leads is no problem. However, because Leadpages is not associated with any e-commerce site, it gets a little complicated to set up an upsell page or offer product specifications (like t-shirt sizes to close a sale) for landing pages set up to close sales. Leadpages does provide a layout specifically designed to integrate with Shopify, the popular e-commerce platform, but then limits your ability to customize the page.

Shōgun

Shōgun is a web design app built for Shopify. Shōgun’s goal is to “empower users to create unique ecommerce experiences by making it easy to build and optimize online stores,” including landing pages. Like Leadpages, Shōgun has a library of beautiful preset layouts that can be adapted for your brand and product. And if you already have your e-commerce site set up Shopify, you can effortlessly include your site’s header, footer, and details of your featured product into the landing page with Shōgun.

Shōgun also offers complete control over all the design elements of the landing page, allowing for highly customizable designs, buttons, and displays. However, Shōgun provides little to no guidance with how to create an aesthetically pleasing landing page from scratch. The surplus of features and little guidance give the app a steep learning curve for beginners or even those familiar with drag-and-drop page design. It does seem to work easier by editing existing pages, but if you already have a layout in mind, plan for time to get to know the various features and elements that need to be adjusted, including page margins and padding, content dimensions, and forms. Speaking of forms, Shōgun does offer a larger variety of options for a form including dropdowns, checkboxes, and radio buttons. Collecting and integrating this information, though, seems more complicated than with Leadpages. But like we said before, if you put the time and work into learning Shōgun, you will definitely end up with a beautiful landing page.

Which is better?

Ease of use and integration options are just some of the MANY factors that can play into deciding whether Leadpages or Shōgun are better for you and your business. Be sure to also consider cost and the amount of time you have to commit to learning and creating the landing page. Or maybe you could consider outsourcing this task to a designer you trust. 

At the Hatch Project, our goal is to help you begin to consider your options as a small business, so don’t be afraid to comment or message us with questions! Starting next week we will be discussing social media, the essential role it plays in marketing, and how you can use it better.