What is a Lead Capture Page: Grab Your Audience

Intro.

When it comes to any type of marketing, experts suggest you need to create an email list. Why? Because you can then send emails to your subscribers, including promotional material to generate sales.

But how do you intend to build this email subscriber list, and what ideas can you implement to capture these people.

Enter, the ‘Lead Capture Page’. A page on your website specifically designed to entice your readers into signing up to what you have to offer.

There’s several interpretations of a lead capture page, many also call it a landing page because it’s the page a visitor lands on when they’ve searched for something you’re offering. Here’s some other names for a lead capture page.

• Splash page
• Squeeze page
• Opt-in page
• Lead Magnet page
• Gift page

I’m sure some marketers have come up with other names, but these are the common names, and names you’ll hear in the industry.

So, how does a lead capture page work, and what functions do you require for it to work effectively?

What Features Should a Lead Capture Page Include

You’ll have numerous pages on your website, and most will display different features, ideas or promotions. A lead capture page is designed with the intent of promoting a single product.

It’s part of a funnel that captures your audiences email address, once they’ve signed up to the offer you’ve promoted. So, how do you convince your audience the promotion is right for them? That’s your job as a marketer, but here’s what you’ll want to consider as part of your lead capture page, to entice your readers.

Opt-in Form

An opt-in form, is a simple form that requires your visitors to fill out general fields such as name and email address, to subscribe to your email list. To be able to achieve this, you’ll first need to have an account setup with an autoresponder service.

There are many autoresponder companies out there, and they are all vying for your business. Some are better than others though, and offer slightly different services. If you’re an affiliate marketer, do your research on the best autoresponder for affiliate marketing. I know that Mailchimp frown upon affiliate marketing, but most others don’t mind.

Once you choose on an autoresponder service, they’ll guide you through the setup process on how to get your opt-in form synced to their service. Usually, you can setup the form via the autoresponder service. They’ll then provide you with some code that you can simply place on your landing page (through the html text tab).

Video/Images

What good is a promotional landing page, with no visual representation of what you attempting to sell! Clear images or explanatory videos will help with any promotional type activity.

Using a free stock image library to obtain wonderful images can help with this. Alternatively, use images from the specific promotion you are advertising to show the benefits of what they’ll be signing up for.

Because this could be your one and only chance to capture people’s attention, make your images eyes catching and irresistible if possible.

Promotional Content

Not only will images and videos be part of your promotional content, the written explanations of the product also go a long way. You’ll struggle to have readers signup to your promotions via your lead capture page, if they don’t exactly understand what they’re going to receive.

Learn How to Write Website Content for Action Taking

Be concise and honest in what you’re advertising. Certainly don’t offer more than what your subscribers will receive. Display your offerings in a good light, and your lead capture page will pay off with your honesty. Neil Patel has a great article on how to promote content.

Offering a teaser can also work in the right circumstances, by showing small snippets but not too much, keeping your visitors in suspense. This can give them no option but to signup for the full explanation of what they’ll receive.

As part of your content, a heading that demands attention will also be required. Not only do these titles appear on your capture page, but can also appear in the search engine results, depending on how you setup the page.

Testimonials

Showing your customers what others have achieved can trigger sales from potential customers. The results of what others have done before you can plant a seed in the mind of many visitors.

Call to Action

If you’ve never heard of a ‘Call to Action’, then you’ll want to concentrate on this point alone. If you’ve implement all of the above without a Call to Action, you’re attempts to capture your readers email address will be in vain.

Some of your visitors require direction, an explanation of what to do next. This is exactly what a Call to Action does. It’s usually in the form of a button that tells the reader to ‘click’. Alternatively, it could be telling the visitor to fill out the form.

A Call to Action basically advises your visitor what to do, to complete an action. This can be to purchase a product, signup to a newsletter or be taken to an external site.

All lead capture pages should have a clear Call to Action, to show your readers what to do next.

Links to Website Information

Don’t forget to include your website authority information, including your privacy policy, terms and conditions or affiliate disclosures. Many rules and regulations are becoming part of website disclosure in recent times.

Providing this information will keep your site legitimate and give your readers peace of mind. It can also lead to a higher opt-in or sales rate.

How to Create a Lead Capture Page

Lead capture pages can be created by you as a website owner, by outsourcing to a developer, or by using a third party company.

Doing it yourself can be achieved if you’re either using a great theme, such as Divi, Genesis or Thrive, or by using a capture page plugin. These awesome paid themes use page builders, which makes the task of building a specific page dedicated to a capture page easy. Elegant Themes shows you how this can be achieved with Divi Theme.

Outsourcing to a freelancer is another alternative, but you’ll need to explain to them exactly what you’re after. There will be coding that would need to be added to your website in order for a capture page to display properly, assuming you’re not using a theme with a page builder. For this reason, they’ll also need to have access to your website.

The most common form of capture page for many online marketers, is to use a dedicated lead page service. There are several of these that are extremely popular in the industry, here’s a few of them.

• LeadPages
• Instapage
• Wishpond
• Unbounce
• PageWiz

Using any of these resources will make your job of creating a landing page much easier, but they’ll also cost you. In my opinion, theses services are not cheap either. But they do serve a major purpose, and will pay their way when you start gaining traffic.

You may find that some autoresponder services can also provide a landing page for you. Alternatively, many will also integrate landing page services within their autoresponder service.

Wrapping Up

Understanding the concept, of what is a lead capture page, can take a little thinking about. It can take new marketers some time to get their head around this concept of more brash promotion.

However, this is a proven marketing technique that has worked for many years, and continues to capture the leads for future prospects exceptionally well.

In my opinion, if you’re new to affiliate marketing and use SEO as your main traffic source, I’d hold back on implementing a paid lead capture page service. By all means go ahead and create your own capture page, but new websites take time to rank. So you’ll have minimal traffic for a number of months before visitors will start knocking on your door. For this reason, you’ll wasting money in your initial months, as there’ll be nobody viewing your capture page.

The idea of lead capture pages is not new. The most successful marketers use these services to build their subscriber list into the thousands. The famous saying of ‘the money is in the list’ still rings true to this day, so make sure you at least start building a list.