Leadpages vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

It's great if you want an easy-to-use but extremely robust tool for producing effective online marketing pages since it makes production work enjoyable and inspires fresh creativity. It also offers wonderful split-testing capabilities which can enhance marketing results. But if you're looking for an out-of-the-box collection of standardized, one-size-fits-all marketing resources, you really might want to consider looking elsewhere.

Incentivized

Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.

Incentivized

• Leadpages integrates well with many of the main software that businesses use like Infusionsoft, Hubspot, Marketo, Mailchimp, GoToWebinar, and Wordpress. This allows your landing pages to be integrated well into the other processes you have with your business.
• Leadpages makes it easy to build professional looking landing pages without having to hire someone else or have coding skills. Their drag and drop builder makes it easy enough to use and get the hang of. I particularly love the hundreds of templates they provide for you to help give you ideas and get you going faster.
• They also have a Leadbox function that has also been super useful in being able to get other types of forms up on our website. These forms provide some functionality that our website wouldn't have had without them.

Incentivized

• Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
• Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
• Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.

Incentivized

• While most of the editing functions are easy to figure out, some of the finer details to get spacing, sizing, alignment and layout just right can take some trial and error if you don't have formal training in the tool. A lot of the editing tools are collapsed into sections, and finding just what you're looking for can sometimes be a challenge.
• I don't believe the version we used had a page optimizer or optimization score, which I have seen on other landing page builders. This may be a feature of a more premium version of the tool or may have been turned off by the product manager, but it would be a helpful feature.

Incentivized

• Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
• Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
• Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.

Incentivized

Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.

Incentivized

I would give it a 10, for me, I love all the features. For the average person, the number of choices on a landing page could create a decision paradox. Thankfully the pre-designed landing page templates do not require a lot of decisions for a landing page newbie.

Incentivized

The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.

Incentivized

Leadpages support is helpful, they also created many resources to help people create good funnels and learn about small things that matter when doing marketing. The affiliate program is good and could be something which pays for your subscription. People like Leadpages because its been recommended by many influencers participating in affiliate program and also because it just works without problems and does the job. But right now alternatives should be taken in consideration, as there are many other projects that could do it better and cheaper.

Incentivized

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product

Incentivized

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card

Incentivized

I have used Mailchimp for clients, and use ActiveCampaign personally for my email marketing and have used it for clients, but prefer Leadpages for the frontend of the opt-in process because of its analytics and performance metrics. Leadpages makes it super easy to see what's performing well, without having to dive into Google Analytics or aggregate any other data. Leadpages also integrates really well with WordPress, my primary platform, with opt-in forms (wayyyy better than Mailchimp).

Incentivized

Optimizely Commerce Connect offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.

Incentivized

• Leadpages, as long as you have it set up properly, will have a quick ROI within days of your first campaign.
• For those that are not familiar, it is probably best to hire someone to take over this part and still your ROI will be very quick, including the cost of this professional.
• Overall, Leadpages has a very fast ROI if used and implemented in a timely manner, and used to constantly evolve what you are doing with new fresh content.

Incentivized

• Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
• Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
• Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.

Incentivized