09-26-2013

Our Investment in LeadPages

by Seth Levine

We’re excited to announce today our investment in LeadPages. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota (our first MN investment!), LeadPages is the easiest way to create and split-test landing pages, launch pages, sales pages, webinar registration pages, and other conversion pages.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the web for generating customer leads. With hundreds of thousands of businesses competing for the attention of consumers across the web, the importance of web marketing continues to increase. There are numerous ways that companies drive traffic to their websites, and a large industry has evolved around the best marketing practices to drive that traffic through better content and marketing strategies and effective use of ad spending on things such as Google AdWords. However much less attention has been paid to the pages where those ads drive customers, and what they’re asked to do once they land on those pages.

LeadPages was developed to address this problem by enabling publishers to quickly and easily create effective landing pages that better capture customer information and convert website visitors into potential customers. To accomplish this, LeadPages has a library of customizable landing pages designed for a variety of customer interaction types – from signing up for a webinar, downloading a free whitepaper, to simply capturing names and contact information. Like anything related to online advertising, there is a massive amount of expertise involved in creating an effective landing page. Best practices not only change by industry but also by geography, target demographic, and a host of other factors. And because preferences change over time as people become exposed (and over-exposed) to today’s designs, these best practices are constantly changing. Because LeadPages captures data on every interaction across their network of pages (LeadPages generally hosts customer pages on their own network), they are in a unique position to help their customers make data-driven decisions on the best landing page for their specific purpose and to allow them to continue to optimize for traffic conversion over time.

In addition to the easy creation of landing pages, LeadPages also allows their customers the ability to push customer information generated through LeadPages to a number of different platforms – for example CRM systems and email marketing platforms. This functionality is quite powerful to marketers, who generally have to manually enter information into various systems, or deploy engineering resources to automate the data integration between systems.

Ultimately, LeadPages’ aspiration is to power better marketing across the web. We’re excited to have Clay, Tracy, Simon and the entire LeadPages team join the Foundry family in pursuit of this goal.