New Drag & Drop Features: Give Each Visitor a Personal Deadline with Evergreen Countdown Timers + More

1. User-specific evergreen countdown timers

“Can we add a countdown timer?” If you don’t hear that anytime a new, limited-time landing page is launched around here, it’s only because everyone assumes a countdown timer has already been added. It’s one of the simplest and most powerful conversion-rate boosters we’ve seen, and with this update, it’s just become way more powerful. In the past, it didn’t really make sense to add a countdown timer to a landing page that didn’t have a specific, one-time deadline. Eventually your timer would run out, and if you wanted to start it up again, you’d have to go in, edit, and relaunch the page—and risk annoying any repeat visitors who realized that the “firm deadline” you’d set had been extended. With our new personalized evergreen countdown timer option, you can set a deadline to act for each individual prospect who finds your page—no matter when that person visits. Say you’re running a 48-hour sales promotion, using a landing page with an evergreen countdown timer. You email your list on Monday morning. One of your contacts—call her Jane Lastname—opens that email and clicks through to your landing page right away. The countdown timer she sees starts at two days and keeps ticking from there. Jane doesn’t have her credit card handy, so she closes the tab and revisits the landing page the next afternoon. This time, when she opens the page, she sees that the time has ticked down to less than a day. She’d better act fast. At the same time, you’re also running Facebook ads to the same landing page advertising your “48-hour only” deal. Another prospective customer, Victor Visitor, clicks through from your Facebook ad on Friday. Although Jane’s deadline has already passed, Victor sees the two-day timer start the moment he opens up the page. To set this up, all you need to do is add a countdown timer to your page, choose the Evergreen option, and set a duration. Everyone who lands on the page will then have the time period you specify to act, even if they arrive at different times and even if they return to the page later—Leadpages will have their browser keep track of their personal countdown. There’s one more thing I love about this feature: it works perfectly with our automatic redirect option. In the example above, say Jane never finds her credit card and comes back to the page on Friday, after her 48 hours has ended. If you have the automatic redirect turned on, she’ll be taken automatically to the “offer ended” page you’ve specified while later visitors will continue to see the promo page.

For you, this means you get all the urgency of a limited-time promotion with all the convenience of an evergreen offer. Take a look at your own best-converting offer: could you add in this kind of “evergreen urgency” and get more conversions with less work?

2. Undo/redo

If you like to make changes on the fly just to see how they look—or you’re simply a bit technologically accident-prone—this update should be a big help. Whenever you're editing a drag-and-drop page, you can now undo and redo actions such as adding, moving, and deleting widgets, changing layouts and styles, and just about anything else. Just click the Undo and Redo buttons at the top of your edit screen.

Try it out and edit fearlessly.

3. Global font settings

Was it Roboto or Raleway you used on your last headline? Which exact sans-serif font does your client find most readable? We’ve released a new feature to help jog your memory: global font settings. Now, you can start with your favorite font families every time you add a new section or widget across the page. When you navigate to the Page Styles tab, you'll find a new Global Settings option to let you choose a default headline font, text-widget font, and countdown timer font. (This is especially handy if you’re creating a long sales or product page with lots of sections.) Of course, you can still change the fonts inside any individual text, headline, or countdown widget whenever you need to switch things up.

4. “Unboxed” lead magnets

Everyone’s seen pop-up lightbox windows by now, and while they’re still effective, our product team decided to give you a striking new option for the opt-in forms you create in the drag-and-drop builder. It sort of takes the “box” out of “lead magnet.” Check this out:

Now, you can draw the focus to your opt-in form by embedding it in an overlay that stretches across the entire screen. (You can also use this function just to make your box background translucent—you control the opacity.) If you need to present a lot of form fields, using this new feature can create a more elegant opt-in experience. Or just try it for fun and enhance the look of a sophisticated landing page. It’s up to you.

5. Pass query parameters to your lead magnet and thank you page

If you’re not sure what a query parameter is, you never need to worry about this. But if you’re one of the more technical marketers among us, we wanted to let you know that pages in the drag-and-drop builder will now pass along any query string parameters on your Leadpage URL will now be passed to your thank you page. This allows you to preserve data such as session IDs, transaction details, and user tokens between pages for better tracking in your analytics platform. And if you’re using an outside service (such as Infusionsoft, AWeber, or a shopping cart platform) to serve your thank you page, you may also be able to use parameters customize that page depending on that platform’s functionality. Speaking of parameters, drag-and-drop lead magnet now allow you to populate hidden fields via URL parameters—just look for the URL Mapping field inside your lead magnet settings to use this option.

6. Custom favicons

This is literally a very small update: 16 or 32 pixels square, to be precise. You can now enhance your branding across your landing pages by uploading your own favicon. (You know, the only thing you can see in your browser tab when you have 23 tabs open. Not that I'd know anything about that.) By default, it's the Leadpages logo, but you can use any 16px or 32px square PNG or ICO file as your favicon. Just navigate to the Page Styles tab and you can upload a custom favicon for each Leadpage.

Now, if you’re already a Leadpages member, these updates might not be news to you. We announce updates like these on the notifications screen inside the drag-and-drop builder every week. (Still, I hope this post helps put these new features into context and give you some ideas for using them.) If you haven’t joined Leadpages—or it’s been a while since you were a member—you can click below to get started and check these features out: Jump in, explore, and convert! Any questions about these new features? Ask away in the comments.