The tasks of the marketing team don’t always overlap with those of the IT team. While the marketing team needs landing pages built quickly and regularly, the IT team is occupied with building and enhancing systems for your organisation as a whole. The marketing team can’t and doesn’t want to wait weeks on end for just a simple one-page website.
Moreover, it isn’t enough to just build the landing page. You need to track its performance, even better if you can run split tests so that you can tweak your page on an ongoing basis.
As the first to market, Unbounce launched in 2009. It allows marketers to build landing pages fast and without a line of code. OK, even if it’s been around for a long time, it sounds like just any other landing page builder (Instapage, Landingi, Sunny Landing Pages, the list is long). So, why should you choose to work with it?
Unbounce is “a bit more” than just a landing page builder. It comes with a range of features to help you optimise your conversions and also lets you add elements such as popups and sticky bars to your site so that you turn website visitors into clients.
- Pros and cons of Unbounce
- Who is Unbounce for?
- How easy is Unbounce to use?
- Design and templates
- How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Unbounce?
- Integrations
- What marketing tools does Unbounce provide?
- Reporting and analytics
- Security
- Customer support
- Pricing
- Is Unbounce the right solution for you?
Pros and cons of Unbounce
The core of Unbounce is its drag-and-drop landing page builder. It also has tools for you to create popups and sticky bars. In each of these, split-testing is baked in, so that you can improve for a higher conversion rate. Unbounce is a cloud-based service and you access it with your browser.
Pros
- Collaboration tools, so you can give your team members access
- Test your landing pages in different ways
- Unbounce stays up-to-date on the latest marketing trends, for example, it also offers AMP
- You can build a mini-funnel consisting of a landing page and a thank you page
Cons
- Creating an account to test drive it already requires your credit card details
- No free plan, just 14 days free test period
- Hefty price tag
- Steep learning curve
- Drag-and-drop editor can be slow at times
- Reporting is a tad basic and could be better
- No split-testing, Smart Traffic, or Dynamic Text replacement in the lowest plan
Who is Unbounce for?
If you look at its prices, you’ll see that Unbounce focuses on specific types of businesses.
If you’re running a marketing and advertising agency, you want to be able to satisfy your clients’ needs as well as show results quickly. With Unbounce, you can create landing pages quickly and show your clients how they performed with reports. You also have the option to become a partner: When your client uses Unbounce, you get to earn a lifetime cut as long as your client stays an Unbounce customer.
If you’re part of a marketing team or the internal marketing specialist, and your IT department is constantly working on other projects or improving the product of your organisation, you may find Unbounce handy. You don’t need to wait for your IT department and can create landing pages fast and without coding skills. You can test out your new campaign idea fast and don’t need to wait for your IT department.
How easy is Unbounce to use?
You can choose between a smart and the classic drag-and-drop builder. If you want to take advantage of industry conversion data, try the smart builder. With its machine learning, it will help you optimise while creating your page. It comes with tools such as copy insights and a digital assistant.
If you choose the classic builder, you’ll be starting with a template and then customise it using its drag-and-drop editor paired with content blocks. You click on the features you want to add, drag them to the desired location, and drop them.
And if you’re a little more advanced, you can further enhance your work with custom HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
You’ll see many elements and features in the classic builder. Some can be quite advanced and complicated for someone starting. It can look daunting at first. The classic builder definitely has a learning curve, so allow some time to find your way in Unbounce.
Design and templates
To make your life easier, Unbounce comes with over 100 templates, if you’re using the classic builder. They’re sorted into different categories of campaigns such as lead generation or webinar registration. The templates aren’t that special looking, but will surely cover a wide range of marketing campaigns.
If that’s not enough, you can also browse and buy templates from Themeforest.
How easy is managing your ecommerce store with Unbounce?
Unbounce concentrates on giving you tools for increasing engagement and converting customers. It can be used as a complement to your online store, for example, when want to enhance a sales campaign for Black Friday. But it’s not for running and managing an online store.
Integrations
It’s probably more the rule than the exception, but in digital marketing, you’re most likely using several tools and services to cover the cutover journey waiting your company’s ecosystem. Of course, when you’re considering a new service, you want to be sure it works well with your existing tools.
Since Unbounce is “just” for building landing pages, it connects with the leading marketing apps. It also offers Zapier and webhooks, if you have coding capabilities in-house.
What marketing tools does Unbounce provide?
Unbounce comes with plenty of conversion optimisation tools to help you generate more leads and to get a better return on your marketing investment.
SEO
It’s easy to optimise your landing pages built in Unbounce for search engines. You can add a meta title and meta description.
With its Dynamic Text Replacing, you can replace the words on the landing page or pops to match your copy to what a visitor was searching for. This makes your page look more relevant to the individual visitor and ultimately boosts the conversion rate. Dynamic Text Replacing is only available in the top 2 plans.
Popups and sticky bars
If you want to add forms to your existing website to collect information from your visitors, you the drag-and-drop form builder to create popups and sticky bars. The form builder has the same features like the landing page builder and comes with templates to help you get started. Again, you can use its Dynamic Text Replacing to your popups and sticky bars to personalise your copy.
Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) compatible
This feature is only available in the top plan. AMP is a framework by Google for speeding up page loading. It uses a specialised HTML framework to load your content almost instantly and so it can provide a better user experience. It also comes with pre-built AMP templates that you can customise.
Split-testing
If you’re looking at how to improve your conversions (CRO – conversion rate optimisation), one of the pillars is to split-test. You can A/B test your landing pages or the forms. You can create variants and Unbounce will show you how each of them performed.
Smart Traffic
Unbounce uses machine learning to show conversion patterns. Interestingly, you don’t need to wait weeks and weeks for it to collect data. Smart Traffic starts to show patterns for as low as 50 visitors and it starts to optimise as soon as it has enough data.
Reporting and analytics
Each page or form shows all the key metrics. You get to see the stats by clicking on the respective pages, popups, and bars. Frankly, this is a weak point of Unbounce. You only get the basics (visitors, views, conversions, conversion rate). If you want more, you need to connect with your Google Analytics account.
Security
All pages created with Unbounce are secured with SSL. It also offers two-factor authentication (2FA) to add an extra layer of protection to secure your account.
Customer support
Each plan comes with the same level of live chat, email, and phone support. It also has a searchable help centre.
Pricing
Unbounce is not known to be on the affordable side. You get to test-drive the tool for 14 days but you need to provide your credit card details at signup.
Is Unbounce the right solution for you?
Unbounce is focused on optimising conversion. It’s built for marketers looking to up their return on marketing investment. If you can afford it, it’s worth its price, but only if you don’t use it as a band-aid or a stop gap measure. It has a learning curve and once you know how to use it, it will help you grow and grow with your business.
But its price tag also means it’s not for you if you’re running a budget-limited business, a blogger, or a freelance marketing consultant.
I hope this review has helped you in making the decision if Unbounce is the right tool for you. If you liked it, please feel free to share it with someone who might also find it useful.
Original post here: Unbounce review – no-code landing page builder
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