Unbounce Review – Is It The Best Landing Page Builder?

Looking for more conversions?

Unbounce may be the tool for you.

Read on for my full review of the platform and whether or not it’s right for your business.

New Balance Chicago needed to increase its sales. Unfortunately for the family-owned and operated business, that meant getting more customers in the door. You see, New Balance Chicago didn’t make one dime off of ecommerce sales on the corporate website. The company asked a digital marketing agency to create an online strategy that would translate to in-store sales. To make that happen, the team turned to Unbounce. Specifically, the agency launched a Facebook campaign that directed curious consumers to a mobile-optimized landing page. That page offered a discount coupon in exchange for an email address. Customers could use the discount coupon when they visited any one of the New Balance stores in Chicago. The landing page also included info about local stores, Google Maps, and tappable phone numbers. End result: New Balance Chicago spent 50% less on online advertising while sales soared 200%. That’s what Unbounce can do for your business as well.

What Is Unbounce?

Simply put: Unbounce is a conversion platform. It helps you create landing pages optimized for conversions.. And you can do it in short order. Unbounce also makes it easy to deploy pop-ups and sticky bars that can get you even more engagement with people in your target market. Bonus: you can do it all without writing one line of code. You don’t need to know HTML, JavaScript, PHP, or any other technology to get the most out of the platform.

Unbounce Review: Landing Pages

The main reason that many people sign on with Unbounce is so they can easily create a landing page that turns visitors into customers. If you’re brand new to digital marketing, then you might be unfamiliar with the phrase “landing page.” Simply put: it’s the web page that people visit when they click on one of your ads. Remember: once you’ve managed to convince people to click or tap an online ad, you’ve only won part of the battle. You also need to convince those people to take some kind of action, such as buying a product or subscribing your email list. A good landing page will take those folks across the finish line. Unbounce helps you create that landing page.

Templates and More Templates

Unbounce offers landing page templates. They’re fully designed and all you have to do is select the one that’s right for your business and add the right text. In fact, Unbounce offers more than a hundred conversion-focused templates. Many of them are industry-specific. They’re also already optimized for conversions. How does Unbounce optimize landing pages for conversions when its design team doesn’t even know anything about your business? With quite a bit of historical analysis. The folks at Unbounce studied more than 64,000 landing pages with 74 million visitors. They found out what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t work. Then, they incorporated their findings into their own landing page templates. Bottom line: you benefit from somebody else’s research.

Unbounce Review: Total Creative Control

Although Unbounce offers plenty of templates, you’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to the finished product. The tool provides a simple, drag-and-drop user interface so you can move landing page elements around, add marketing text, design calls to action, and even include your own images. It’s also WYSIWYG. That means “What You See Is What You Get.” In other words, as you’re designing your landing page, you’re also viewing it as visitors will see it. You don’t have to deploy it and check it repeatedly to make sure it has the look and feel that you’re expecting. Of course, you can always adapt your branding to the landing page. Include your logo. Change the color scheme to match your web colors. Update the page so it more properly reflects your business. You also get to choose from more than 840 fonts provided by Unbounce. Say goodbye to boring text that uses Helvetica or Arial! Additionally, Unbounce allows you to embed videos, add widgets, and create your own custom backgrounds. You can even create a landing page that uses parallax scrolling, if that’s your thing.

Buy a Template

If the templates provided on the Unbounce platform don’t work for your purposes, be sure to browse around the templates on Themeforest. Most of them cost $20 or less. They won’t put much of a dent in your budget.

Unbounce Review: Start From Scratch

If, for whatever reason, you don’t like any of the Unbounce landing page templates, either on the platform or Themeforest, that’s no problem. You can create your own landing page from scratch. It works the same way as adapting a template to your own marketing needs. You just start with a blank canvas and add the text, images, and design that works best for your target audience.

Hands-Free Deployment

Once you’ve created a landing page you like, you can publish it. You don’t even have to touch your website. Unbounce gives you the opportunity to generate a live landing page with updating anything on your site. As I stated above, you also don’t have to write a lick of code.

Unbounce Review: A Portfolio of Pages

Unbounce doesn’t limit you to a single page. You can publish multiple pages in mere minutes. The tool even offers a “duplicate” feature. That gives you the ability to use an existing landing page that you’ve created as a custom template. Once you’ve duplicated the page, you can adjust the text so that it’s relevant to a different market segment.

SSL Encryption

As you probably know, SSL encryption on your website is mandatory these days. That’s because Google Chrome will warn users if your site isn’t secure. You don’t want potential customers seeing a warning that your site isn’t secure. That will make it difficult to create trust. Fortunately, Unbounce publishes SSL-encrypted landing pages. You don’t have to understand the technology behind digital encryption. The platform handles all of that automatically.

Unbounce Review: Custom Form Actions

It’s likely that your landing page will require a little more than just the click of a button. You might ask visitors to fill out a form. Once they do that, it’s up to you what happens next. Unbounce allows you to redirect them to a new page or display a confirmation message. Of course, the confirmation pages are customizable as well. Incidentally, you can declutter your landing pages by putting your forms in lightboxes. For example, if you want someone to fill out a form, just add a button to the page that’s labeled “Request More Info” or something similar. Then, when a visitor clicks the button, your form will display in a lightbox. That’s a great way to keep the focus on your marketing message so visitors aren’t distracted with form fields.

A/B Testing

Almost all aspects of digital marketing require some level of testing. Landing pages are no exception. If you want to see whether your conversion rate will go up if you change the call to action button color or you’d like to know if one version of your copy gets you more clicks than another version, you can do that with Unbounce.

Unbounce Review: Integrations

When it comes to digital marketing, you’re probably going to need more than one tool. Fortunately, Unbounce integrates with some of the most popular marketing tools on the planet. Here’s a list of some of the tools you can use with Unbounce:

• Marketo
• Zapier
• MailChimp
• HubSpot
• WordPress
• Kissmetrics
• Salesforce
• Infusionsoft
• Campaign Monitor

And there are others as well. Chances are really good that you can incorporate your existing tools into your Unbounce marketing campaigns. Unbounce also offers an API so your developers can create customized integrations.

Mobile-Friendly Pages

Unbounce produces landing pages that are responsive. That means they look great on any screen size, no matter how big or small. So whether your visitors are looking at your landing page on a smartphone or a giant monitor, they’ll see a design that’s professional and appealing. Along these lines, Unbounce will soon support Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology. That means your landing pages will load in lightning-fast time for visitors on mobile devices.

Unbounce Review: Dynamic Text Replacement

Personalized marketing tends to get better results. Unbounce supports personalization with dynamic text replacement. What’s dynamic text replacement? It’s a feature that allows you to include the exact search terms that people used to find your landing page. Let’s say you’re selling fishing reels online. You create a landing page that advertises your latest fishing reels and a corresponding Google Ad. You’re aware that there are several different keywords people can use when they search for fishing reels. For example, some might use “saltwater fishing reels” while others might use “spinning fishing reels.” In that case, you’d use dynamic replacement text so that your landing page uses the visitor’s search term. If somebody searched for “saltwater fishing reels,” then your ad headline would be “Saltwater Fishing Reels.” That’s a clever way to convince people that you created a landing page just for their interests.

Popups

If you’re somebody who likes to reach people with popups on your website, you’ll be happy to learn that Unbounce offers a popup solution. Once again, the tool enables you to get a head start with templates. Pick a look and feel that will resonate with your target audience. After you’ve selected a template and updated it, you can publish it in minutes. You won’t need to enlist the aid of a developer. You also have the option to choose when the popup appears:

• On arrival
• After a specified delay
• When the visitor scrolls
• On a click
• On exit

Finally, you can also specify how often the popup appears.

Unbounce Review: Sticky Bars

Sticky bars are a non-intrusive way to grab the attention of people who visit your website. Unbounce lets you easily create and deploy them. If you’re unfamiliar with sticky bars, they’re headers that stay at the top of the web page even when a user scrolls down. In other words, they “stick” to the top of the page. Hence the name. You can create and publish a sticky bar in minutes. Once again, you’ll have your choice of templates to choose from. You can use the same kind of scheduling options with sticky bars that you use with popups.

Agency and Client Tools

If you’re running a digital marketing company and need to keep track of multiple clients, Unbounce makes that task easy. The tool enables you to manage all your clients with a single account. You can also assign various levels of permissions for each user. Unbounce even allows you to duplicate landing pages between clients. That can save you a lot of time. Finally, Unbounce also offers a taste of CRM. You can organize and export leads for each of your clients individually.

Unbounce Review: Support

With Unbounce, you get support from 5AM to 5PM PST. You can contact support via phone, email, or live chat. Here’s the important part, though: you get access to all that support no matter which level of service you choose. Even if you go the “cheap route,” you can still pick up the phone and ask a question.

GDPR Compliance

According to the website, Unbounce is a fully GDPR compliant platform. If you’re unfamiliar with GDPR, it’s the EU’s General Protection Data Regulation privacy law. It went into effect in 2018. You can get into some trouble if your website or landing page runs afoul of GDPR guidelines. That’s not something you’ll need to worry about if you use Unbounce.

Pricing

Unbounce offers three levels of service: Essential, Premium, and Enterprise. Essential will only cost $79 per month with annual billing. That gives you 75 landing pages, 8 popups, and 8 sticky bars. You’ll pay $159 per month for the Premium service. That gives you 150 landing pages, 16 popups, and 16 sticky bars. Enterprise will cost you $399 per month. For that, you’ll get 375 landing pages, 40 popups, and 40 sticky bars. There are various integration options associated with each level of service as well. For more info on that, check out the plan comparisons page.

Unbounce Review: Pros and Cons

There are plenty of Unbounce users. Some of them have shared their thoughts, good and bad, about the platform online. Here’s what they have to say. First, the good:

• Awesome solution for marketers with very little coding skills
• Ease of use
• Can create A/B tests in a few clicks
• Excellent support
• Plenty of integration options
• Easy to create mobile-friendly pages
• Community is helpful

Next, the bad:

• No grids or rulers when designing pages
• Not cheap
• Reporting on landing pages could be stronger
• A/B testing only tracks 30 days worth of data
• Landing pages don’t always load quickly
• Steep learning curve
• No “beginners” webinar or tutorial

Unbounce Review: The Verdict

Yes, if you’re looking to create landing pages that convert, you should absolutely sign on with Unbounce. If you still aren’t totally sold on it, though, no worries. You can try it for free for 30 days. That will give you a chance to make sure it’s right for your business. More than likely, though, you’ll find that it’s exactly what you need. That’s especially true if you want to quickly create and deploy multiple landing pages.