Unbounce’s tech can help firms turn online visits into sales leads
Vancouver-based Unbounce is a local success story.
Started in 2009, the firm grew its revenue 90 per cent to $12.4 million last year by selling a simple service to clients: putting web pages online, one by one.
Unbounce’s service enables companies to create landing pages, which are online marketing tools designed to increase sales.
The company was born out of frustration. Rick Perreault, chief executive of Unbounce, came up with the idea, after the digital marketer tired of pestering his web developers each time he wanted a new landing page to support a marketing campaign.
“I’d have to go to the IT department, and they’d have to build them for me and put them live,” he said. “Then if they weren’t working for me, I’d have to go back and request changes.”
He complained to a colleague and suggested a drag-and-drop tool, “like PowerPoint but for the web,” he said. That would cut IT out of the loop.
They ended up co-founding Unbounce with four other people, using $300,000 in friends’ and families’ funding, and launching the service in 2010. Five years on, 2015 revenue grew 80 per cent from $6.9 million the year earlier.
Landing pages help to convert online visitors into leads.
Many consumers arrive by clicking on an online advertisement that often takes them to a company’s home page, where they are unsure of what to do next.
Directing those visitors to a landing page designed to support the specific advertisement gives the company a chance to guide the dialogue. These pages typically prompt the visitor for their email address by giving them something of value, such as an ebook, a free service trial or discount. That converts the visitor into a sales lead.
Steven Van Geel more than doubled his conversion rate using Unbounce. The sales director for Frosst Creek Developments, a family-owned firm building Creekside Mills, a 129-home estate in Cultus Lake, B.C., advertised in print and scattered display advertising to various online sites that went to Creekside Mills’ home page.
“We didn’t really see much return. We were tracking things online but weren’t getting a huge conversion rate, and each conversion was costing a lot,” he recalled.
Ads drove around 20 leads in four months, with a conversion rate of 1.35 per cent. The cost per lead was $147. Van Geel began working with Vancouver-based pay-per-click Internet advertising agency Titan PPC. Now when people click an online Creekside Mills advertisement, it takes them to a landing page that Titan created using Unbounce. Titan hosts the page on Unbounce’s computers, charging Van Geel a monthly fee.
The landing page looks as though it is located on the Creek Mills site.
“We were getting under 10 leads a month using the other company, and last month we hit about 74,” said Van Geel, noting that his ad budget didn’t increase.
Part of that bump is due to Titan’s advertising campaign drawing more traffic, but the conversion rate for visitors also increased to 5.52 per cent. The cost per lead fell to around $22.
“Without landing pages, pay per click advertising doesn’t work,” said Patrick Schrodt, founder of Titan PPC. “If we can keep clients happy with high-conversion landing pages, clients will stay with us longer.”
Schrodt uses landing pages aggressively to drive sales for his clients. A plumber based in Vancouver might want to serve five local cities. Titan PPC will create separate landing pages customized for different cities in the region, linking it to advertisements tailored with those cities as keywords.
That can open the faucet for client leads, he said.
Titan relies heavily on Unbounce, which allows Schrodt to pay a designer for a one-time template rather than employ them to redesign each page repeatedly.
It also eliminates the need for a coder to create it and put it online.
“It’s saving thousands of dollars a year in salary and design fees,” he said.
Toronto-based Uberflip, which sells an online platform enabling large customers to manage their online marketing content, has used Unbounce to tweak its marketing campaigns on the fly, said Hana Abaza, Uberflip’s vice-president of marketing.
“You want to test different campaigns and ensure that the messaging and design of the landing page is in line with your advertising campaign, and you want to be able to quickly test and iterate on that,” she said. Running alternative landing pages at the same time to see which performs better — a process known as split testing — is a common practice in online marketing.
Although there are competitors in the landing page space, Brian Davidson, a partner at Chicago-based digital marketing firm Matchnode, praises Unbounce for its mobile platform support.
The firm creates landing pages that are designed to display well on mobile platforms.
Matchnode’s clients increasingly run large Facebook advertising campaigns viewed by users on their mobile phones. When they click on those ads, they’ll be directed to a landing page.
“If you’re going to have a prayer to attract those people, you need a great mobile landing page,” he said.
“Unbounce allows us to move a lot of clients to a mobile strategy almost immediately,” he added.
Unbounce also plans to expand into new markets, having launched versions of its website in German, Spanish and Portuguese.