FIRM SPINS SEARCHES INTO ONLINE PAY DIRT
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, the 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 Power Point 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 funding from friends and family, and launched the service in 2010. Revenue for 2015 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 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. They typically prompt the visitor for their email address by giving them something of value, such as an ebook, a free service trial or a 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 advertised in print and scattered display advertising to various websites that went to the home page for Creekside Mills, a 129-home estate in Cultus Lake, east of Abbotsford.
“We didn’t really see much return,” he said. “We were tracking things online, but weren’t getting a huge conversion rate, and each conversion was costing a lot.”
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,” Van Geel said, adding 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-perclick 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 Van- couver 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 repeatedly redesign each page. 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.
Without landing pages, pay-per-click advertising doesn’t work.
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, adding that simply redesigning a landing page designed to be viewed on a desktop or laptop computer won’t cut it. “That’s trying to put lipstick on a pig.”
“Unbounce allows us to move a lot of clients to a mobile strategy almost immediately,” he added.
Perreault said about a third of the people visiting his clients’ landing pages are viewing on mobile devices. It’s a sign of how quickly the market is moving, he added.
Margins average 90 per cent, but customers cost up to $400 to acquire. Unbounce has catered to very small businesses or solopreneurs, mid-sized firms (including agencies such as Matchnode) and large enterprises. Perrault is moving away from the lowest customer tier, which typically sees more churn.
To do that, he is gradually increasing the minimum size of his monthly plans. “When we dropped those plans, it freed us to book more features on the next level up. Also, our support burden went down, and our revenue started growing faster,” he said.
Unbounce plans to expand into new markets, having launched versions of its website in German, Spanish and Portuguese.
“In the next 12 months, we want to make a bigger commitment,” Perrault said, “moving from marketing into currency regulatory support and ensuring that we’re doing business properly in Europe and building out customer success teams for these markets.”
In the meantime, there are a lot of landing pages to host right here. have also likely experienced double-digit growth. He chalks up part of the food item’s rising popularity to something fairly counter-intuitive: a widening consumer interest in healthy eating. As people are increasingly drawn to eating higher-quality foods with greater health benefits, he said, they’re allowing themselves more leeway for quality sinful snacks, including the doughnut.
Canadians have also scaled back on eating out, especially for fullcourse meals like dinner, Carter added. Instead, they’re choosing to spend their restaurant dollars on breakfast and snacks, he said, meaning more of their money is going toward sweet treats and baked goods.
Yet another boost for the doughnut is our love affair with caffeine. Canadians drink more than three billion cups of java a year, Carter said — and that’s not including home-brewed beans.
“Obviously, the best compliment to that is a baked good,” he said, adding that a strong coffee program is key to not losing market share to other eateries that serve both.
Susan Hamer, who opened Suzy Q Doughnuts in Ottawa in February 2012, agrees that it’s a perfect match.
Serving coffee with a doughnut, she said, is part of the country’s culture — although her shop offers a twist on the classic pairing by selling a Finnish-inspired doughnut. The hand-rolled and hand-cut goodies come in an irregular shape, with lots of cardamom spice and intensely flavoured glazes.
That’s a smart move, according to Carter. Canadians — especially young consumers, who are considered flightier when it comes to brand loyalty — are drawn to innovative products, he said, and successful doughnut bakers have managed to create interesting flavour concoctions.
That’s why Vanessa Baudanza, co-founder of The Rolling Pin in Toronto, said she wasn’t worried about opening her specialty store in June 2014 as she felt confident customers would travel from all corners of the city to taste her unique products.
The upscale shop is best known for its small syringes filled with flavours like caramel or espresso that top some of its doughnuts, letting customers inject the rich fillings themselves.
Baudanza continues to dream up creations like the Cadbury Creme Egg-stuffed doughnut (served only around Easter time) and a carnivalinspired version topped with deepfried mini Mars bars.
“Nothing’s more classic than a doughnut,” Baudanza said. “So if you can spruce it up and jazz it up and make it really unique and wonderful, then — of course — everyone’s going to want to come and grab one.”
Keeping up the pace of innovation will be key to these stores’ survival, Carter said.
“For these smaller players in particular,” he said, “they’ll just need to have a constant message of innovation and excitement to attract the largest restaurant consumer in the Canadian marketplace right now.”
Nothing’s more classic than a doughnut.