Unbounce Review: High converting landing page templates

31st October 2021

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TL;DR

Drag-and-drop your way to beautiful landing pages with Unbounce. With good-looking templates (for every conceivable type of campaign) and AI optimisation, this no-code solution makes it easy to create high-converting destinations for your campaigns. All you need to do is provide the traffic.



Unbounce Pros

  • Drag-and-drop builder
  • Responsive landing page templates
  • Optimisation AI
  • The conversion experts
  • Up-and-running in minutes

Unbounce Cons

  • Occasionally desktop/mobile disconnect
  • Not the cheapest (still good value)
  • Some key integrations missing

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The Story

What is Unbounce?

Unbounce is a fast, high converting landing page maker that majors in style, ease and optimisation. Pick a template, make it your own, and see your conversion shoot up.

An antidote to ‘one-size-fits-all’ landing pages, Unbounce can create multiple versions to run at the same time, making your product launches, PPC campaigns and email marketing work harder. Once your campaign is live, Unbounce’s AI magically tailors landing page content to user intent, creating a personal experience more likely to lead to a sale. All without the need for designers, developers or code.

Oh, they also do super-smart popups and sticky bars too!


Meet the Maker:
Ty Lingley

Unbounce started in 2009 when “landing pages” were barely on a marketer’s radar. As a designer, Unbounce’s CEO and Co-Founder, Rick Perreault, experienced firsthand the pain marketer’s would encounter when trying to get any changes made to a company’s website. This hunch was validated by a survey among marketers. He then quickly got to work bootstrapping an easy-to-make landing page builder and set of landing page examples.

We spoke to Unbounce’s Partnership Marketing Manager, Tyrone Lingley, to pick up Unbounce’s present day story. He shared his secrets for a winning campaign, the importance of testing and the rise of conversion automation.

Read the interview

The Product

How we tested Unbounce for this review

Let’s start with why: designing and developing multiple landing pages is a pain.

Essentially, they’d either not be made or would drag me or development resource away from other tasks. Then when in situ they’d be the subject of long A/B tests, which would lead to the odd tweak here and there. In short: a fraction of what they should be.

As a non-technical Marketer, Unbounce is aimed squarely at me. It was about time I put it to the test.

I did so via the free trial, creating a mock landing page utilising the full depth of Unbounce’s features: its landing-page builder, templates, conversion automation and pop-ups. I also connected Unbounce to some of my favourite Marketing and CRM apps, including Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zapier and Slack, keen to see how it would feed leads into my funnel and alert me to potential deals. And to really put the squeeze on the ‘easy-to-make’ claims of its drag-and-drop builder I gave myself a time-limit of three hours to do so. Here’s what I found…


Getting started with Unbounce

Make sure you get your free trial and 20% Unbounce discount on your first 3 paid months via Surges.

Once you’ve got the keys to your Unbounce account a welcome video gives you the tour. It takes you through the main components of the drag-and-drop landing page builder points you in the direction of a training template.

Unbounce   template editor   Surges review

This step-by-step guide is a great hands-on lesson in Unbounce and how to make a landing page template your own, covering things such as editing text and forms, creating testimonials, setting page goals, adding your branding and optimising page elements. There won’t be much you can’t do after 10-15 minutes.

Of course, there’s lots more needed in the background to get your campaign in tiptop shape. The landing page pre-launch checklist also includes: setting up domain, URLs and tracking; adding scripts like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel; and how to test it all before you go live. Anybody in need of a bit more hand-holding can also watch a daily 30-minute webinar from Unbounce’s onboarders’ tips and tricks to get your pages up and running.

Unbounce covers all bases here so you’ll be fully flying in a couple of hours max.

Unbounce features you’ll love

  • 🖱️ Drag-and-drop builder

    Your new high converting landing page is only a few clicks away.

    Its templates offer a huge headstart – they’re stunning, responsive and modelled on Unbounce’s conversion know how. All you need to do is pick one and make it work for you.

    A lot of SaaS companies will claim they’re user-friendly but are actually a swamp of confusing features – not so Unbounce. What you see is what you get with the builder, so you can preview edits as you intuitively create what’s in your head. There’s the easy stuff (e.g. adding and arranging videos, copy, branding, buttons and testimonials) but also a load of advanced options (e.g. video backgrounds, visitor-triggered lightboxes, countdown timer and parallax scrolling). You can also easily duplicate pages, create variations and assign it a custom URL.

    It’s highly unlikely your existing CMS will be able to this without the need for custom development, meaning Unbounce is the quickest possible way to get your landing page published.

    In September 2021, Unbounce launched a new ethos called “conversion intelligence.” It rejigs their entire offering around data and automation, with a Smart builder that removes any of the guesswork around what will and won’t work. It recognises that many marketers don’t use all the optimisation and testing tools at their disposal, so Unbounce’s AI will do it for you.

  • 🎨 Templates for every occasion

    Your shortcut to sexy, high converting landing pages. Unbounce’s free collection of 100+ best-practice templates have you back for every type of campaign, from lead generation for B2B SaaS, demo pages, presales, magazine subscriptions, upcoming events, ebooks, lead magnets and more. You can customise each landing page design till your heart’s content without being constrained by rulers, grids or bad stock photography (thanks to Unsplash!).

    Every landing page template works with Wordpress and extend to popups, sticky bars and AMP pages too. And if any of the Unbounce templates don’t do it for you, you can also purchase them from partners such as Themeforest from around the $20 mark.

    Unbounce may pitch its easy-to-use builder as its best feature, but for me it’s beauty and range of their landing page examples that steal the show.

  • 🛒 Best chance of a conversion

    You’ve set yourself up for success with a great looking landing page, now finish the job. Let’s make it a high converting landing page.

    All plans include unlimited A/B testing and access to Unbounce’s AI anticipation and optimisation engines - Smart Traffic and Dynamic Text Replacement.

    Dynamic Text Replacement is Unbounce’s answer to landing page personalisation. The feature replicates the copy on your landing page, based on the keywords users type in before clicking on your PPC ads. It doesn’t take a genius to know added relevance equals better conversion. Why settle for a single version of your landing page, when Unbounce can automate testing for you!

    Unbounce’s Smart Traffic is an optimisation algorithm that serves up the best variation to each visitor, based on other attributes than the ad they’ve seen. This context-rich feature looks at attributes like user location, browser behavior and their device to determine which variation of your landing page and offer will convert visitors best.

    They do traditional A/B testing too. Take any landing page, duplicate it, and experiment with headlines, messaging, design and call to actions to discover what drives actually conversion.

  • ✍️ Smart Copy - AI writing assistant

    Not everybody is a gifted writer. Unbounce’s new Smart Copy feature auto-generates a few versions of your sample landing page copy, speeding up the process significantly. AI writing tools are all the rage since CopyAI and MeetEdgar came on the scene and showed what’s possible. Tell Unbounce a bit about your company and tone of voice and it’ll produce product descriptions, taglines, blog snippets and more, consistent with your brand.

  • 🖇️ Do even more with integrations

    I’ve talked a lot about landing page conversion, but what happens after someone has signalled an interest?

    Enter Unbounce’s many integrations. In short, they allow you to seamlessly hand a contact over to marketing and CRM apps.

    You’ve be granted a treasured spot in your lead’s inbox, follow-up accordingly with Mailchimp, Salesforce or HubSpot. Perhaps a live chat could help. Or a form submissions posted to a Slack channel could alert your sales team. Or maybe a Shopify buy button is in order.

    Unbounce integrations make all of these a possibility and a hell of a lot more.

  • 👋 Say 'hi' with popups and stickies

    Forms are the cornerstone of all effective lead generation landing pages.

    It takes mere minutes to add popups and sticky bars to any page on your website – from pricing pages, to blog posts, to homepages. Effortlessly nudge them towards your goal.

    Unbounce allows you to create custom lead generation and contact forms too, complete with unique targeting and triggers, such as scroll delays, source or frequencies of visits. Test new promotions, run discount codes, time-limited offers and pre-orders. Unbounce has thought of it all.

  • 🔐 Tempt with gated content

    Lead magnets are a great way to entice new leads. Put your killer content – be it a one-page PDF, eBook, video or webinar - behind a form, so it can be unlocked with an email address.

    If you’re serious about growing your email list or want to pre-qualify leads, this is a winning feature.

  • 💨 Little details limit load time

    The worry with any plugin is that it slows down your site. There’s a compromise, no doubt, but what mitigations do Unbounce make?

    I’m pleased to report Unbounce automatically optimises images so you don’t have to. There’s also an Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) option that load up to 85% faster than standard mobile pages. Plus they present SVG images with their tiny file sizes. And lots more. Load time is too often an afterthought so it’s refreshing to see it properly considered as a key component effective landing pages.

Things to consider

  • Join the Unbounce Community

    You don’t have to go it alone. Unleash your full conversion potential by getting active in the Unbounce community. The forum is a treasure trove of advice and industry best practice from the brains of Unbounce Pros and conversion obsessives.

    Unbounce also undertakes seminal research on conversion rates and strategies for the benefit of all marketers, and you’ll be the first to hear about it here. The recent Conversion Benchmark Report is a must-read and can finally answer ‘What’s a good conversion rate for my landing page?’

  • Free landing page analyzer

    How do you build perfect landing page?

    Unbounce’s own lead magnet is a free analysis of your landing page’s effectiveness. Filling out the short form gives your test results in the form of scores for copy analysis, conversion centred design, SEO, message match, mobile friendliness and more - all compared to industry standards. You also get a handy list of quick actions for improving your page.

  • Tackle PPC leakage

    The cost of PPC ads has tripled in recent years and is only ever going up. Instead of sending traffic to your website at large, Unbounce allows you to pair every ad with a laser-focused landing page designed to convert. This includes the Dynamic Text Replacement I mentioned earlier that personalises the experience for every individual user. Unbounce claim their own tests show an increase in conversion by 65% when following this advice, which in turn improves your Ad Quality Score and cost-per-acquisition. If you’re finding your Google Ads aren’t working as well as they used to, maybe its your landing pages that’s really to blame.

Unbounce Pricing & Offers

from $90 per month

Essential plan - 75 Landing Pages

The new Conversion Intelligence features are available on all plans. Higher pricing tiers increase your landing pages and popups limits and opens up more features, including AMP landing pages, launch scheduling, priority support and some of the advanced popup targeting settings. There’s also some technical features reserved for the Enterprise plan, such as audit logs, dedicated support and page migration. However, most features remain in place across all plans and a sizeable 500,000 page view limit, so you’re getting a lot of bang for your $90 a month.

All plans include a 30-day free trial. Annual subscriptions get a 20% discount.

20% off first 3 months

14-day free trial + Unbounce discount code for 20% off your first 3 months


Unbounce Alternatives

Anyone upgrading from DIY landing pages will be shocked just how much time they’ll save compared going it alone. In today’s day and age there’s absolutely no need to fight for development resource for creating landing pages and key conversion features. Unbounce offers a quick fix.

When it comes to other great landing page tools, the likes of Instapage and Landingi all offer easy-to-use visual builders, beautiful templates, and in-built testing and conversion rate optimisation. However, it’s probably HubSpot that offers marketers most, given it sits on top of its free CRM. Not only can HubSpot landing pages show dynamic content based on a visitor’s attributes, but it can also do so based on the data stored in your CRM. HubSpot integrates with Unbounce, however with HubSpot landing pages costing only £33.60 month you may be willing sacrifice a few features to save a little money.

You may also want to add in some social proof conversion with a tool such as Fomo.

Unbounce Support   👍  or   👎

Getting in touch with Support is easy. Simply click on the Question Mark in the top right corner of Unbounce and if the Answerbot can’t help, you’ll have the option to submit a question to a real person.

Unbounce’s response to my landing page template query came back within 3 hours with a pinpoint answer – not bad given it was submitted at 4pm on a Sunday (UK time)! Enterprise customers also get access to a dedicated onboarding trainer and their own Customer Success Manager, who is on hand for more strategic support.

It’s a bit tucked away but I also liked the open feedback Unbounce encourages in its community forum, asking customers what they think of individual features and how they can be improved. Always a promising sign that a company puts its customers first.

The Verdict

Surges score

92%

Unbounce is a shortcut to successful landing pages.

The tool easily passed my 3 hour test for getting a landing page live. Beating all expectations, my dummy landing page was up-and-converting within the hour!

I know I’m not the only marketer that’s up against crazy workloads and rising development costs, so the ability to create beautiful landing pages in record time really is a godsend. Add to that the new Smart Copy feature, and your writer’s block will never hold you back again. The pre-built templates look great out of the box and only require minimal tweaking to prepare them to go live. In terms of landing page design, I’d even go as far as saying it’s one of the easiest drag-and-drop builder I’ve used in any marketing tool – the only points deduction is because of changes to the desktop templates didn’t always automatically carry across to the mobile view.

Being fast isn’t everything of course and the speed-of-use of Unbounce prides itself on is coupled with a wealth of optimisation features that shouldn’t be underestimated. You can quickly create variants for testing, let AI work its magic on personalising the experience for every visitor, and be safe in the knowledge Unbounce cares about load time as much as Google does. You’re not just getting beautiful, responsive landing page templates.

Finally, I find it incredibly reassuring to know that the anatomy of its landing pages templates are based on the conversion learnings of all other Unbounce customers. The end product is proven to work and removes any rookie mistakes.

The result of all this is ultimately better conversion rates on the main lead generation pages of your website. Whether you’re trying to encourage a visitor hand over contact details, download a piece of content or hit the ‘buy’ button, Unbounce gives your campaign a better chance of success.

Find out for yourself with a 30-day free trial and an exclusive 20% Unbounce promo code with Surges.

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