Landing pages are the cornerstone of online conversions. Actually, there’s a pretty high chance you’ve already visited a landing page or two today before reading this article. In fact, although possibly unaware of that, you’ve probably been on a number of Unbounce landing pages during your life on the internet.
The Importance of Landing Pages
What exactly is a landing page? In a nutshell, a landing page is any page on your website where you send your visitors with the goal of initiating a conversation and closing a deal. What does a landing page look like? Here’s an example of a landing page made by Unbounce for Unbounce:
Landing pages can be used for almost any purpose – to sell a product, generate leads, promote a course, invite people to a webinar or conference, offer a discount, or make an announcement. So, why are the businesses so crazy about landing pages? Certain stats show that landing pages (when properly tested and targeted) can boost conversion rates by up to 300%.
We know figures sometimes speak louder than words, so let us show you the importance of landing pages through some actual numbers – Conversion Rate Experts managed to generate $1M for Moz using landing page optimization and email marketing only. This case study clearly shows that a great landing page can bring you significant revenue, but how to create one that will?
Contrary to the popular belief, not everybody is a developer/designer these days. In order to create a perfect landing page or customize any page to fit your specific needs, it’s going to require at least some coding. With that in mind, you have two choices – either hire a professional to do it for you or use a landing page creation software. If you opt for the latter, it’s time for Unbounce to kick in.
What is Unbounce?
Unbounce advertises as the conversion platform for marketers. Essentially, it is a web service for creating and testing customized landing pages, website popups, and sticky bars. More importantly for an average marketer, Unbounce caters to those users who don’t have much technical knowledge but still want great-looking landing pages.
More than 14,000 customers have so far used Unbounce to improve their conversions, including some of the big brand names such as New Balance, The New York Times, Vimeo, StumbleUpon, Hootsuite, Campaign Monitor, Indochino, Thomson Reuters, and many others. Let’s examine some of their experiences with Unbounce.
Unbounce Case Studies
New Balance, the famous footwear manufacturing company, drove 200% more sales using Unbounce mobile landing pages.
A custom men clothing store, Indochino, used Unbounce landing pages to get 800+ showroom bookings, 40 purchased suits, and 750+ newsletter signups in 9 months.
Canvas Factory, on the other hand, used just one Unbounce popup and got over $1M in untapped revenue. Sometimes it’s all about smart targeting and good timing.
What about the people behind this success?
Oli Gardner, the co-founder of Unbounce, recently shared with Journey to Seven Figures Podcast how Unbounce used content marketing and partnerships to grow their website traffic to 800,000 monthly visitors and how focusing on the right customer helped them grow to 14k users and $17M in revenue.
How to Create a Landing Page Using Unbounce (No Coding Skills Required)
Building a landing page the traditional way can be tedious and time-consuming. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. With Unbounce, you can create a landing page faster than your developer, with absolutely no coding skills required. Just follow the next few steps and you’ll get yourself a lovely landing page in no time.
Step #1 – Choose a Template (Or Start from Scratch)
Unbounce enables you to choose from 100+ landing page templates (including popup and sticky bar templates). Use the Unbounce Builder drag-and-drop feature to customize one of our own designs or start your own from a blank page – the choice is yours. In order to customize your landing page, you can:
- Pick out the most suitable template for your industry, campaign, or conversion goal
- Add/remove different page elements
- Edit images and text
- Adjust colors and fonts
- Add forms and lightboxes
Or, if you decide to start from scratch, you can add new page sections and drag and drop all the page elements to preferred positions, in order to fully customize the page to fit your needs.
Step #2 – Tweak Your Landing Page Layout for Mobile View
Once you’ve built the desktop version of your page, you should adjust it for mobile devices as well. This is especially important if you have in mind that 52.2% of website traffic worldwide in 2018 is generated through smartphones.
The easiest way to do this is to use the Unbounce’s Layout Assistant tool, which will do around 80% of the work, while you just have to adjust the few remaining page elements and maybe hide the ones you don’t want to show on mobile.
Step #3 – Configure Your Landing Page Settings
In step 3, you can optimize your landing page by adjusting your SEO settings. Also, make sure to write an attention-grabbing title and meta description. In addition, here you can set up your own customizable confirmation page. It can be a simple ‘Thank You’ page or something that offers additional value to your new customer.
In order to monitor progress and track your success, you need to set conversion goals (and which action you want to track as a conversion). For example, you can choose to track form submissions as conversions.
Step #4 – Set the Landing Page URL
At this point, you’re gradually approaching the launching stage. Just set a domain where you’d like your page to be published and choose a URL of your liking. Far from being the most important aspect of your page, URL still can help you gain an edge over your competition, so always make sure to structure your URLs properly.
Step #5 – Use Unbounce Script Manager to Embed Tracking Scripts
For every campaign, it’s essential to track progress in order to be able to measure success (or the lack of it) and act accordingly. With Unbounce, it’s super easy to embed Google Analytics or AdWords scripts to multiple landing pages at the same time. Or you could create your own custom scripts and embed them just as easily.
Step #6 – Integrate
Integrate Unbounce with your CRM and marketing automation tools in order to pass leads. Choose from a bunch of integrations, such as Hubspot, MailChimp, Salesforce, Zoho, and many others.
Step #7 – Preview and Publish
Congratulations, you’ve reached the final step. Just preview your desktop and mobile versions of landing pages, and once you’re sure everything is set the way you want it to be, hit the ‘Publish Page’ button.
That’s it – creating and publishing landing pages has never been simpler, thanks to Unbounce!
Pro Tip #1 – Duplicate Pages
Once you’ve set up your first landing page, most of the hard work is done. In order to speed up the production, you can duplicate pages with a single click and then make the necessary adjustments to tailor them according to each specific campaign’s needs.
Pro Tip #2 – Perform A/B Testing
From landing pages to online quizzes, it’s important to A/B test just about everything in the world of digital marketing. You can employ the Unbounce duplication feature once again to create a copy of your page, tweak it a bit, and share the traffic across the two landing page variants to see which one comes out as a winner.
Unbounce Plans and Pricing
Unbounce allows you to choose from three plans – Essential, Premium, and Enterprise. The basic Essential plan is $79 per month (with the annual billing plan, offering 20% off regular monthly price), while the customizable, top-of-the-range Enterprise plan starts at $399.
In case you’re still not sure whether Unbounce is the right tool for your needs, it comes with a free 30-day trial.
Unbounce Alternatives
The evident success and efficiency of landing pages in the lead generation have led to even fiercer competition when it comes to similar tools. In addition to Unbounce, two major names pop out as the forerunners in the field of landing page creation tools – LeadPages and Instapage.
LeadPages
LeadPages was founded in 2012 and it’s currently the most popular choice with 44,000+ businesses using its services. Some of the big names using LeadPages include Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Fortune.
When it comes to pricing, the Standard plan is $25/month, while the Professional plan costs $48/month (and it gives you access to additional features such as LeadLinks and A/B testing). Those who want to get the most out of their landing pages will have to cash out $199/month for the Advanced plan.
If you’re looking to find out more about this software, feel free to check out this comprehensive guide to LeadPages.
Instapage
Instapage was launched in 2012, about the same time as LeadPages. It offers similar services, such as landing page creation, a range of templates with customizable elements, split testing, and detailed analytics.
The basic Core license starts at $69/month, the Optimizer plan costs $99/month, while it will cost you $179/month for the Team and Agency license. There’s also the customized Enterprise plan with advanced functionality for which you can request a demo.
Lead Generation Alternatives
As we’ve been talking about landing pages in terms of their lead generation potential, we should also briefly examine some of the other effective means of obtaining leads:
- Ebooks. Some say the use of ebooks for lead generation is a thing of the past, but with a high-quality material and adequate promotion, you can still capture some serious leads using ebooks.
- Free video training/course/software. Offer your audience the opportunity to learn something new for free, in return for some leads. Or simply add the prefix ‘free’ next to anything and it will instantly add lead generation potential to it.
- Online quizzes. A hidden gem of lead generation. Online quizzes are the next big thing when it comes to capturing leads, due to their ever-increasing popularity on social media. If you’re looking to take your lead generation game to the next level, you can try creating your own online quiz right now.
