Cleve Gibbon

Oli Garnder is the co-founder of Unbounce, the widely popular and successful landing page marketing technology platform. Oli’s 12 Step Conversion Rehab Infographic is a must read for anyone interested in building better landing pages. We’re still working our way through the gems inside that one.

Unbounce is a great SaaS based solution. It’s tagline, to “create, publish and optimize landing pages with IT”, drills home what successful marketing technology platforms do – they make marketers more productive through technical innovation.

Oli Gardner, Co-founder and Director of Inbound Mareketing, Unbounce:

Unbounce is a landing page platform. What do you consider to be the essential characteristics of a marketing technology platform (e.g. integration, user experience, data aggregation, others..)?

Online marketers can think of a marketing technology platform as a workbench, a place they can go to solve a wide variety of problems, employing more than one tool to do so. In the case of Unbounce, not only do we provide page editing and hosting, but we also provide split testing and lead capture. You should also be able bring your own tools to the workbench, and in the case of Unbounce, we do a pretty good job of letting you do that by supporting HTML and script embedding. Of course, we’re working hard to make it even easier to bring your own tools to the workbench by integrating with more of them (so you don’t have to roll up your sleeves so much), and opening up Unbounce so that the folks who make those other tools can also join in the work of making everything play nicely together for you.

A marketing technology platform should facilitate it’s users to increase ROI and to do this, it needs to bring value at a lower cost. A balance of ease of use and workflow, as well as actionable data are keys to a successful platform.

Online marketers can think of a marketing technology platform as a workbench, a place they can go to solve a wide variety of problems, employing more than one tool to do so.

Customer experience matters. Can you give me 3 (or less) areas that the unbounce platform contributes to making this optimal for their customers?

• Professional templates (designed according to conversion best practices) to get you started in minutes.
• Simplified one-click testing. Easily duplicate a version of your page, give it some weight and start watching the difference in conversion rates.
• A full-featured WYSIWYG editor that allows for complete customization of your page, if you so desire.

Can you give us some interesting stats (e.g. users, landing pages, conversions, subscribers, etc.) that communicate the scope, size, use, and reach of the unbounce landing page platform?

We now have literally thousands of domains hosted on Unbounce, with hundreds of pages being published every week. Barely a day goes by that we don’t see a thousand or two leads generated (over 200,000 business leads generated with Unbounce in our first year). Our customers are using Unbounce to create everything from single-page landing pages, to multi-page micro-sites (which doesn’t work as smoothly as we’d like yet, but our customers are pretty driven and creative). We’ve used Unbounce ourselves to run our first recruiting campaign, and one of our customers even put up a site dedicated to their wedding.

Barely a day goes by that we don’t see a thousand or two leads generated (over 200,000 business leads generated with Unbounce in our first year).

If you could improve one thing in the platform, only one, what would it be and why?

That’s a really tough question, because we have a long list of things we’re improving all the time. I think top in my mind is getting a public API out there. Or maybe getting the platform distributed globally so we can provide a good experience for everyone. Page organisation is also top of mind for us and our customers as they start running larger amounts of campaigns.

I think top in my mind is getting a public API out there.

Do you have a favourite marketing technology platform and who do you like about it?

I’d say that’s a combo between an email marketing platform and a social media platform. For emails I love MailChimp and Madmimi. MailChimp is really the cool kid around as far as email is concerned and has a lot of powerful features. Madmimi, on the other hand is a smaller system that not many have heard of, and while not as powerful as the bigger players, it’s by far the easiest system I’ve used for quickly sending out email blasts.

For social media, I use Hootsuite every day. Late at night I sometimes schedule a few Tweets for the early morning (I’m not an early riser) so that I can hit the critical times. And then I’m literally on the iPhone app all day.

Wrap Up

We’ve started hearing the term workbench more and more by folks that are trying to place technology tools into the hands of marketers to make them more productive online. Thanks Oli for giving us the scoop on Unbounce. Very powerful story with great execution.