Using landing pages in marketing has gone from something you do occasionally to one of the most important tools in the marketing toolbox. But designing and developing landing pages without a robust and user-friendly platform can be painfully time-consuming and unproductive for marketing teams and organizations without proper IT resources. Using a DIY landing page builder can save time and resources, especially when you want to make a quick change or edit to your campaign.

Choosing a landing page builder that offers ease of use and rapid skill acquisition is great for marketing firms and departments alike. Although there are many landing page builder platforms and tools out there, many find Unbounce one of the most robust and user-friendly platforms available to digital marketing agencies and companies with limited IT resources. Unbounce allows for quick and easy design and development of engaging and highly converting landing pages that are also responsive and mobile friendly. Unbounce also keeps up with the latest market needs and technology trends by constantly adding new features and integration points that are not only cool to use but also add real value.

Here we have listed some of the new features and updates to Unbounce that got marketing agencies and Unbounce customers excited:

Overlays add new dimension

 Increasing your landing page conversion rates is critical to continued success. Regardless of what you are offering on your landing page, every visitor who doesn’t convert is potentially one less customer. Creating a compelling and clear value proposition can often help. So does removing jargon and distracting images.

Overlays or lightboxes are often used to attract specific users and can quickly increase conversions. Similar to pop-up boxes but larger, they are used as an immediate call to action giving visitors a quick and easy way to sign up for exclusive offers, access a live chat feature, or learn about a sale. Lightboxes can open automatically or can be programmed to be user triggered. Overlays can quickly generate leads, increase signups for a newsletter or white paper, or optimize your traffic flow by directing users from low-converting to high-converting pages.

Unbouce calls their overlay product Convertables and they are so easy to use.

You can quickly build Convertables that perfectly adhere to your brand guidelines through the Unbounce Builder.

Image source: unbounce.com

Covertables can be triggered to launch on arrival to the landing page, upon exit from a landing page, or after a certain delay of time.

Roll-back to an earlier version

Unbounce listened to customer feedback about version control and now allows you to see previous versions of your page. With this builder enhancement, you can quickly and easily roll back to older saved versions of your page. Handy, huh? The best thing is that you can make changes to your landing page without worrying about losing the page that’s currently running.

No more panicked moments. Simply restore your landing pages to a previously saved page version.

Video Background

In early 2016, Unbounce released the video background feature to its users allowing them to add a video background from YouTube, Wistia and Vimeo directly on to the landing pages. While Video backgrounds were adopted successfully in the Unbounce community, but there were some concerns around using videos on landing pages leading to lower conversion rates due to distracting the visitors, web browser issues, or even internet bandwidth speeds.

As a result of these debates, Unbounce took the initiative to test out the use of video backgrounds on landing pages. Based on the results, they came up with some guidelines outlining when to use a video background versus a static hero image and best practices for applying a video background. The main finding was that video backgrounds work well on landing pages where the goal is to communicate a certain “vibe” or “feeling”. Some good examples would be landing pages a conference, performing arts event or restaurant. Read more about video backgrounds and the guidelines around them here.

Image source: unbounce.com

New page builder optimizations

One of the best features of any DIY landing page application is its ease of use. Landing pages are intended to be set up quickly so they can begin generating leads immediately. Easy-to-use applications can be learned quickly, have drag & drop features and templates, and allow changes and new version to be made efficiently.

Unbounce has recently added a set of new features and improvements to its landing page builder to allow for even faster and easier development of pages. Some of the most important ones are: Inline text editor, Snap to the content area, increased number of Lighboxes allowed,

In Line Text Editor: this new feature allows text edits to be made in place and see those changes as they’re being made, using the Inline Text Editor. Previously Unbounce users had to edit text blocks in a separate pop-up editors without the ability to preview the changes in real-time. Using the new inline editor, users can now edit text and highlight color, see spellchecking errors, edit line height/line spacing, view and edit source code, and place Dynamic Tex. This is defiantly a time (and sanity) saver for many Unbounce users. Here are the instructions on how to enable this feature for your page builder.

Image source: unbounce.com

Snap to the content area: this allows users to just click on an element in the builder canvas on the left side and it’ll auto scroll to the element in the page content pane making it easier to find the elements on the page. Watch a video to see how it actually works!

Up to 20 lightboxes: users were previously limited to 10 lightboxes per page. Unbounce has doubled that limit and now support up to 20 lightboxes per page.

Updated user interface for the page builder: Unbounce released a new interface in mid 2016 that that is lighter and faster than the previous version.   The page builder looks more modern and sleek and there were ton of back end improvements that made the page builder faster than before.

New integration points

As a comprehensive landing page builder platform, Unbounce offers seamless integrations with most commonly used CRMs, direct mail providers, and other third-party providers to allow campaigns to be fully orchestrated. Unbounce pages and forms can be easily integrated with MailChimp, WordPress, HubSpot, Salesforce or Constant Contact and many other commercial third party solutions. Unbounce has done a good job to bring new integrations to its users based on the latest market and technology trends. See a list of all Unbounce integrations here.

Recently Unbounce has enhanced its AWeber Integration to fully support AWeber Tags, which means leads captured on Unbounce forms will automatically push over to AWeber with the correct tags in place for sending highly-targeted, automated emails. 

Conclusion

We at Optimum love using Unbounce and are excited about all the new features and additions that makes building landing pages easier and even more fun! If you need help with creating advanced landing pages using the latest features including overlays, video widgets, and parallax scrolling  Contact Us today and see how we can help! We provide a free consultation to determine what landing page options are best for your business and marketing needs and goals.