Episode 108: Using AI for Lead Generation with Felicia Bochicchio at Unbounce

Mar 6

Felicia Bochicchio at Unbounce joined us on “Subscriptions: Scaled.” She has had a long career in SaaS technology that spans more than 20 years. She started in 2000, which was the early days of the subscription model that we all know today. Even back then, she and her colleagues were thinking about different approaches to subscriptions, such as a transaction-based model.

She eventually moved from California to her home today in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she discovered an amazing and welcoming community in the tech scene. One company she kept hearing about was Unbounce, which has been an anchor in the tech community in Vancouver for a long time.

In 2018 she was given the opportunity to join the Unbounce team as Chief Revenue Officer, a role she readily accepted. This was at a time when the company was starting to rethink how it operated, specifically when it came to its internal structure. Her trajectory within the company took off, and today she serves as the CEO.

What is Unbounce?

Unbounce is a company that provides tools for digital marketers to generate leads, sign-ups and sales. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to make constant improvements to its product. This means that marketers can build high-performing landing pages without any special coding or programming skills.

While Unbounce engages with people around the globe, the company focuses on the SMB market, primarily in North America and other English-speaking countries. As a subscription company itself, it is able to provide valuable insights and engagement with its customers.

The Unbounce onboarding process

An Unbounce customer can range from a company with just a handful of team members up to a medium-sized company with a full digital marketing team.

Unbounce’s roots go back to an era of product-led growth, much like the customers it serves. The focus is on understanding how digital marketers prefer to work and build products that make it easy for those people to be successful. This means that the onboarding process needs to be smooth, easy to navigate and have acceptable payment terms.

Most SMBs want to try a new service before making a long-term commitment, and Unbounce fills that need with a 14-day trial. During that trial, Unbounce provides support, which is critical in situations where most SMBs find themselves in which the marketers have to wear many hats.

Once they get through the trial, the Unbounce team works with them to identify their use cases and needs, allowing those customers to select a package at a price point that makes sense for their particular needs. The norm is a monthly subscription, but there are times when an annual payment makes sense.

Education is essential

Felicia likens the onboarding process for new customers to inviting them into your home. They come in knowing where the front door is, but after that, some people prefer to explore the house on their own and some need more guidance.

Unbounce has always put an emphasis on thinking like its customers, and this informs the way it educates its new customers through training and educational materials. To continue the house tour analogy, if a new customer is hungry but doesn’t know where the kitchen is, the Unbounce team is ready to step in and help. They’re often proactive with help, checking in with clients to ask if they need any assistance with anything.

The no-code process

The initial goal of the company was to help marketers build landing pages or mini-websites without the help of a designer or a software developer. This is critical when dealing with SMBs because they often don’t have designers on their staff.

Most marketers are creative people, but they may not know the ins and outs of turning their vision into reality in an online environment. They want to build campaigns that match the messaging from a pay-per-click ad or an email message with the same brand tone and style. Unbounce enables them to do that, and the Unbounce team is standing by if they need any help.

If a marketer has built a campaign in a slide show, the AI and machine learning tools built into the Unbounce product will build a relevant and appropriate landing page for that campaign that will result in higher click and conversion rates. Then all the marketer has to do is go through the page for minor tweaks or edits, and the page is ready to go live.

The AI effect

Most of the world is starting to understand the potential of generative AI and how it can help everyone from writers to programmers by making their jobs easier. Unbounce is digging into this new technology to build AI and ML tools specifically for marketers.

Over the years, the company has built a database of billions of visitor insights and conversions. It is leveraging that data to build tools that are optimized to guide its customers to create landing pages that aren’t just centered around the words the marketer types into the tool, but pages that are optimized for maximum conversion rates.

Most of its customers are interested in learning, and these tools help them learn and grow in their knowledge of optimization and conversions. If the customer wants pages optimized for traffic, Unbounce can tell them which pages generate the most traffic and which pages are performing poorly. Maybe the text on a poorly-performing page is too long, and the marketer will tighten up their copy in the future.

Felicia warns that generative AI is still in its infancy, or as she says, it’s still the wild west. She believes that it’s going to be messy at first, but the companies who are diligent about building the right tools with functionality that makes people’s jobs easier will rise to the top in the end.

She believes the biggest opportunities for growth will come for companies that are targeting narrower verticals. The technology is based on huge data sets, which the tools use to learn and evolve. Traditionally, companies needed deep pockets to be able to tap into data sets with billions of data points like Unbounce has. This technology will open the door for SMBs to analyze that data for their specific niche, just like large enterprise companies have been able to do for years.

Felicia calls this the democratization of data, and it is sure to be a game changer for their customers moving forward.