One of the key elements behind a successful online business is its audience base. A larger and more engaged audience will help you grow your business. This is why you often hear the popular refrain, “the money is in the list!”.
Thankfully, WordPress offers a number of high-quality plugins (both free and paid) that are designed to help you build and grow your email lists. With this in mind, in this post, we’ll take a look at why small business owners should use list building plugins as part of their online marketing efforts and round up five of the best plugin solutions out there.
Why You Should Build Your Email List
If you’re thinking about growing your online business then a powerful lead generation plugin is a must-have. Here’s why:
- Personalized marketing campaigns. Emails are far more personalized than general marketing campaigns. You can segment your traffic to be able to send out targeted email campaigns.
- Full control over the list. A major benefit of having an email list is that it’s all yours. Unlike social media followers, your email lists won’t suddenly disappear because of updates to platform rules that can potentially limit your outreach.
- Increased sales. When a visitor subscribes to your email list, they’ve already shown interest in your product. Lead generation puts you in a better position to follow up with interested prospects.
Now that you have a better idea of why you need to start building your email list, let’s take a look at five of the best WordPress plugins that’ll help you get started.
5 Plugins to Help You Build Your Email List
Although there are several lead generation plugins out there that will help you build an email list, not all of them will scale as your online business continues to grow. We’ve shortlisted some of the best offerings in this section and highlighted the standout features on offer with each.
We’ll start with the premium solutions and then recommend some free alternatives, as well.
Bloom
Elegant Themes’ Bloom is a premium WordPress plugin that gives you everything you need to convert visitors into customers. Since different targeting configurations work best on different areas of your website, Bloom lets you use six different opt-in types anywhere on your website. These include pop-ups, fly-ins, inline forms, below content forms, widget area forms, and required forms to unlock content.
In addition to this, you can configure triggers with your opt-in forms to target your site’s visitors based on how they interacted with the web page.
Key Features:
- Ships with over 100 pre-made templates.
- Allows you to associate triggers with user behavior.
- Makes it easy to display opt-in forms on specific posts and pages.
- Comes with A/B testing and tracking functionality right out of the box.
Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is marketed as the list building solution that’s designed to help you optimize conversions. It comes with just about every kind of opt-in form imaginable including pop-up lightbox, sticky ribbon, in-line forms, 2-step forms, slide-ins, opt-in widgets, content lock, and many more.
With Thrive Leads, you can build hyper-targeted lists by displaying relevant offers to visitors. It also lets you A/B test your form before you deploy it so you can rest assured that its design is optimized for conversion.
Key Features:
- 10 different types of opt-in forms to choose from.
- Allows users to add animations and triggers to their forms.
- Comes with form tracking and reporting functionality.
- Fully responsive and compatible with all major web browsers.
Optin Monster
Optin Monster is a popular, premium lead generation plugin for WordPress that comes with a drag and drop form builder. It features a number of pre-designed form types including lightbox pop-ups, floating bars, sidebar forms, and slide-ins. In addition to this, the plugin also lets you show targeted messages on specific pages or categories.
The standout feature on offer with Optin Monster is its Exit Intent Technology that works by detecting user behavior and making one last effort to display a targeted campaign.
Key Features:
- Built-in drag and drop page builder.
- Allows users to build segmented email lists.
- Comes with A/B testing functionality.
- Lets you track and view stats about your opt-in forms.
WordPress Leads
WordPress Leads is a free lead generation plugin that allows you to track your visitor’s user behavior on your website before you design your opt-in form. By learning more about your leads, you’re able to design better, high-converting opt-in forms and sell smarter from the get-go.
With WordPress Leads you also get a visual form builder and a bulk lead management tool that lets you search prospects’ contact information. In addition to all of this, you can also synchronize your leads with third-party CRM tools such as Salesforce and Zoho.
Key Features:
- Fully functional built-in visual form builder.
- Allows you to track and analyze prospects’ user behavior.
- Comes with a bulk lead management tool.
- Integrates seamlessly with over 36 CRM providers and over 39 email service providers.
Optin Forms
Fancy Themes’ Optin Forms is a powerful yet simple tool that enables online business owners to create opt-in forms without having to code. Once you have the plugin activated, you’ll be able to build a form in three easy steps: choose your email solution, select a form design, and customize its appearance.
The plugin integrates with some of the most popular email solutions including AWeber, MailChimp, and GetResponse. Optin Forms comes with five different form designs that are fully customizable.
Key Features:
- Incredibly easy to use.
- Integrates with the most popular email solutions.
- Comes with five pre-designed forms.
- Allows users to customize typography and colors.
Albacross
Albacross is a different category of plugin compared to the others we have covered here. It designed to help you convert your website visitors into leads by identifying who your otherwise anonymous visitors are, what pages they have been to, what they are interested in, who their chief decision-makers are, and how they can be contacted. It does this by looking at the IP address of visitors and mapping those back to known company networks wherever possible.
In addition, Albacross integrates with Zapier, so thousands of different apps are at your disposal, such as various CRM systems, email marketing tools, etc.
Key features:
- Allows you to identify the company network of your website visitors.
- Possibility to track the visitors’ behavior on your website.
- Zapier integration.
- Comes with tracking and reporting functionality.
Conclusion
Building an email list can be a daunting task – especially if you’re not sure where to start. The good news is that WordPress takes most of the heavy-lifting out of it by offering powerful lead generation plugins – both free and paid – for its users.
We rounded up some of the best plugins out there and listed their standout features. Hopefully, you’re in a better position now to make an informed decision.
Have you used any of the lead generation plugins on our list to grow your email list? Let us know in the comments section below!
