OptinMonster Review: Best Optin Marketing Solution for Rapid Email List Growth

We all strive for the success and it’s this desire that makes us keep looking out for the effective solutions for our business needs. Likewise, when it comes to email marketing, one has to make sure that they are using the effective email opt-in solution for their website. And if not, they are unknowingly missing out on leads and sales conversion.

Are you using an effective email opt-in solution to grow your email list?

For any business, it’s really important that it remains connected with its customers and communicate with them in a timely manner. And today, the most reliable channel to connect to your customers or followers is via email marketing. There is no better way to connect than to do so using email.

While sending an email to your readers or followers is quite an easy task provided you have access to some good email marketing tools. But, in order to make any marketing campaign successful, you need to have a strong email list. And building an email list is not a piece of cake.

What exactly you need to generate more leads and conversions?

To capture emails, off course you need a way to ask visitors to join your mailing list. But simply adding a sign-up form to your website’s blog post or in sidebar doesn’t guarantee your traffic will convert.

You would not believe but it’s quite true that even if you have a website with very specific and well-defined niche and with lots of traffic doesn’t always guarantee to grow your mailing list. So you need to decide on the right growth strategy and make use of right tools which can help you to a great success without having to put a lot of efforts. And one of such tools is OptinMonster – helps you create email opt-in forms without any coding.

In my review, I will list out some especially powerful feature of this email opt-in solution. Then, I will go more in-depth and show you how exactly you can create, target and manage your email opt-ins as well as integrate with your google analytics account to track impressions and conversions in a sole and highly-intuitive dashboard of OptinMonster.

A quick OptinMonster Overview

OptinMonster is an industry standard, cloud-based lead generation tool that helps you grow your email list. It’s the best email optin solution in market and works with almost all types of website including WordPress.

The idea was conceived by Syed Balkhi back in 2013, also a founder of WPBeginner. His vision took the lead generation process to the next level.

OptinMonster comes with all the tools that one needs to turn abandoning website’s visitors into subscribers and customers. What makes it a unique tool is that it comes with some popular features such as a user-friendly interface to create your optin forms using a drag and drop form editor, a great selection of attractive pre-designed email optin templates so you don’t need to start from scratch, and some cool features like Exit Intent.

Now that you know what is OptinMonster, let’s learn about some interesting features of OptinMonster, as they are the basic building blocks of this lead generation tool.

Discover awesome 8, and powerful features of OptinMonster

Easy to use, Streamlined OptinMonster Interface

What’s really appealing about OptinMonster is its interface. Although we have lot of tools in market that offers, if not all, some features similar to OptinMonster, but what is so unique about OptinMonster is its streamlined and attractive interface. The most recent release of OptinMonster v2 brings tons of enhancements and completely revamped user-interface for creating and managing email optins.

For any website, one of most important requirements of users is that screens have “an orderly, clean and clutter free appearance” without reducing its usability. And keeping the interface “simple and user-friendly” using right colour combination is a sign of good design.

People want easy-to-use, speedy, and responsive solutions and in such a case, nothing works better than one intuitive interface where everything is summed up in a single page. OptinMonster well adopts this design principle and helps save time for its customers as they won’t have to jump from one page to another which can sometimes be a frustrating.

Another big improvement that the developers made is that it now allows you to create stunning and mobile-friendly email optins.

Cool Exit-Intent Technology to Improve Conversion Rates

Exit intent is the smart technology used by website owners to show an opt-in form when a visitor is just about to leave the site. It detects user’s mouse behavior and show them a targeted message as they are leaving.

If you’re using any analytics tool on your website, you would have noticed that around 60 to 70 percentage of traffic will be new visitors. And the majority of the visitors that abandon your website, never come back. But with a successful exit intent opt-in form could boost your conversions by 200% or more.

Different Opt-in Types and Locations

OptinMonster offers you several optin form types that can be placed in many locations throughout your website. It’s a great way to increase visitor’s exposure and ups the chance they will join your mail list.

• Pop-Up – This optin form pops up at your readers and appears in the centre of the screen. You can create variety of pop-ups that can be triggered by timed delay, for example, display popup after a period of time or when a user scrolls to the bottom of a page. It’s an extremely effective way to generate and convert leads!
• Fullscreen – Well, you guessed it right! The fullscreen popup form will cover your entire screen. It works great especially when you need to bring attention to the action you want your visitors to take.
• Slide-in – Much like popup forms, the slide-in simply pops up at the bottom of the screen as the visitor scroll down a page and immediately becomes noticeable. It’s also considered as an alternative to popup forms because it gives a polite and stylish way to display information to your visitors without annoying them.
• Floating-bar – The floating bar optins can be extremely useful to grab your visitor’s attention. The optin form, once displayed, is locked into place so that it does not disappear when user scrolls down a page. It really increases chances that your website visitors will notice your campaign and take appropriate action.
• Inline – If you want to display optin form inside the content of your webpage, this form type is perfect for you. Unlike global pop-up and fly-in optin form, inline optin form performs really well to get the attention of already engaged visitors and encourages them to join your list especially when your blog posts are irresistible.

Selection of Premade Optin Layouts

OptinMonster offers dozens of premade form templates (~15-25/optin type) to help give your optin marketing a jumpstart. You can think of these as starting points and then customize and take it to the next level to build a beautiful opt-in box for any purpose. The premade layouts are a great productivity hack!

Once you find the right template that suits well to your design needs then simply select it, swap out demo content, adjust fonts, colours and so on. Each opt-in box layout is fully customizable. This helps to get your list building project off to a lightning start, without having to resort to a single line of code. Optionally, you can start with a blank canvas but I don’t think you’ll need to.

Campaign Targeting and Display Rule Engine to Boost Conversions

The one of the most powerful features of OptinMonster is its Display Rules Engine. I believe that its detailed triggering and display rules is what makes it stand out from other optin tools in market.

One of the most powerful and essential features of the OptinMonster tool is its inbuilt Display Rule Engine. I personally believe that its detailed triggering and display rules is what makes it stand out from other opt-in tools in market.

Quick Integration with Any Website

As we’ve mentioned in the beginning, OptinMonster is a cloud-based, SaaS product. To integrate with your WordPress website, you can either,

• Add custom code to your website
• or Install OptinMonster WordPress plugin to manage campaigns from within WordPress Admin Panel

Effective Conversion Optimization with A/B Split

If you want to increase the impact of your campaigns then taking advantage of OptinMonster’s A/B split test feature is the way to go! A/B testing (or split testing) is a powerful feature that helps you improve the effectiveness of your opt-ins by comparing two or more variants against one another to see which one performs better.

You can easily create two or more variations of your opt-ins and setup A/B tests from within the OptinMonster dashboard. All it takes is a few clicks of mouse and you will be able to test all aspects of your optins including different triggers and targeting.

One Tool for All your Websites Need

Though, it may not sound very interesting to everybody. But if you run a digital or an email marketing agency, the fact that OptinMonster is a saas tool rather than a simple WordPress plugin is going to make your life a lot easier.

Unlike any other listing building solutions, you don’t need to manage opt-ins forms individually on every website. With OptinMonster, you can manage all your optin forms, in fact plan your entire optin marketing strategy for all your websites, from one single interface. And that’s going to make things very convenient for you and result into time saving way to access and manage your campaigns online, anytime and anywhere.

Creating your email opt-in campaign using OptinMonster

Step 1: Creating a New Campaign

In general, a campaign is basically a “series of actions or events” that are meant to achieve a particular goal. In Optin Marketing, we create campaigns basically to increase our email opt-in rate, ultimately to grow our list.

You can have variety of campaigns running on your website. For example, you can run a campaign that offers free guide in return when user signups, another example would be to give a discount on product or service when user optin to your list.

So, let’s get started.

First, Login to OptinMonster Dashboard. If you’re not an existing customer, you can signup here for free trial.

Next, Go to Dashboard, and click on Create Campaign button.

On Campaigns Page, you will select type and template for your campaign.

1. Campaign Type – you will choose from five campaign types currently supported; these are popup, fullscreen, slide-in, floating bar, and inline opt-in form.
2. Campaign Template – you will choose a layout of your choice.

For this example, we’ll choose campaign type Popup.

Each campaign type comes with several pre-made templates which infact is a great way to start with. After selecting campaign type, you will see a list of templates depending on what campaign is selected.

How do you choose the perfect template for your Email Optin Form?

Selecting a template for your email opt-in form is a matter of click but what’s really important is the template that you choose for your campaign. The simple yet effective way to generate more leads through email popup is through form design and layout.

To get the best results out of email opt-in and generate superior email capture results, you can consider the following characteristics,

• Make form headline bold to grab visitor’s attention
• Look for headlines that are around six to eight words long
• Make email optin form descriptive enough for people to tell them what it’s about and what they get in return when they signup or perform an action
• Choose color scheme that matches your website, adopt clean and consistent look for opt-in forms

OptinMonster form builder allows you to preview and see how your email opt-in form would look like on your website while editing.

To preview any template, simply hover over it and click on Preview button.

Once you choose the template that fits your need, you can click on Use Template button to use that layout for your campaign.

Next, give your campaign name and choose the website to load this campaign on.

Finally, click Start Building.

Step 2: Customizing Optin Form Design in Visual Editor

Next step is to design your campaign.

You can edit the campaign by clicking on the block you want to modify, then editing the wording in the editor on the left. You can change the font, line-height, letter spacing of headings tags.

You can even customize your campaign fields, change their appearance, or add some extra fields to your campaign in a matter of few clicks.

In left pane, under Optin Settings, you can set campaign background, set borders, adjust padding and more. You can also put custom css here.

Finally, you’ll need to determine the success action of a successfully submitted form. Success actions include display a view, click to call, redirect to a url, reload the page or simply close the campaign. To do so, click on the Success tab button just above the preview panel. This will show Success Settings tab on the left pane, and there you can change the style of the Success view.

Next, we’ll configure when and who sees our campaign under display rules section of OptinMonster.

Step 3: Configuring Campaign Targeting and Display Rules

It’s very important that your campaigns are displayed at the right time and especially when a user is most receptive to join your list. But remember you also don’t want to bombard your readers with too many optin popups as they may find it so irritating!

With OptinMonster’s powerful display rule engine, you can effortlessly create countless display rule configurations for your campaign to control where on your website and when your optin will appear. You can setup from very basic to complex rules as per your specific needs.

Select Display Rules tab from the top menu.

Step 4: Integrate with Email Marketing Solution

OptinMonster supports number of different email marketing providers including Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, Custom HTML, Feedblitz, MailChimp, Mailpoet, MailerLite, SendInBlue, TotalSend and more.

Go to Integration tab from the top menu and click on Add New Integration button.

This will show a dropdown with a list of email marketing service providers and you can choose one you wish to use for your campaign.

Step 5: Connect to Google Analytics for Campaign Monitoring and Progress

OptinMonster seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics. By adding a Google Analytics to your OptinMonster account, you can analyze your data to see what’s working and what’s not. A few examples of the types of data you can see once you’re connected to Google Analytics:

• Real time data (who is engaged with your campaigns in real time)
• Timely Engagement
• Demographic information (by city, state, country, continent)
• New vs Returning Visitors
• Platform specific data
• Network referrals (such as visits from Facebook, Twitter, Instragram, etc.)

To connect, Go to Analytics tab from the top menu and click on Connect button displayed inline with Google Analytics heading.

Next, you need to authenticate your Google Analytics account in OptinMonster before you can enable analytics tracking for your campaign.

Just step away from running your first campaign on your site.

Step 6: Publish your Campaign

Once you finished creating your new campaign, it needs to be published. You will notice a Publish tab option in your Campaign Menu bar at the top of the page.

When you on Publish menu item, you will see the Publish Status toggle. By default, it’s paused. If you click that toggle, it will switch to Live. Don’t forget to click on Save button once you change the status.

Managing your Campaigns

Because OptinMonster is an integrated lead generation software, it allows you to plan your entire opt-in marketing strategy – easily manage campaigns and monitor their progress – from one easy-to-use dashboard. It gives you a detailed insight into how campaigns are performing, number of visitors actually engaged, which method works best and which doesn’t and so on.

In dashboard, you see all the campaigns, configured for one or more sites, under one account and in one place. The campaigns are grouped by site and you can view real-time detailed analytics on their performance. If you click on Analytics icon of the campaign under Actions column, you will see the analytics of the selected campaign and its performance in last 30 days. You can change the date range to filter the result.

You can also replicate a campaign with just one click, create A/B Split test to create variations which ultimately helps you get better results and increase your leads.

Analytics and Reporting

OptinMonster conversion analytics allows you to easily monitor the performance of your campaign by tracking various metrics like clicks, views, overall conversion rate. It integrates easily with google analytics and gives you a quick glance on how your opt-in forms are performing.

Identify your best performing pages with the referral tracking system which enables you to understand which post or page is getting the most conversion on your site.

You can use these actual insights to make data driven decision and grow your email list.

How much does it Cost for your Website(s)?

OptinMonster currently has 4 plans – Basic USD 19 (per month), Plus USD 39 (per month), Pro USD 59 (per month) and Growth USD 99 (per month).

With basic plan starting at just $19 per month for use on one website, OptinMonster is an affordable option for most. Though, there already exists some other lead generation tools in market but If you’re looking for something that’s exceptionally simple to use, integrates easily with any website, and also provides access to an extremely helpful features with premium support, OptinMonster is a strong contender.

The full pricing options are as follows:

• Basic: $19 (1 site)
• Plus: $39 (3 sites)
• Pro: $59 (5 sites)
• Growth: $99 (10 sites)

All the plans include one full year premium support. After this period, you will need to renew your plan to continue using the OptinMonster services. There’s also an option for 14-day refund if you don’t like their services without any hidden cost.

You can see details about their plans at optinmonster pricing on their website.

Promo: Save 50% Off on any OptinMonster plan on annual purchases.

Wrapping Up

OptinMonster is the smart solution for lead generation. It works out of the box with major email marketing services and integrates nicely with google analytics for traffic analysis. If you’re not tech-savvy, you can reply on OptinMonster for your optin marketing without hiring a developer. Although a little pricey at $19*/mo, OptinMonster is totally worth it when you consider the features that comes along with it out of the box and it can help you in improving the performance of marketing and sales.

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