Optimizing conversion rates is the number one priority for most digital marketers. Attracting and ‘hooking’ a future loyal follower can be an art form – one that baffles the best of us. Fortunately, there are a vast amount of tools to help you achieve your goals; especially within the WordPress community. In this article we’re going to explore the cream of the crop.
More specifically, we’re going to dive into the world of popup plugins. Once we’re done with that, we’ll move on to explore how you can make the most of your new popup plugin and maximize conversion rates on your WordPress website. Let’s get cracking!
What Is An Optin Popup?
Optin popups are a proven way to convert visitors into loyal followers. Optins enable visitors to enter contact information for subscribing to a newsletter or requesting more details about a particular subject.
Popups you say? But they’re annoying as hell, right? Marketing tools can be tiresome – there’s no doubt about it – but in the hands of a great fisherman, the correct bait can be the key to his or her success. Only you can decide if the results are worth the method. With that said, let’s get straight onto exploring the top popup plugins for WordPress.
There are a great number of WordPress popup plugins available, and sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a somewhat daunting prospect. Thankfully, we’ve already done the heavy lifting for you with our carefully considered selection below.
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1. OptinMonster
Build your own popups and optin forms with OptinMonster. This all in one marketing toolkit is a great option when you don’t know where to start since it has so much to offer. First off, there’s the drag and drop popup builder with easy preset templates. You can customize colors and even add dynamic elements to create high converting popups for your site. And options for exit intent and retargeting make them even more effective.
But in addition to popups, OptinMonster offers a host of other helpful features such as A/B testing, email marketing integration, analytics, gamification, countdowns, mobile support and more. The free version is a great way to get started, but for superior marketing features then you should definitely consider upgrading to an OptinMonster Pro plan.
2. CM Popup Banners
With CM Popup Banners you can optimize your WordPress site to grow your audience (and your income). Perfect for sharing deals, capturing newsletter leads, advertising new products and more this helpful plugin ticks all the boxes when it comes to optins.
Choose from pop-up, fly-in and full screen styles and add important information with the Ad Designer, like text, images, videos and links. CM Popup Banners also comes with the ability to select a specific post or page, as well as a number of popup triggers for on page load, click, hover, end of page, inactivity and exit intent. This way you can choose when and how your popup is displayed. So you could add a popup for a content marketing ebook on a related blog post when a user gets to the bottom of the page, or a coupon code popup on your e-commerce store when a customer is idle for 30 seconds.
You can also get the Popup Form Builder add-on to start capturing leads. With it you can build and add a contact form to any popup to collect customer information.
Another great feature is the ability to stay on top of your campaigns thanks to the built-in reporting. From here you can view statistics (impressions, clicks, ctr, etc) and run A/B tests to see which of your popups is performing better and make tweaks accordingly. All in all, this is a great optin plugin – and there’s even a CM Popup Banners Lite version you can try for free!
3. Automizely Marketing (Free)
Make marketing your WordPress site easy with Automizely Marketing. This powerful plugin offers tons of features for optins, coupons, upsells, web push notifications, social proof, live chat, SRM and more. And while Automizely Marketing really is an all in one solution, it is especially useful to manage your website popups.
So what makes Automizely Marketing’s popups so great? To start it’s jam packed with features. With Automizely Marketing you can create popups with optins, coupons, countdowns, upsells and more. There are also options for branding, popup triggers, display frequency, exit intent tracking, customization for desktop/mobile, and lots of pre-styled templates to choose from. And the plugin offers all of these features for free (yes, free) – all you have to do is install the plugin right from your WordPress dashboard. So why not get started today?
4. Brave
Create powerful popups with Brave. This all-in-one conversion boosting plugin offers 200+ pre-styled widgets to choose from for capturing leads, gaining social followers, promoting sales and offers, preventing abandoned carts, collecting user feedback and more. You can also use the plugin’s drag and drop popup builder to create or customize your widgets for your needs.
Brave also offers a number of helpful admin features like A/B split testing, multi-step campaigns, advanced targeting and tracking, campaign scheduling, CRM integration, and support for pretty much all popular email service providers (including AWeber, MailChimp, ConvertKit, MailPoet, GetResponse and more). And it integrated seamlessly with your social media offering support for social signup, sharing, social chat, follow and optins. If you’re looking to achieve your marketing goals, Brave is certainly one of the best choices for your business.
5. Optinly (Free)
Optinly is a freemium WordPress popup plugin that comes with the best in the industry features. You can create popup campaigns and set them live in under minutes with pre-existing growth marketing goals and relevant popup templates. The plugin also comes with advanced popup triggering options, a WYSIWYG popup builder, and the option to integrate with 10+ email marketing platforms.
6. Ninja Popups
Ninja Popups is a customizable popups creator for WordPress. With this plugin you can effortlessly create popups on your website for newsletter subscriptions, social follows, recommended or related items, and much more.
Popups are a fantastic way to grab readers’ attention, and Ninja Popups makes it easy to add custom popups to your website. The plugin gives you lots of great popup options that are mobile ready, fully translatable and full of features. Add popups that lock content until a reader subscribes or shares. Or add popups for special deals, discounts, or coupon codes. The possibilities are endless. One of the neatest features are the statistics Ninja Popups provides to show you which popups are helping and which can go.
Need more popup design options? Get the expansion pack! The plugin author created an additional theme pack for those who need a bit more variety. If you run a lot of promotions or want to use different designs for each popup type the expansion pack would definitely be helpful. But since it’s just a few dollars extra it’s work getting just to add to your toolkit for a later date.
7. Popup Maker (Free)
Popup Maker is a plugin that enables you to put just about any content that you can imagine into your popups. Plus it’s packed with a host of features like:
Popup opening animations
Complete positioning and size control
Theme builder
Scrollable content and more
8. Bloom
Bloom is a very slick plugin from the rockstars over at Elegant Themes. It’s premium too, so you get what you pay for – a quality product. No matter how you plan to add optin forms to your site, Bloom has tons of great features built in to make the creation process easy:
Six easy optin styles; like popup, fly in and widget
Over 100 starter templates
Easy import and export for sharing with your other sites
Statistics tracking to keep tabs on your conversions
And more – checkout our Bloom review to learn more
9. PopUp By Supsystic (Free)
PopUp By Supsystic enables easy, unlimited creative design for gaining more subscribers and social followers. It’s great for expanding your number of subscribers. This WordPress plugin enables quick customization of advanced professional sign up forms, even if you have no knowledge of code.
Responsive popups with friendly options
Customizable themes
Exit popups for capturing lost visitors
10. Optin Ninja
Optin Ninja is a premium WordPress Plugin designed in a way which will help you with drawing in new email subscribers. Collect email addresses and store them in a local database, use autoresponders via an API key or use any custom form. The plugin allows you to use one-step or two-step process for converting visitors into subscribers.
Each content box can be styled differently. Squeeze pages can be customized in details; use standalone pages or open them in popups, customize backgrounds, colors, fonts, etc. If you wish to try different options, Optin Ninja allows you to create simple A/B tests which may help you decide which approach to use.
The plugin is easy to install and works well with most WordPress themes and plugins. Checkout the plugin demo to preview all f the awesome optin page demos and to see real screenshots of the analytics graph, autoresponder, design options and the 300+ included graphics.
11. Hustle (Free)
Brought to you by WPMUdev, this free optin plugin offers tons of premium like features. Hustles is a great way to promote your newsletter, sales, free ebooks and more. The plugin includes intuitive options for creating popups, embedded forms or slide-ins and there’s even ready to use templates to get you started. And there are helpful options for smart triggers, schedules, social sharing, and of course integration with most popular email providers.
Hypothesis?
After all the plugin picking, popup customizing, and newsletter writing, how do you know any of this stuff is working? Although the magic formula shall be contested upon for many millennia to come, there are some experiments that most experts agree will actually produce the desired results. This comes in the form of statistical hypothesis testing.
Statistical hypothesis testing has absolutely nothing to with a certain large, mostly herbivorous mammal that is generally found in areas of sub-Saharan Africa. However, it does have quite a bit to do with scientific research in the field of statistics.
A/B testing refers to a randomized experiment consisting of two variants – A and B – whereas the former represents the ‘control’ subject and the ‘treatment’ is represented by the latter.
Confused? Well, thankfully you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to have a successful website. That’s what plugins are for! Although many popup plugins have tracking features built in, there is a plugin specifically designed to help you define, manage and keep track of A/B testing experiments:
Nelio A/B Testing is a powerful and versatile conversion optimization service for WordPress. The plugin itself is free, but the service it requires is premium. Here’s what Nelio A/B Testing can do for you:
Improve your landing pages
Write better posts
Test new themes and different menus
Test titles and headlines
And the best thing is, all of this can be done from right inside your WordPress Dashboard! Another great feature that will warm you up is heatmaps.
This feature literally lets you analyze the hottest areas of any page so you can understand your customers better. And because Nelio A/B Testing is designed as a service (albeit premium), all of the processing is removed from your website and lets their cloud handle the load. This makes for much faster site upload times.
Putting the Icing on the Conversions Cake
So we’re talking about popups in this post, but I want to give you an added bonus too. One of the most proven ways of increasing your subscriber list and keeping them coming back for more is one of the simplest: say thank you.
Tests show that including a thank you page at the end of a transaction (be it financial or otherwise) creates a big impact on every customer. It also creates a great opportunity to include links back to some of your other content.
Another great way to say thanks for the time we spent together is with, you guessed it – a WordPress plugin. Thank Me Later actually sends thank you emails to anyone who leaves a comment.
Awesome features abound:
Invite readers back to your blog
Link to your Twitter or Facebook for more followers
Customize emails for categories
Link to your RSS feed
Includes multiple language translation
Just as in the real world, a thank you goes a long way to making a reader, subscriber or customer feel welcome and they will love you for it.
Converting Visitors Hook, Line and Sinker
So the hungry website visitors have taken the bait and you have reeled them in. You have increased your subscriber list with popup optins, created more interest in your website, come to a complete understanding of your customers and their needs, and have even taken time out of your busy day to say thank you.
You may now proceed with conquering the world. Or if you’re still hungry for more, check out our roundup of the email optin plugins. Any questions, suggestions or critiques? Fire away in the comments section below!