Overview
OptinMonster joined the premium email optin form plugin market in 2013, and managed to differentiate itself from the competition by offering a user-friendly interface, a selection of clean and attractive designs for its optin forms, and a new feature that wasn’t widely available at the time: Exit intent. When exit intent is enabled, popup forms are only triggered when a visitor is about to leave the site — something that quickly helped win the plugin plaudits from users and reviewers alike (especially those averse to bombarding visitors with popups on each page load).
OptinMonster integrates with all popular email marketing applications and services. You simply need to connect to your preferred email marketing service, whether it be AWeber, MailChimp, or another platform.
Detailed analytics are available too, and you can perform split tests between forms to see how they compare. This will help you get a better picture of what type of marketing campaign is working.
OptinMonster: The New Features
As mentioned, the biggest change to OptinMonster is that it’s no longer just a WordPress plugin: It’s now a hosted service that any website owner — whether they’re using WordPress or otherwise — can use to add a range of email sign-up forms to their site.
As it’s a hosted service, all of the form and other content creation and management tasks now take place through your account dashboard on the OptinMonster website. This has a number of benefits, including the introduction of a clutter-free, purpose-built user interface; the ability to manage all of your forms and other content through one central location; and one less (large) plugin to manage on your website. Your OptinMonster account is indeed still linked to your WordPress website via a plugin, but the current plugin is much smaller and more lightweight than its previous incarnation.
Making things hosted isn’t all the OptinMonster team have been up to, though. To reward early adopters and keep the plugin competitive, the developers have added some other great new features, such as:
- more form types (blank, sidebar, and in-content/after post, full-screen entrance and exit gateways)
- purpose-built mobile forms
- more form appearance themes
- a canvas tool for creating small window and full-screen custom popups, and welcome mat-style optins
- the ability to insert forms into posts and pages using shortcodes
- the ability to add animation and sound effects to forms as they load
- a manual optin trigger (i.e. to launch forms on mouse clicks)
- newly optimized code for faster loading times
- a testing mode for previewing forms
- a Yes/No form option for asking visitors a question
- success templates that are shown after a positive form interaction
- more controls for when and where popups are displayed
- an Adblock detection popup trigger.
OptinMonster launched in 2013 with three types of optin forms. Since then, the developers have added more options to the list of popup form types, and it currently stands at as many as seven sign-up form types — each with its own variety of templates.
Other features of the initial version of this optin form plugin included:
- lightbox, footer bar, and slide-in forms
- multiple form design templates
- the option to add custom HTML and CSS to forms
- the ability to create unlimited forms for different posts on your site
- impression and conversion stats for each form
- the ability to clone forms for instant A/B testing
- exit intent to only show popups as visitors are about to leave
- integration with all major email marketing services
- a user-friendly native WordPress user interface.
In short, the developers of OptinMonster went to great lengths to try to include just about everything you could ever need to start creating powerful optin sign-up forms for your email list.
How Does OptinMonster Stack Up Against the Competition?
OptinMonster is the best product when it comes to lead generation. Let’s take a look at a few areas where OptinMonster excels in comparison to other lead generation tools.
1. Loads of Features
Some cool features of OptinMonster are:
- Drag and drop builder: The powerful drag and drop builder makes it easy to build stunning optin forms in minutes.
- Campaign types: OptinMonster comes with 8 different campaign types to display the most attention-grabbing offers to your visitors such as lightbox popup, full-screen welcome mat, slide-in scroll box, floating bar, countdown timer, etc.
- Campaign triggers: Using smart campaign triggers, you can display the right campaigns to the right person at the right time. OptinMonster provides more campaign triggers than any other lead generation solutions such as exit-intent, scroll trigger, inactivity sensor, etc.
- Targeted campaigns: In addition to detecting user behavior, OptinMonster lets you create targeted campaigns based on the traffic source, the page or section of your website, geographical location, and devices of your visitors.
- Seamless integrations: Integrating your favorite email marketing services with OptinMonster is a breeze.
- Actionable Insights: OptinMonster provides you with detailed stats that help you identify how well your lead generation campaigns are performing. You can also easily A/B test your lead generation ideas and stick to what works best with your audience.
2. Easy to Use
OptinMonster makes it easy to build a lead generation campaign even if you’re an absolute beginner. If you can point and click, then you’ll be able to create beautiful optin forms, no design or coding skills required.
Its interface is tidy, which makes creating optin forms much easier than any other tools. On top of that, the built-in templates make it easy to get started, so you don’t always have to start from scratch.
It also provides seamless integration with your all favorite email marketing services, so you can easily build a lead generation campaign that converts.
3. Perfect for Businesses of All Kinds
OptinMonster comes with all the features you can expect from a lead generation tool. Whether you’re a publisher, eCommerce merchant, B2B business, or any other marketer, you’ll find OptinMonster immensely useful alike.
4. High Performance
Since OptinMonster is a hosted platform, it doesn’t consume server resources like other popup plugins that are built for WordPress. That means high performance is always assured without slowing down your site.
OptinMonster Pricing
The pricing for OptinMonster starts at $9 per month for a single site license with all the basic tools. Their Plus plan costs $19 per month which includes everything in the Basic plan, plus advanced features like exit-intent technology, MonsterLinks, inactivity sensor, etc. Their most popular Pro plan is priced at $29 per month, which provides access to every feature available for 3 sites.
The Growth plan supports 5 sites, includes everything in Pro, and allows you to add custom branding, so the app looks like it’s your own. You also get access to activity logging and client login details for $49 per month.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the move to a hosted service has improved the OptinMonster user experience. Now that you can create and manage your popup campaigns through a purpose-built interface, you’re no longer constrained by the limitations of working through the WordPress dashboard.
The new features that have been added to OptinMonster make it arguably the best email optin and custom popup creation tool for WordPress users. Thanks to the varied selection of high-quality templates, a feature-rich editor, and detailed settings that control when your popups are triggered, on which pages they’re active, and who can see them, you can really take your lead generation efforts to the next level.
Another nice feature is the ability to launch the optin form popups from a button or link on a page — thereby giving you even more flexibility in how you attempt to persuade visitors to interact with your content. The blank canvas option should also come in handy for anyone who wants to display custom content in a popup window.
In short, although the very clever exit intent behavior trigger that helped this tool stand out from the crowd has now been copied or adopted by many of its rivals, the new features, existing features, and improved ease-of-use mean OptinMonster remains about the best email optin form plugin on the market!
