In today’s ever-changing world, digital marketing has evolved so fast that it seems so difficult to catch up with some of the new models of marketing your products but one aspect of e-marketing remains very vital to the success of any online business and that’s the evergreen mailing list.
Social media marketing is great, it can guarantee instant success but not sustainable success without a consistent budget. However, if you plan to run a long-term business online, paired with a pool of loyal customers that can be re-targeted, then building an email list should be a decision taken at the start of your business.
The major reason people shy away from email marketing is because it is perceived as being too difficult to make anything out of it. This in part, is due to the fact that only a handful of email marketing software are readily available to produce a strategy for building a profitable email list.
How Can This Problem Be Solved?
The best solution is to have a strategy using a functional email list building software to make the whole process happen without hassle. Thanks to WordPress which has a handful of email list building software that can do a good job.
So, the next challenge would be making a selection among the handful of lead generation tools available in the market; there are a couple of them which produce some nice optin forms in your site’s front end, but actualizing it is a lot of work in the backend.
The goal of any right-thinking email marketer is to choose a software that is very easy to install, manage and interact with. Coupled with the fact that it has to come with features that makes it easy to collect email addresses from visitors. This is where MailOptin comes into the picture.
Introducing MailOptin
MailOptin is a dynamic lead generation software with built-in features that will help you grow your email list faster. The plugin is built to collect email addresses from anywhere within your site, using different type of optin forms and settings to maximize conversion.
No matter how great your list building strategy appears on paper, if there is no complimentary email list building software, you may not get the desired result. Thus, you need the right set of tools paired with sufficient data, targeted displays and A/B testing performance comparison to really be a master list builder.
MailOptin is bundled with premium features like exit-intent, page level targeting, automated newsletters, click lunch triggers and optin analytics.
The Dashboard
After installing the plugin, the first thing you are going to notice is the dashboard which is very easy to interact with. From the dashboard, you can manage every setting in the plugin, you will find stuff like “Connections,” “Optin Campaigns” and “Campaign Log.”
Within few minutes, you should have created your first optin form and deployed it on your site to start collecting email addresses from your visitors.
Email Marketing Integration
MailOptin supports the leading email marketing providers. Some of them includes:
- MailChimp
- Sendy
- ConstantContact
- CampaignMonitor
- Drip
- MailerLite
- ActiveCampaign
- ConvertKit
- AWeber
- GetResponse
Integration is straightforward; all you need to do is insert the API key of your email service provider into MailOptin Integration setting. In cases where an API is not required, the plugin will aid you in establishing a connection with your preferred email service provider using an alternate method.
Essentially saving you a lot of hassle in finding out how connections can be established using any of the supported integration platform.
Setting Up MailOptin
Within the plugin’s dashboard, you are going to navigate through some settings that will prepare you for creating optin forms in few minutes.
Once you have connected MailOptin to your preferred email marketing service provider using the “Connections” tab, you can now start creating different optin form types.
Now, you will have to navigate to the ‘Optin Campaigns tab’ and for the purpose of the review, we are going to create the popular popup optin form called Lightbox in MailOptin.
Before we proceed with that, here are the other optin form types available in MailOptin:
- In-Post optin forms
- Notification Bar optins
- Slide-In
- Sidebar/Widget optins.
This is what the optin form types look like when activated on a live website.
Creating Your First Optin
Let create our first Lightbox optin form and start collecting leads.
In this guide, I have opted for MailChimp and this is purely my personal preference. You can integrate the plugin with any of the leading email marketing services in the market as revealed earlier in the review.
The next step is to create an optin campaign; navigate to “Optin Campaign” >“Add New” on the plugin. You are going to find multiple stylish templates to select from. Bear in mind that all of them be customized easily using its live visual editor.
Customization
Musing the live editor, you can customize every element of the optin form. You can alter things like the message, the image, the image orientations, borders, effect, colours and lots more.
Settings and Triggers
Once you are done customizing your optin form, you can setup up your triggers. There are a lot of trigger options called “display rules” you can configure in the plugin. The outcome will depend greatly on the responses of your visitors.
Here are some of the trigger settings available in the plugin:
- Click Launch
- After X seconds
- Exit Intent
- After scrolling down X percent
- Visitor has viewed X pages
- Schedule
You can use any of the trigger options and your Lightbox optin form would be displayed once the trigger option is activated by a visitor.
The beauty of it all is that you can set up multiple display rules for each campaign. Although, all campaigns do not have the same kind of display settings because of the way they are designed.
There are some other features you may want to consider before you enable your optin form and they are:
Exit Intent
Popups are generally intrusive and it greatly affects user experience. The exit intent feature on the plugin tries to solve this problem by making popup optins less intrusive while maximizing conversion. To activate this feature, go to “Display rules” >“Exit Intent” and turn it on.
Turning on the features gives MailOptin the privilege to read your visitors mouse behaviour, when it detects the mouse cursor moving towards the exit icon of your browser, it will trigger the popup optin form.
Targeting Optin Forms
The best lead generation comes from targeted optin forms and it is easy to create a segmented or targeted email list using the plugin.
To generate targeted email leads, navigate to “Display Rules”> “Page Targeting.” Here, you can determine the exact pages you want your optin form to appear on.
For example, you own a soccer website, it is possible to display an optin form on Barcelona page and another optin form on Manchester United page. Only fans of either teams would subscribe and in turn, you can start sending targeted mails. Imagine promoting Manchester United jersey to Barcelona fans, that would bring low conversion, but sending out jersey sale promotions to Manchester United fans using your generated segmented email list would greatly maximize conversion.
Eventually, the plugin will help you create a system where relevant emails can be sent to your target audience which in turn improves click-through-rate.
After Conversion
The after conversion option lets you configure what happens when a visitor subscribes to your mailing list. You can do the decide to:
- Display a success message
- Redirect them to another page
- Close the optin form
- Close optin and reload the page
Click launch
The click launch trigger is built for content upgrade. Assuming you have a free downloadable content. Rather than give it away easily, let your visitors pay using their email addresses.
What this means is that, you provide them a link to download the content right in their inbox, Of course, that would only be possible when they release their email address to you. In essence, the success of this strategy depends greatly on what you have as an incentive to offer your visitors, in other for them to willing-lingsubscribe to your email list.
Enable Your Optin
With all said and done,let’s deploy your newly created Lightbox optin form and start collecting email addresses.
Firstly, head back to the “Optin Campaign” tab and select your recently created optin. Toggle the activated button so it changes from grey to blue, confirming that the optin form is active and deployed in your live site.
Lightbox optin has been deployed and email harvesting hasstarted. This is the start of your successful email list building journey.
One Last Thing: MailOptin Analytics
One other reason people do not succeed in list building is because their strategy is purely based on assumptions. With MailOptin built in analytics, you can really plan your list building strategy effectively, because you will have enough data to aid you, make tweaking decisions and determine what works best.
Using the built-in analytics, you can track data like the number of impression, subscriber’s count and conversation rate.
You can take a step further by creating a split test:
To activate the split test engine in the plugin, navigate to “Optin Campaigns” and select the optin form you want to carry out split test on. Thereafter, click the “More Options” and create an A/B Split Test.
A new form will be displayed where you can give the split test a name and write notes about the changes you have made.
On clicking the “Create Split Test” button, you will be redirected to the optin form live editor where you can make changes for the second variation. Then, you can pick a winner or create additional variation.
Other Worthy Features of MailOptin
Here’s a summary of other useful features available in the plugin:
- Email Automations – If you just published a new post on your blog, you can let MailOptin automatically send out newsletters to your mailing list.
- Schedule – Control the time or period you want your optin form to be triggered.
- Scroll Trigger: Decide to display your optin form only when a user has scrolled a fixed percentage of your content.
Pricing & License
Pricing starts from $69 for the Standard version which is limited to just one site. For three sites, you can get a Standard license for $99 per year. It includes access to unlimited optin campaigns, exit-intent, click launch trigger, one-year support and lots more.
The Pro plan is $199 and It includes everything in the standard plan as well as optin adblock detection, optin scheduling, WooCommerce integration.
To unlock all restrictions and get access every feature in the standard plan, you need the Agency license which goes for $269. You are going to get advanced WooCommerce integration, advance EDD integration, third-party app integrations and priority support in this plan.
You can get MailOptin for free or visit the plugin’s pricing page to get an in-depth overview of everything available per license.
Wrapping Up
In terms of functionality, fluidity, and simplicity, you can’t take it away from MailOptin. From the point of installation, the plugin guides you into becoming a master list builder. Thanks to its awesome set of tools that makes every step in your list building strategy count.
Some highlights of the plugin include its exit intent technology, A/B split testing engine as well as its live visual editor for deploying engaging optins in your website. These are premium offerings taken to a whole new level, it is unlikely not to get your desired result.
If you have tried to get list building right, or this is your first attempt into building an email list. Provided your primary motive is building a profitable mailing list, MailOptin is all you need to make it happen.
