To make Listing Building on your site Word Press uses the best tools
Grow the list of email addresses “. ” Start building your list immediately “.” The money is in the list “. These are just some of the phrases that have long been heard over and over again when it comes to doing business online.
In fact, email marketing is an extremely valuable and still too often overlooked tool. Often using the excuse that so many emails no longer read them. Like no one else, click on the banners, after all
For those who rightly believe in it, at the base of any e-mail marketing strategy there is a big challenge: to grow the list of subscribers , that is to collect the highest number of e-mail addresses of people interested in your content and / or what you have to offer.
To facilitate this task, numerous solutions are available, such as OptinMonster , PopUp Domination, Bloom by Elegant Themes , SumoMe, Optin Revolution, OptinSkin, Pippity Popups, Optin Ninja and many others. After having tried different ones over the years, my choice fell back on Thrive Leads and in this complete review I will explain to you the reasons that led me to this choice.
Most of these solutions, such as Thrive Leads, can only be used on a WordPress site. Moreover it is the most used CMS in the world and the publishing platform most used by those who want to do marketing using their own content.
Read also: OptinMonster VS Thrive Leads
Need a plugin to make the list grow
Imagine having a site that enjoys some pages well positioned on search engines, which guarantee you constant traffic from people potentially interesting for your business model.
Not people who, when they come to your site, swear at Google for having led them to that page, but “happy” and satisfied people to have found that content. Maybe that content helped them solve a problem, such as discovering new information or learning something they wanted to learn.
However, as often happens for many Web pages, once their task is over, these pages are closed or simply abandoned to go to other sites.
In situations like these, on your site you may have new readers every day, but probably many of them will never come back and will not even remember going there.
For this reason, building a list of email addresses is a fundamental and extremely useful process to ensure that your site has not only occasional readers, but subscribers with whom you can develop a progressively closer and more constant relationship.
To answer the question if it is necessary to use a plugin to make the list grow, the answer is NO . Most e-mail marketing services already provide the basic tools to collect e-mail addresses on the pages of your site. But it is undeniable that the use of tools such as Thrive Leads make this task much easier and offer unique features to make the most of your site’s content.
Why Thrive Leads: some of the advantages?
Thrive Leads is a plugin developed by Thrive Themes, a company that offers numerous solutions to transform a WordPress site into a powerful marketing tool.
In addition to being rich in features and providing a large number of ready-made templates, Thrive Leads is constantly updated, the support provided by Thrive Themes is truly remarkable, both in terms of assistance and training.
This plugin offers a wide selection of opt-in module types. From the classic pop-ups, to the ribbons, to the slide-ins, to the welcome mat, to the pits in 2 steps, passing from the classic forms to be inserted inside or at the end of the posts or in a widget.
It is therefore not necessary to install different plugins to create various modules, it is possible to manage all of them with Thrive Leads .
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The design of the modules can be completely customized with extreme freedom, not simply by changing the colors or images present in a template. With Thrive Leads you have a page builder that allows you to build and customize your modules as you wish.
One of the aspects that initially led me to choose this plugin is the large number of supported email marketing services . This is a fundamental aspect as some plugins only support the most popular ones . Imagine what a disappointment it would be if you wanted to create an opt-in module and have to give up on the best, simply because you can’t hook up your email marketing service to the module.
Thrive Leads currently supports the connection to numerous services, not just email marketing. Here are: ActiveCampaign , Amazon SES, ArpReach, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, ConvertKit , Drip, Facebook, GetResponse, Google, GoToWebinar, HubSpot, iContact, Infusionsoft, KlickTipp, MadMimi, Mailchimp, MailerLite, MailGun, MailPoet, MailRelay, Mandrill, Mautic, Ontraport, Postmark, reCaptcha, SendGrid, SendinBlue, SendReach, Sendy, SG Autorépondeur, SparkPost, Twitter and WebinarJam Studio.
You can connect Thrive Leads to multiple services, such as using MailChimp on some modules and ActiveCampaign or ConvertKit on others.
Thanks to Thrive Leads it is also possible to customize the forms for users already registered on your list and even hide them for those arriving on your site from an e-mail sent to them. Later in the article I will explain this functionality in more detail.
There are also numerous options to customize where, how and when to display the different modules. For example after X seconds, or when the user scrolls to a certain point on the page, when he tries to leave the site …
Another feature that we particularly use is the ability to perform A / B tests (even with multiple variants) on the modules, so as to experiment and find more easily which types and methods guarantee better results. Later on, I will take a closer look at this aspect.
You can choose between 22 different types of animations that can be applied both to the entire module and to the elements that make up the module itself.
With this plugin it is also possible to block certain portions of content to make them visible only to those who subscribe to your list.
Moreover with Thrive Leads it can easily implement solutions to make certain contents downloadable via e-mail such as ebooks or other types of files, without necessarily going through an e-mail marketing service. This feature, called Asset Delivery, is extremely useful also from the point of view of respecting the GDPR, since it allows to distribute a file even without forcing someone to subscribe to the list.
In the course of the article I will deepen the various points and you will discover many other advantages of Thrive Leads.
It is a paid plugin but …
Yes, Thrive Leads is a paid plugin, but considering both what it offers and the prices of competing solutions, the price is extremely competitive.
You can indeed buy the plugins with a single one-time payment and enjoy unlimited updates . It is therefore not necessary to subscribe to a monthly fee to use it, nor to have to renew the license every year. You can then buy and pay Thrive Leads once only 67 dollars (for a single site) to access all the features of the plugin and forget about it.
Being able to buy a solution like this with a one-time payment is an incredible advantage. Especially for those sites that have just been born or that are low traffic, for which a monthly fee could be too burdensome.
Not just pop-up windows
With Thrive Leads you don’t have to limit yourself only to the classic pop-up windows:
But you can also take advantage of all the other formats made available by this plugin, such as the Ribbon format , for which it appears and remains attached to the top of the page. Useful both to collect email addresses and to show an important message to your visitors:
The In-Line Forms allow you to insert modules, within the content of the pages and items. You can also decide to insert them automatically after X paragraphs. This way you can add modules to your items without even having to enter each item individually to enter a code by hand:
The so – called 2-Step Opt-In Forms, or the 2-step modules (which I will show you better later) allow you to show the data entry form only after clicking on a call to action :
The modules in the Slide In format are visible and attract almost as much attention as the pop-ups, but they are less invasive and annoying than the latter.
If you want to be sure to catch the attention of your visitors, the Screen Filler format is the one that guarantees you maximum visibility. This mode covers the entire screen, placing itself above the content of the page.
Similar to the Screen Filler is the format called Welcome Mat or Scroll Mat . Also this goes to occupy the entire visible area of the page but moving the content downwards, rather than placing itself above it.
Moreover, with Thrive Leads you can go to insert the various modules created also within the classic widget areas of your theme, such as in the sidebar or in the footer widgets, available in most WordPress themes, such as Genesis or GeneratePress .
Targeting: to always show your modules at the right time and in the right place
Placing the exact same form with the word “Subscribe to the newsletter” on all the pages of the site means wasting many but many opportunities. If you want to grow your list, the advice is to try as much as possible to convey the message more in line with the content of that particular page.
I’ll give you an example: in one of the busiest pages of your site you talk about radiators. Probably if on this page instead of inviting users to subscribe to the newsletter, you would offer them the opportunity to register to download a PDF with your updated guide ” How not to be fooled in choosing the radiator “, you could get better results ?
The pop-up that invites you to download the guide ” How not to be fooled in choosing a radiator ” would not have the same success if it were shown on another page of your site, for example in that wonderful article you wrote last month where you talk about baseboards. On this page one of the Screen Fillers that you saw a little while ago would look good and invites you to register for your free mini course via email, with the stimulating title “Skirting and Masterclass covers”.
In the ope that your reality is better than these examples, what I want to tell you is that with Thrive Leads making the form appear right at the right time and in the right context is child’s play.
With Thrive Leads it is possible to create modules that can be manually positioned in the content of a page or an article but also, and above all, modules that are inserted automatically according to the rules established by you.
When you create a Lead Group you can set a series of conditions in which to make appear or not to appear a set of opt-in modules. For example you can create a series of modules to be displayed only on the home page of your site, another that is shown only in some posts and another one that appears only in the articles inserted in a certain category. If you want you can also create rules for individual posts or individual pages.
This allows you to define with extreme precision where to show every single module on the pages of your WordPress site.
Furthermore, for each format, you have different activation criteria available. You can activate the module when the page is loaded, or after a certain amount of time. When the visitor scrolls to a certain point on the page or when he clicks on a particular element and many more …
Learn how to use Thrive Leads: Lead Groups, Lead Shortcodes and ThriveBoxes
Since this is a very powerful tool with endless possibilities for customization, a little practice and reading of the documentation is necessary to take full advantage of Thrive Leads .
After installing and activating the plugin, by accessing the Thrive Leads page, you will be faced with the possibility of creating different types of modules. Each of these types operates with different logics.
The first, called Lead Groups , allows you to create modules that automatically appear in different sections of the site based on the rules you will be establishing. The various groups are sorted and activated based on their priority. So if you create 2 groups with similar rules, only the one with the highest priority will be activated. This aspect is one of the main reasons for frustration on the part of novice users who approach Thrive Leads and start creating forms without having read the documentation;).
In each Lead Group you can activate multiple modules of different types:
and establish for each of them whether they should be activated only on desktops, only on mobile or on both:
The type called Lead Shortcodes allows you instead to create modules that can be inserted into any page or article on your site by simply pasting a shortcode . It is also possible to insert them directly into the site template using the PHP code generated by Thrive Leads.
The third type, called ThriveBoxes , allows you to create modules that are activated by clicking on the link, on a button and even clicking on an item in the menu of your WordPress site.
So, based on your needs and the result you want to achieve, you need to choose the type that best suits your purpose.
Opt-in in 2 or more steps
You may have seen more than once here opt-in modules that, once loaded, invite you to choose to answer with a yes or a no. If you choose, you will then be shown the form to enter the name of the e-mail address. It is a classic example of a 2-step opt-in module, which many situations can work much better than immediately inserting the form with the data request.
With Thrive Leads, creating such modules is child’s play and the nice thing is that you don’t have to limit yourself to just 2 steps. If you want you can safely enter more interactions.
Customize the content
A particularly useful and integrated tool in Thrive Leads is the one that allows you to customize the content of the modules created based on the type of visitor .
This feature, called Smart Links , allows you to create URLs with particular parameters that allow you to manage what to show in the modules created with Thrive Leads.
Thanks to this feature you can define a destination URL, select which category of optin-in modules will be involved by this setting (if all those present on the site or only one category), define whether to display the status “Already registered” on the modules or simply hide the modules. Finally you can also set the duration of the settings for this link:
or example, you could create a form on your site to stimulate registration for your newsletter. Thanks to the Smart Links feature, you can create links to be included in the e-mail sent to the subscribers to ensure that, when they return to visit your site, they do not display the newsletter registration form again but, for example, a special offer .
Or you can simply decide to hide the registration form from those who are already subscribed to your newsletter.
intercept the people who are about to leave the page
An increasingly widespread feature among the solutions that allow to create modules of and that which tries to intercept the so-called Exit Intent, that is the moment in which the visitor is about to close or leave the page. In Thrive Leads this feature is called SmartExit.
Let’s assume for example that you have created an opt-in form that appears automatically after the user has been on that page for at least 30 seconds. Using the SmartExit function you can make the module appear even when the user is about to leave the page even though the 30 seconds have not yet passed.
Signup Follow: improve conversions and avoid having your data entered multiple times to your subscribers
Imagine you want to invite your newsletter subscribers to a webinar. The first solution that probably minimally is to insert in the invitation mail a link pointing to a page where people can enter their name and their e-mail addresses to subscribe to this webinar.
From a certain point of view, however, it is a bit pointless to request a new e-mail address from a person to whom you have just written via e-mail. Furthermore, this additional intermediate step can also drastically reduce the number of conversions, ie webinar registrations.
In practice, normally you should do the following: Send an email -> Address people on a landing containing a form -> Register them to the Webinar
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