My quick review of this great email lead generation plugin for WordPress.
MailOptin can do the following:
- show newsletter forms throughout your site (capturing emails to your list)
- many form display options
- many form trigger options
- send emails right from WordPress
- show signup-statistics, conversion rates, and subscriber info
Why should you pick MailOptin? What makes it special against the billion other optin plugins like OptinMonster and Convert Pro?
1. Simple, easy to use
I can’t stress this enough. I love how simple MailOptin is. The plugin feels super simple and like you only have 1 or 2 areas to click through. I hate when plugins take over my dashboard. I hate when plugins try to package their 1 or 2 main features as 100 features (ARGH). MailOptin is sensibly-designed and clutter-free. I did not have to “learn” how to use it.
Oh and setting up my email integration was literally 1-click (it took me directly to my MailerLite API screen). Bonus points for being so damn easy! I didn’t have to hunt around or read any documentation.
2. Creates email capture forms
This is the main purpose of the plugin, and it does it pretty well. You simply create a “campaign” and then choose from a few options. It’s like 5 clicks worth of work and you’ll have an email-capture form created within a minute.
Most of you using an optin plugin will be going crazy creating a whole bunch of them. Your head will flood with ideas of where to shove different forms into your site. The handy “duplicate” option here will allow you to quickly duplicate existing forms and then change only a few things.
3. Different form placement options
How do you want your form to show? MailOptin conveniently allows you all these options.
- Pop-up?
- Widget?
- Notification bar?
- Slide-in box?
- Or placed in (or after) your post?
4. Many display triggers
This is where the magic begins if you ask me. There are many display rules to choose from. And your head is going to explode with all kinds of mischievous ideas.
- Page targeting (decide which pages to show the form on)
- User targeting (all users or only certain users)
- Device targeting (desktop, tablet, mobile)
- Click launch (shows when button is clicked)
- Exit intent (shows when user leaves your site)
- Timed display (shows after set number of seconds)
- Scroll trigger (shows after page is scrolled a certain %)
- New vs Returning visitors (target the one you want)
- Referrer detection (show to users referred from certain page)
- …and more!
5. Simple statistics (reports)
I enjoyed the simple statistics page. It shows the basic stuff like number of impressions, subscribers, and conversion rate. But you can also see which campaigns and pages are generating the most subscribers, which then gives you ideas to go back and do specialized campaigns for those pages. You can also clear the stats if they’re clogging up your database.
- I think I might have liked to see data ranges (up to 90 days or one year). But I can understand showing only the last 30 days might be more sensible for the database.
6. Send emails from WordPress
You can send (and automate) emails right from WordPress. The most common would be to automate so it sends out an email whenever you have a new post. But you could also do your own manual one-off emails. Random affiliate deals, new products, etc.
This feature is really useful if you hate logging into your email marketing service and mucking through their content builder (ughhhh, I dread it). Also from what I see, it seems most other email lead plugins cannot do this.
7. See your “leads” (aka form submissions)
At first, I thought I wouldn’t care about this feature but I’ve come to love it. MailOptin has a “leads” page where you can see info from all completed form submissions.
It shows you their name/email, which browser, which page, which page referred them, which campaign they filled out. It’s actually really useful to get a glance at who’s signing up. Normally, you wouldn’t be able to see this unless you logged into your email marketing account.
8. A/B Split Testing
This is a really hot feature right now and I don’t take it lightly. You can easily enable the split-testing feature on any campaign which then creates a duplicate of it with which you can variate some things. You can create as many splits as we you want.
Then compare success rates between them and choose your winner. It’s a lot of fun and a good chance for you to try out different wordings until you find a winner. Perfect for the aspiring copywriter inside of you!
9. Solid documentation
Their documentation is helpful and very easy to use. Just enough text and images to help you figure everything out by yourself. The plugin was easy enough for me to use and the documentation covered whatever little things I need more explanation on.
10. Coded well
The plugin is fast, lightweight, developed by someone I respect and built for speed. So many email-collector plugins out there are bloated and lag your site or load 3rd-party assets (which I can’t stand). MailOptin is solid and clean!!!
MailOptin vs OptinMonster, Convert Pro, Thrive Leads
MailOptin stacks up very nicely against the big dogs for me. It’s more affordably priced despite having most of their features, coded better, and faster than the others.
- OptinMonster – considered the premium WordPress lead generation plugin, most features and most expensive (I’d say even “too expensive”). Can be overkill for many people.
- Thrive Leads – I hate anything by Thrive. Bloated and will make your site slow. It doesn’t scale well. The bigger site your site, the more traffic and more forms you have, the more it slows everything down!
- Convert Pro – I’m generally not a fan of anything by BrainStorm Force (same development company as Astra theme). But this one is probably the most popular and most affordable alternative to OptinMonster. It also does have most of the features that OM has and also allows full form-building functionality. With that said, I feel MO is faster than CP and I think better reporting.
Suggestions for improvement:
- More formbuilder customization – this is MailOptin’s weakest area. You can’t drag and drop custom designs from scratch like with other plugins. You have to use the built-in templates and customize from that. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it weren’t for images not cropping in the right aspect (they often came out too fat).
- Updated form designs – I’ve heard some people make fun of their outdated-looking designs and there’s truth to it. But hey, just pick a clean font, clean colors and it will look just as modern as anybody else. For newbie users, having super modern designs right out of the box would be most helpful.
- Auto-fill campaign name – if user forgets to enter a campaign name, put placeholder text of “Campaign #1” and auto-increment. Great for rapid fire users like me too lazy to type in a name.
- Preview campaign – allow a “preview” option in the Actions menu. It’s really helpful for remembering what the differences are (especially between split-tests). Even better would be showing this preview when cursor hovers over the campaign name.
- Show campaign type – I don’t really need this but it might be cool if I could always see the campaign type. It’s fine appended to the campaign name at the end (currently). Just keep it showing all the time.
- Reorder the MailOptin menu – currently shows Settings > Emails > Campaigns. I would switch it exactly opposite… Campaigns > Emails > Settings. I think this makes more sense so I don’t have to skip over the Settings and Emails every time I use it.
- Fullscreen and Content Locker features – ok, now I’m just making random fantasy requests I saw from OptinMonster. If you can add this, Collins…that would be so awesome. But no worries if you can’t.
- Add conversion page column to the “Leads” page – this would be so helpful to see my most successful pages at a glance. I think adding a Dashboard widget displaying the last 10 entries would be great as well (showing name & conversion page).
MailOptin is great for small businesses
If you’re looking for a solid email lead generation plugin that’s super simple and easy to use, has a nice set of features, coded lightweight to keep your site fast, AND doesn’t cost an arm and a leg…MailOptin is your easy winner.
It’s fun to use. Really quick to set up. You’ll see lots of value regardless if you’re a small site with only 1 or 2 forms, or a power-user with over 50 forms. I was testing this on two of my critical sites and shocked how quickly I picked up new subscribers.
The starter plan costs $79/year for 1 site (with no impression limits) and comes with all the pro features.
- Try MailOptin today.
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