Marketer’s Delight – WordPress conversion theme

Are you looking for an aggressive conversion theme for WordPress?

• That looks like a landing page with lots of 1-on-1 sales copy?
• That’s designed to focus on copywriting quality and CTA?
• That’s ultra-lightweight?
• To replace an old Thesis site?

For those wanting the usual image-heavy pagebuilder designs, please skip this!

What’s a conversion theme?

I’m sure there are other possible names for these:

• landing page theme
• sales copywriting theme
• digital coach theme
• ebook marketing theme

They’re largely from that 2000’s era of website design used by digital coaches and ebook-sellers; plainly designed single-column websites with lots of sales-copy. This simpler design focused on 1-on-1 sales text appeals more to some users than a fancy store with professional aesthetics. Simplicity feels more trustworthy to them.

• Simple layout. Mostly single column.
• Lots of text. Varying in size, font, and color.
• Lots of emphasized titles and headers.
• Lots of conversion buttons, links, and newsletter sign-up boxes.

Other popular conversion themes (Thesis & Thrive)

Thesis was an iconic conversion theme around 2010. Used by popular bloggers which then influenced thousands of others to rebuild their sites using Thesis.

Thesis main features back then:

• Super fast, lightweight.
• Can customize your design without coding.
• Built to be SEO-optimized.

That made it a favorite over other themes at the time, that were complicated to edit and also bloated. Even if they did have easy customization options, none of them catered to what online marketers wanted. They were focused around layouts and fancy images/sliders….whereas internet marketers wanted only a simple layout and options to hook their conversion boxes to various areas of the site (before or after header, before or after content, sidebar, footer, pop-ups, etc).

In time, WordPress themes trended towards fancier sites with more interesting multi-column layouts and GUI-based design settings. Thesis fell out of trend but still hung onto its [now oldschool] followers while other (more graphical) themes popped up.

Thrive was the popular conversion theme around 2018. It’s still popular today not only among digital marketers but also affiliate marketers and heavy content sites like blogs.

Thrive themes cater to a wider group of users due to these features:

• Allow fancier layouts.
• Compatible with pagebuilders.
• Integrates with other Thrive conversion plugins (Thrive Leads, etc).

Like Thesis, Thrive appealed to the users of its time. In this era, users wanted fancier layouts. Seemed like everybody was using a pagebuilder. They also needed integration with other conversion plugins and Thrive’s ecosystem of quizmakers, coursemakers, countdowns, social-proofing looked especially appealing.

What are Marketer’s Delight top features?

Alex Mangini (the founder of Marketer’s Delight) has done a great job with his newly-rebuilt 2020 conversion theme that stays true to the old time conversion themes but updated for easy use today. It’s a powerful theme to get your landing pages up and running in no time, and fun to use.

1. Classic conversion design theme

MD is perfect for you if you like simpler design, landing page vibe and pop-ups and buttons. If you’re coming over from Thesis, you’ll be just at home here with a theme that’s more focused on conversions than design styles.

• simple design settings
• lots of conversion settings

If you want a pagebuilder, really customized layouts, or more modern flashy business/ecommerce styling…then MD is not the theme for you.

2. Flexible design

Like many conversion themes, MD design is simpler and more out of your way so you can focus on your content and offerings. This is different from the usual themes, where you spend so much time trying to get every aspect of the design to look right. The MD design areas can all be adjusted within 5 minutes.

• If you’re a power user and want to customize CSS styling, Alex has included simple handy styling classes.
• Google and Adobe webfonts.
• If you want to make your MD site fancier, you can.
• Check out these sites built with MD.

I think you should check out the Marketer’s Delight website. See all the different CTA box locations throughout his site and that’s a pretty good idea of what MD can do.

3. Conversion tools

Many conversion features built-into the theme so you don’t have to add plugins that add bloat or extra design elements to hassle with. I felt like I could do a whole digital marketing site using only the theme.

MD Gutenberg blocks included:

• Email signup form
• Content upgrade
• Callout block
• Share notice
• Bouncing arrow

Marketing and Optin features:

• Add tracking scripts to single pages
• Create custom sidebars for any post or page
• Create floating bars, popups, and email forms
• Add a featured video to your content
• Share buttons (super lean and don’t slow down your site)
• Edit Share buttons and icons order
• Corner notes (coming soon)

Other MD integrations:

• Email marketing – AWeber, MailChimp, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, Drip
• Custom HTML Forms
• Google Analytics
• WooCommerce
• …more coming soon!

“Dropins” available (these are CPT’s):

• Stream
• Bookshelf
• Videos
• Glossary
• Testimonials
• Beacon
• Related Posts
• Gallery Blocks
• Page Blocks

4. Lightweight

MD as is the case with many conversion themes is ultra-lean. It loads as fast as static HTML because there aren’t any big CSS or JS scripts. If you’re sick of conversion themes inching towards being more and more bloated, I can assure you that MD is right back to how they should be…super super lean. Text-based!

The coding is super clean. No wasted code or bloat anywhere. I think any purist developer would respect it.

5. Developer capabilities

MD is friendly for developers as well. You can also play with the following:

• Create admin pages
• Custom fields
• Post meta
• and other extensions on MD Toolkit

6. Requested features

These are features I’d love to see in the future.

• Child theme library – at least some different preset styles for first time users to play with. I think the hardest part of designing simple themes like these is coming up with harmonious color palettes.
• Border radius option – on conversion boxes. Some rounding can be nice.
• Built-in header styles – like some using an alternative (handwriting) font. Or places a box/border styling around them. Maybe it exists and I didn’t read all the documentation.
• Content alignment options – for each section, like header menu links or text in the footer copy widget. I want to center some things.
• Don’t change page on settings save – certain areas like the CTA, I would prefer to stay on settings page so I can test different settings over and over.

Marketer’s Delight is great for old-school style marketers

Conversion themes are for making long text and conversion buttons!

• If you loved Thesis but don’t like it’s complexity and now-dated interface, MD is refreshingly simple and back-to-the-basics for you.
• If you hate Thrive’s bloat, MD will be nice and super light for you.
• If you find most WordPress themes to be too limited or not have much styling options for your CTA items, MD will easily give you those options.

You will NOT like Marketer’s Delight if you want the usual pagebuilder themes with lots of focus on graphics. I recommend MD only if you need that kind of retro-ish landing page site design.

Marketer’s Delight is a theme that gets out of your way. No giant cockpit of design settings, no CSS/JS bloat to slow down the frontend. It’s built for TEXT CONTENT more-so than DESIGN CONTENT. MD is built for lots of text, buttons and email forms, and track conversions. Things that appeal to longform sales-copy marketers. It turns every page of your site into the perfect landing page. It’s the “Thesis” of today’s generation.

• Marketer’s Delight home page – for more info and also best example of how the theme looks/functions
• Showcase – sites made with MD (some nice ones in there).

Check out Marketer’s Delight. (It’s currently $67.)