A robust email subscription list is the key to any successful online business regardless of the niche you’re in. A powerful email list not only helps you get more traffic but also lets you make a stronger bond with your audience. Its ability to generate online profit effectively makes it a cardinal marketing strategy of any website. Once you have a robust list, it becomes much easier to convince your trusted audience about your products, thus making the conversion process easier.
Now the biggest question comes – How do you get more subscribers? Unquestionably, professionally designed optin forms along with some enticing incentives to subscribe are essential for developing email list optins. And with all these, you’ve to make sure maximum visibility of the optin form on your website to attract more and more visitors.
A significant number of free & premium plugins are now available in the market that empower you to add optin forms in key locations on your WordPress enabled website. Read about 10 free & premium WordPress email subscription plugins to help you develop a strong email subscription list.
ConvertPlug – $27 (Premium)
If you’re looking for a feature-packed list building plugin at an unbelievably pocket-friendly price, your only choice has to be ConvertPlug. It helps you transform your website into a list building powerhouse. With fully customized popups, you can convert your visitors into subscribers in minutes. This world-class WordPress popup plugin comes with more than 12 distinct visitor behavior triggers and over 10 different popup display positions.
What’s more! You’ll get over 100 professionally designed readymade templates aimed to boost your conversion rate. This globally acclaimed plugin offers some must-have features including opt-in popup, exit popup, video popup, slide-in popup, embedded forms, social popups, info bars, two step opt-ins, user inactivity trigger, repetition control, page level targeting, referral detection, import & export etc that are sure to take your email subscription list to the next level.
Bloom – Premium – Developer License $89
Bloom plugin has made converting your visitors into email subscribers simpler like never before. According to studies, 20 times more engagements come from emails than social media profiles and posts. With 87 amazing themes and 6 different optin display types, it pays to place the optin where it works the best.
Features like automatic opt-in popups, automatic opt-in fly-ins, inline optin forms, widget area optin forms, below content optin forms, content locker and integrations with 16 premium marketing software make the Bloom plugin one of the best choices among those looking to build a solid and trusted subscriber list.
OptinMonster – Premium (Single site $49)
Presence of some great features has helped OptinMonster make its place amongst the most sought after plugins recognized for successful list building. This completely responsive plugin offers features like high converting template library, 8 distinct types of optin forms, page level targeting, exit intent technology, 2-step optin technology, scroll triggered optin forms and popups, timed popups, eye-grabbing popup animations, simple integration with more than 19 email marketing software etc.
It’s not recommended for beginners because of its high price compared to other plugins available in this segment. However, if you’re looking for an all-in-one WordPress list building plugin and willing to pay more, you can definitely try OptinMonster. This is one of the well maintained WordPress plugin with new features being added every other day. If you have to invest in one premium plugin, don’t look anything apart from OptinMonster.
Thrive Leads – Premium (Single site $67)
This HTML supported WordPress plugin comes with a full money back guarantee plus the benefit of keeping the plugin for free. It offers almost every kind of optin form that may be required to build a strong email subscription list like ribbon-style forms, slide-in forms, scroll mat, 2-step optin buttons, full-screen forms and features like exit intent, scroll triggers, SmartExit, API integrations with most popular email services etc.
The vast collection of forms and in-built drag-and-drop editor provide you with the flexibility of creating and displaying opt-in forms on the site. Though the main features promoted by Thrive Leads are conversion optimization related, they also emphasize the fact of hiding an optin form automatically for already subscribed visitors. With its powerful analytics and beautiful ready-to-use templates, you’ll be able to develop a powerful email list for sure.
SumoMe – Free
SumoMe is an easy and absolutely free plugin for displaying popups for WordPress users. You just have to visit the SumoMe website to download the plugin. After its installation, you’ve to register with SumoMe for free. And voila! You’re ready to use the popup function for your site. With the help of its list builder app, you can create beautiful lightbox popup that helps significantly in building email subscriptions with most of the prominent email service providers.
Apart from the list builder feature, the free version of SumoMe offers some useful features including Share, Welcome Mat, Scroll Box, Heat Maps, Highlighter, Smart Bar, Image Sharer, full HTML control, email subscription statistics and more. If you’re a beginner blogger wanting to build a strong email list without spending any money, SumoMe plugin is just perfect for you.
Icegram – Free
The Icegram free plugin offers some amazing features that you will hardly find in any other free WordPress plugin. You can create popups, messenger popups, action bars (bottom or top) and toast notifications. From a collection of six beautifully designed popups, you can create one according to your preference. There are some drawbacks though such as the absence of visual builder and inability of customizing button colors and backgrounds, which mean your choice will be restricted to the templates offerings.
However, Icegram makes it extremely easy to create targeted campaigns. You can configure the appearance of a popup including after what time, on which pages, between what dates and on the devices it should be displayed. What’s more! Icegram works with almost all email marketing software and all lead/form capture plugins.
Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box – Free
Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box plugin displays a box on a page of your site once a visitor has scrolled down the page. The box disappears if the visitor scrolls back up the page. This plugin allows lots of customization like you can decide on the positioning of the box (left, middle or right of the page). You can also adjust the width of the box, the positioning height of it and how many days it stays invisible once a user closes it. You can place the box on pages, posts and/or on your home page.
The content that would be placed in box can be of different types like you can display a simple message, a banner or newsletter sign up form. You can select the color of the box from four different color schemes offered by the plugin or you can use custom CSS. The settings page offers the ability to enable social sharing buttons.
Cliftons Lightbox – Free
This free professional lightbox is meant for empowering you to exhibit a lightbox to your visitors. It’s specifically aimed towards developing sign ups to a newsletter. You can’t modify the layout of the message. However, a description can be displayed with a limitation of a maximum of five bullet points and either a YouTube video or an image.
The sign up fields are displayed at the bottom of the lightbox. Though this plugin doesn’t offer any additional styles, you can specify the seconds for the lightbox to load. A privacy statement can also be linked to it and lightbox cookie can be added to control the repetitive displays. Additionally, it works with any email marketing software.
Popup Extension – Free
This popup extension plugin, developed by Satollo, combines with their newsletter plugin. You can configure the popup message with the help of WordPress visual editor. Dimensions of the popup can be managed from the settings page. This plugin offers rules that can be used to determine various display factors for a popup.
For instance, you can exhibit a popup after a specified number of views and after a pre-determined number of seconds. You’ll also be able to reset this after a pre-defined number of days to make the message get displayed again. This simple plugin also allows one-click subscribe using Facebook apart from the traditional method of providing email address.
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Take Away
If you’re determined to build a strong email list and subsequently increase your website’s revenue, a popup plugin is something that you must use. Here, you need to consider two things – firstly afeature-rich popup plugin that’s capable of adding significant value to your business, thus increasing your conversion rate to a great extent; and secondly, you’ve to pay a price for the best ones. However, you shouldn’t compare the extra revenue generated by a bigger email list with the cost of the popup plugin. Instead, you should consider it simply as a good investment.
Finally, if you’re a beginner who is just starting out, you should first try your hands with some good free popup plugins. When you’ve tested the water and want to add extra functionality as your conversion grows, you should go for a premium popup plugin.