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MailOptin is an all-in-one email list building plugin for WordPress and it’s easily one of the best WordPress plugins ever released.
Now I know you’re thinking I am over-exaggerating; surely I am not because this is truly an amazing tool and the only way to find out is to walk you through the feature set of the plugin.
If you are passionate about building an email list, and you have been overwhelmed by the complications and hassles involved in setting up list building forms in WordPress, you are in for a smooth ride!
MailOptin literally breaks the barrier in creating an opt-in form. The astonishing thing is that once you install and activate the plugin, you can start deploying opt-in forms immediately.
Why MailOptin?
There are a couple of list building plugins that have been hyped but never lived up to expectation. MailOptin was designed to help internet marketers, entrepreneurs, and bloggers easily create professional, stylish opt-in forms with maximum conversions.
MailOptin takes email list building to a new height; it makes everything happen so fast and very easy. Thanks to the clean and well-tailored user interface that makes your list building journey move smoothly.
For me, while I pay keen attention to the pricing of premium plugins, I am very critical about the feature set any plugin has to offer, and MailOptin doesn’t disappoint in any way.
Before we talk about the pricing, let jump into what the plugin has to offer, then you can really justify its price tag.
Features and Options in MailOptin
Firstly, the plugin has a strong development team backing it up, this means that MailOptin is always improving, you are going to get frequent updates, mostly new features and security patches.
Design – MailOptin contains a wide range of opt-in form types, and each of these opt-in form types has different built-in stylish themes that can be customized from start to finish.
There are five opt-in form types in the plugin and they include:
- Lightbox: Design popup forms with various stylish templates.
- In-Post Opt-in: Display optin forms at the top or bottom of your post.
- Notification Bar: Optin can also be displayed on a notification bar.
- Slide-in: This opt-in form appears at the bottom corner of your site.
- Sidebar/Widget: Sidebar opt-in forms that can be easily activated from the widget area of your WordPress.
Customization and Placement
With absolutely no limitation, you can create professional optin forms and place them anywhere on your site. Every element of your opt-in form can be customized and it gets even better with the plugin’s live editor. You won’t have to reload your entire website to see your changes; every change you make is visible on the live editor. You can change the opt-in form message, the image, image orientations, effect, borders, colors and even remove the plugin’s branding.
In as much as there are opt-in form types that automatically displays in certain areas of your website, you can also choose to display certain opt-in form types in any area of your website. You can do this using MailOptin’s embedding feature.
You have two options in the plugin, you can either use a shortcode or a template tag. To begin, navigate to Display Rules > Shortcode & Template tag, you will find the code ready for use.
Advanced Targeting
The targeting options available really shows the power of the plugin. If you use them smartly, you can dramatically maximize conversions and even create a segmented email list to quickly reach out to a target audience.
Basically, you can trigger optin forms on specific areas of your site; this could be blog posts, pages, categories, tags and so on. Since it’s possible to display optins in certain areas, it is also possible to prevent optins from being triggered in any part of your website.
A/B Testing Engine
MailOptin enables you to carry out split testing on your opt-in campaigns. This way, you are able to create variations of your optin form in order to determine the most performing one. This is very crucial and highly beneficial for creating conversion-focused opt-in forms.
To create a split test on MailOptin is pretty straight forward. Simply create a split test as seen in the images below.
– Select your optin form.
– Click More Options and create A/B split test.
– You will be redirected to the opt-in form live editor where you can customize the variation.
Aside from the robust split testing ability of the plugin, you can also have access to performance statistics of your opt-in forms using its built-in analytics. You can track things like the number of impression and conversion rate.
Creating Your First Optin Form
Like I have earlier stressed, creating an opt-in form is very easy in MailOptin and I am going to walk through the steps in setting up a popup.
Once you have installed and activated the plugin, navigate to Optin Campaign > Add New > Campaign Title > Elegance Theme. The default opt-in from type is “Lightbox”, otherwise you can select any other opt-in form type just before selecting a theme.
Immediately you select a theme, it will take you to the live editor where you can customize your opt-in form and set the trigger options which we are going to also talk about.
Trigger Settings
Now that you are done with your customization, it’s time to set up your triggers. There are a lot of trigger options that you can select from to determine how best you want your opt-in forms to be displayed.
For the Lightbox opt-in form, here are the display options you can trigger:
- Instant
- Specified time delay
- At a specific point in the content
- After scrolling down a fixed percentage of the page
- Scheduled triggers
- When the visitor shows exit intent: this is when a visitor is about to leave your website.
All forms in MailOptin have their own unique settings, so it’s possible to find a trigger option in a particular opt-in form type and not find it in another opt-in form.
For me, once of the unique trigger option that can dramatically increase conversions happens when you turn on Exit Intent – This feature triggers your popup form whenever a visitor attempts to exit your website or close the tab.
From research, it’s been proven that less intrusive popups help in increasing conversion by 70%. It’s a win-win situation because you will be having a user-friendly focused website and a less intrusive Light box optin form.
Easy Integration
The plugin nicely integrates with most of the popular email marketing services. Just on the integration settings, you will be shown the best way to easily connect the plugin to your responder. Usually, it’s with an API connection.
Here are some of the providers you can integrate with:
- MailChimp
- Sendy
- Constant Contact
- Campaign Monitor
- Drip
- GetResponse
- ConvertKit
- AWeber
Enable Your Optin Form
Now that all your settings have been saved and you have connected the plugin to your email marketing service provider, you can enable or activate your customized optin form so it can go live in your website. Navigate to Optin Campaign > toggle on/off the optin form you want to activate.
Other Features of MailOptin
You thought you have seen it all? Well, there is more to come. Let’s look at some of the features in the plugin that can be very handy, and can equally maximize conversions when properly used.
- After Conversion – What happens after getting a lead? You can choose to display a success message like, “thank you for subscribing to our mailing list” or redirect your subscriber to a new URL. You can also decide to just close the optin form automatically after conversion.
- New Post Notification – MailOptin will automatically trigger your mailing list with a “New Post Notification” newsletter each time there is a newly published post. There are also pre-defined templates to select for this purpose.
- Schedule – Simply have mastering of optin timing. At what time do you want to trigger your optin form? Use the schedule to make that happen.
- Click Launch Trigger: When an element is clicked on your website, you can force an optin form to be displayed. This is very effective for content upgrades; if you have free downloadable content, you could offer such content only for those who subscribe to your mailing list.
- Scroll Trigger: When a user scrolls a fixed percentage of your content, your opt-in form will be displayed. It’s a great way of attracting people who are engaged with your content.
Price and Availability
You can get MailOptin Lite for free here. You can also purchase the plugin’s single site license for $59. The three site license has a price tag of $99 and the Pro Plan goes for $199.
The Pro plan gives you full access to all MailOptin features. Check out what features are available per premium plan.
Final Verdict
From the makers of ProfilePress, one of the best user account management plugins in the market, it was unlike for them to develop anything less than standard. If you have ever used ProfilePress, you should know that these guys mean business.
MailOptin is simply a masterpiece; it is very easy to use, yet so powerful. Its feature set is amazing and is equally very affordable. Installation, activation, and integration are straight-forward. Before it is too late, know that the plugin has a robust documentation area and you can also take advantage of its priority support system.
Without a doubt, MailOptin is an all-round solution to start and grow your email list without hassles. It is a must-have in your WordPress plugin’s arsenal if you really mean business about building a list.