For sustainable growth in an online business, one has to pay critical attention to list building. The email list is an essential aspect of every successful business, it is one way of marketing that never goes old. As far as emails continue to exist, people will continue to make use of it for business and communication.
With Email marketing, you can continually reach out to your loyal customers regarding products and services information with minimal effort compared to reaching out to random people every time you need to push out information about your business. The email list ensures that re-targeting an audience doesn’t stress you out.
While re-targeting your customers via a mailing list is key to profitability online, the problem lies in building an email list. As this has become a great challenge for list builders, a lot of developers have tried to create marketing solutions overcome the challenge. Not many have succeeded in the quest, however.
Well, that is not to burst your bubble, there are a couple of email marketing software that has really made list building easy, achievable and cost-effective. If you are really serious about building a profitable email list, you won’t find it on a free-to-use solution. The best features that you can use to improve conversion with action-based messages and understand the behaviour of your visitors are found in premium list building plugins.
In this article, I want to talk extensively about one of such plugins called MailOptin. This WordPress plugins is designed to help you start your list building journey in next to no time. Within a few minutes, you should have your optin form for collecting email addresses from your visitors. One of the things MailOptin lets you do is to decide how you want to grow your list, you can use an aggressive approach; displaying your optin forms on page load or the less intrusive approach; displaying your optin forms only when a visitor is about to leave your site. This whole phenomenon is called Exit Intent, and we are going to delve into it later down this review, but before then, let’s walk through what MailOptin has to offer.
List Building: Getting Started
List building is all about communicating with an offer to visitors who interact with your site. The offer can be a voucher, a free survey, downloadable content or simply an offer to sign up for your newsletter. It has to be engaging, attractive and less-intrusive. Also, your optin form needs to detailed with a clear-cut easy procedure to sign up.
First thing first, you need to create an optin form type, in MailOptin there are several optin form types and they include:
• Lightbox (Popup)
• In-Post optin forms
• Notification Bar optins
• Slide-In
• Sidebar/Widget optins
You have a lot of option form types to play with, but for the purpose of this review, we will be using the Lightbox optin form type for most of the plugin’s functionality.
Simple Email Marketing Integration
MailOptin is a list building WordPress plugin that needs to be connected to an email marketing service provider just like every other top list building plugin. The engine is needed to push out your emails to the list you will be building. The plugin has support for all the major email marketing service providers like MailChimp, Sendy, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, Drip, ConvertKit, AWeber, GetResponse, MailerLite etc.
Setting Up MailOptin
This plugin has a simplistic user interface; from the dashboard, you can manage every option required for building your email list. There are several tabs like “Connections,” “Optin Campaigns” and “Campaign Log” that contains important settings and display rules that will enable you plan the kind of strategy you want to adopt.
So, when you connect the plugin to your preferred email marketing service provider, you can start creating different optin form types.
The ‘Optin Campaigns tab’ is where you can start creating beautiful and attractive optin forms. Although the plugin has a good number of templates to select from, you would still be able to fully customize whatever template you decide to use on your website.
Optin Form Customization
With MailOptin, you will be able to customize every element of the optin form. Things like the message, the image, the image orientations, borders, effect and colours can easily be tweaked. The interesting aspect is that you do not need to reload your website to see the changes, the plugin has a live editor that automatically displays the changes you have made when saved, it would now be displayed in your live site.
Settings and Trigger Options
Several trigger options exist in MailOptin, these triggers are called “display rules.” The way you configure the triggers will determine how your optin forms appear in your site, but it equally depends on the response of your visitors.
So, if your visitor has to carry out an action when the action is positive, the trigger option is activated and your optin form is displayed.
Here are some of the trigger settings available in the plugin:
• Click Launch
• After X seconds
• Exit Intent
• After scrolling down X percent
• Visitor has viewed X pages
• Schedule
Let’s look at some of these triggers extensively:
Exit Intent
Like I said at the beginning of this review, the plugin comes with a built-in exit intent function. Exit intent is an industry standard that triggers a less intrusive optin popup form while maximizing conversion. If you activate this feature in MailOptin, your optin form will only be displayed when it detects the mouse cursor moving towards the exit icon of your browser.
This means that visitors don’t get to see your popup when they load your website, they will have time to interact with your content and when they believe they have seen enough and want to leave your site, your optin form is triggered. This is still the best way to build an email list quickly without annoying your visitors.
After Conversion
With the after conversion option in MailOptin, you configure what happens when a visitor subscribes to your mailing list. You can do the decide to:
• Display a success message
• Redirect them to another page
• Close the optin form
• Close optin and reload the page
Click Launch
Click launch is a core aspect of MailOptin, it allows you to use some kind of a bait to harvest email addresses. Here is how it works: assuming you have a free downloadable content that is of good value, instead of allowing every one download it easily, you can offer it in return for the email address of those who want to download it.
What this means is that you provide them with a link to download the content right in their inbox, your visitors have to release their email address to receive the downloadable content. At the end of the day, it’s a win-win situation. The only drawback is that you must use an offer that worth getting by your visitors.
Segment Your Email List
A targeted email list is best for maximizing conversion. MailOptin can be used to generate targeted email leads using its Page Targeting option. This way, you are able to control the kind of messages you push out to a specific email list. In turn, you are going to have a better click-through-rate, because you will be sending out relevant emails to your target audience.
Imagine pushing out Hockey offers to people who don’t like Hockey but love Soccer. That would amount to a huge waste of time and resources. In the same vain, if you push out Hockey offers to lovers of Hockey; assuming an 80% discount for a jersey, the result would be astonishing. This is basically the purpose of page targeting, it’s a handy feature with a big impact.
Enable Your Optin
So, now that you have completed the basic settings, activated some targeting options, integrated with your preferred email service provider and customized your optin form, the next thing to do is to enable the optin form so it can start collecting email addresses in your site.
Just in the “Optin Campaign” tab in the plugin, you are going to find a list of your optin forms, you will need to select the specific optin form you want to enable. There is a toggle button that allows you to make the necessary changes. A blue button means that the optin form is turned on while a grey button means its disabled.
So here is our optin form, deployed to the site and ready for lead generation.
Split Test Engine and Analytics Reporting
MailOptin has a cool split test engine that makes getting important data for list building growth quite easy. You can carry out A/B split test in next to no time and start scaling up with your result.
To start off, go to “Optin Campaigns” and select the optin form needed for split test. Then, click the “More Options” and create an A/B Split Test. A new form will be displayed where you can give the split test a name and write notes about the changes you have made.
On clicking the “Create Split Test” button, you will be redirected to the optin form live editor where you can make changes for the second variation. Then, you can pick a winner or create additional variation.
Also, data like the number of impressions, subscriber’s count and conversation rate can be tracked in your dashboard, thanks to the plugin’s built-in analytics feature.
Is That All?
Actually, that’s not all. Here are some couple of things you can also do in MailOptin:
• Email Automations – If you just published a new post on your blog, you can let MailOptin automatically send out newsletters to your mailing list.
• Schedule – Control the time or period you want your optin form to be displayed.
• Scroll Trigger: Decide to display your optin form only when a user has scrolled a fixed percentage of your content.
• Cookies – Either global or campaign-specific cookies can be set. This would determine how you want to trigger your optin form.
• New vs Returning Visitors – This is a handy feature that lets you trigger your optin forms to only new visitors or returning visitors.
• Visitors Using Adblock – It doesn’t matter if your visitors are hiding behind an Adblock, you can still force your optin forms to them. This can be easily activated in the plugin’s display rules.
Pricing & License
MailOptin has three pricing options, they include:
• Standard plan: $69 – 1Site, $99 – 3Sites (unlimited optin campaigns, exit-intent, click launch trigger and one year support).
• Pro plan: $199 (access to everything on the standard plan, including access to adblock detection, optin scheduling, WooCommerce integration).
• Agency plan: $269 (advanced WooCommerce integration, advance EDD integration, third-party app integrations, priority support).
Visit the plugin’s pricing page for a complete list of features you can get per plan. You can also try MailOptin for free.
Wrapping Up
Passionate about building an email list and committed about it? Then you don’t need to waste any more time thinking about how to go about it. All you need is a performance-based list building WordPress plugin and MailOptin seems to fit in easily because it is a full-fledged email marketing solution for beginners and pros.
The plugin is built from the scratch to assist you in making the right decision and taking the best strategy for growing a profitable list. Thanks to its array of features that takes into account visitors behaviour and the best way to harvest their email addresses without going against the industry standard.
Some features like the advanced A/B split test engine is essential for optimizing your optin forms and maximizing result and of course, you get to select from multiple templates and form types with the option to customize them any way you desire. Also, the plugin has an extensive documentation area that will give you a complete guide to using all of its features.
The plugin is easy to use, comes with a great support and can work with any WordPress template. MailOptin is a top-quality WordPress plugin that features smart technology specifically for building a targeted email list for profitability.