With the current supremacy of email marketing as part of any effective online business, the question always arises: what should I use to convince/inspire/convert people to opting in to my email list?
NB – Links in this article may be Affiliate Links, which means I get a small commission if you decide to purchase something after clicking the link. There is no additional cost to you for this (and sometimes there is a special discount).
OptinMonster Review – LeadGen for Dummies
Enter – OptinMonster.
Although it started as a pure wordpress plugin, OptinMonster is now usable on pretty much any platform – I use it on my Rainmaker Platform (which doesn't have plugin options) over at Tips for Lawyers.
That means that it's a serious contender for:
- people who have WordPress sites
- people who have multiple sites
- people who use multiple platforms.
So let's take a look at the basics and you can decide for yourself.
Creating a Sidebar Form with OptinMonster
The most fundamental type of optin is a simple sidebar – lots of different plugins have options for this, but it's a good place to start to see how easy (or otherwise) OptinMonster is for that kind of starting point. In this review of optinmonster I thought it would be an easy place to start.
This video will show you just how simple it is:
Creating a Top Floating Bar with OptinMonster
Next in the OptinMonster review I looked at creating a top floating bar – many people have these kinds of optin forms on their sites, and they can be a bit annoying sometimes to implement depending on what platform you use and what theme you have installed.
Here you can see how easy it is:
Creating a Popup Using OptinMonster – with Exit Intent
Although by now a few different places have “exit intent” technology, as far as I know OptinMonster was the first, and it's pretty refined by now. Therefore, one of the main things I wanted to show you in this review of OptinMonster was just how to do it.
What is it? Exit Intent is a script that lets OptinMonster find out when a user looks like they will leave the site, by checking their mouse movements. It doesn't work on mobile, but using Exit Intent you can prevent your popup from annoying the heck out of everyone by “popping” while they are in the middle of reading an article, and at a time more likely to get a response (after they have finished).
It's pretty cool, and you can see how it works in this video:
What Don't I like about OptinMonster?
As much as I love OptinMonster, it does have an annoying habit of caching its files at poor times.
In practice this means that you can sometimes not see your changes immediately, or your popup might not update straight away. In the WordPress plugin you sometimes don't see your latest optin forms even though they appear in the optinmonster dashboard.
Once you clear your cookies or caches it normally (but not always) fixes the problem though.
It's not that much of a big deal, but can be a bit irritating.
The image sizes are also a bit limiting, in particular on the sidebar forms – that's not uncommon in this kind of form, but I would like to be able to restyle/align my images without having to apply custom CSS to the form (avoiding CSS being the reason I'm using optinmonster in the first place).
Some of the more cool things you can do with OptinMonster are not necessarily as “point and click” as the basic setup process – in fact, it can get fiddly to do some of the nice additional things (not too hard, but just not point and click – the instructions are all pretty good and are constantly being added to by the team).
Other OptinMonster Cool Things
One of the things I like is that OptinMonster doesn't just do lead generation. If you want to put a picture, form, HTML code, Facebook signup or whatever into a popup – you can do that using the OptinMonster canvas function.
So What's the Wrap?
I have no trouble recommending OptinMonster. It's especially useful for the “design challenged” like me who just want to create effective lead generation forms on their site.
It integrates with everything you need, including ConvertKit, Aweber, Mailchimp and Infusionsoft.
It can sometimes be a little annoying in the caching department, but otherwise is largely hassle free.
Check it out today.
[the_ad id=”312″]
Just wish it did landing pages as well. RM’s landing pages are too labour intensive. Thinking that LeadPages or ClickFunnels will do landing pages + optin forms… Why did you decide not to go with either of those, Chris?
And what are you using for landing pages? RM? Convertkit?