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As a business owner, you’re often plagued with concerns surrounding your subscriber base, increasing leads and revenue. There are thousands of apps that you can invest in, but few would create the kind of results you want. OptinMonster is a popular conversion optimization tool designed to get you more subscribers to your email list.
This review examines how OptinMonster works, campaign setup, targeting rules and how it helps online shops convert and sell more.
Lead Generation and Its Importance to Businesses
For e-commerce businesses, the first step to a sale is acquiring a lead. These leads are people who show an interest in purchasing from you.
However, getting leads isn’t quite enough. If you don’t find a way to get these leads to make purchases, your sales funnel is incomplete. This process is known as lead conversion. No one wants a visitor who visits the store daily but never buys. But, that’s the reality for most online stores. You spend too much on inbound marketing, only to find visitors exiting the site without making a purchase.
On average, most ecommerce stores get between one to two percent conversion from their web traffic, according to BigCommerce. Wolfgang Digital also revealed that the average conversion in 2019 was 1.84 percent. Pretty low, right? This is why OptinMonster was created.
What is OptinMonster?
OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation and customer acquisition platform. This tool help stores increase their email list and boost your sales with custom-made opt-in forms.
With OptinMonster, you can create interactive and targeted pop-ups that capture your visitors’ attention before leaving your site, measure conversion rates, A/B test exit intent forms, and increase sales.
OptinMonster comes with a myriad of features that allow you to achieve optimal results from these pop-ups. The tool comes with advanced analytics, behavioral testing, and others that ensure a data-driven approach for better conversions.
OptinMonster Solutions for E-commerce Webmasters
Reduced cart abandonment: Cart abandonment is still one of the most significant killers of any e-commerce business. With time-sensitive behavior, OptinMonster can reduce your cart abandonment rate and optimize your revenues.
Increased conversions: The business loses money every time a customer checks a product but doesn’t make the purchase. OptinMonster has smart targeting features that display personalized messages based on behavior automation to maximize engagement and sales.
Email list growth: With OptinMonster, you can design exit-intent pop-ups, welcome mats, and other forms that will bring you more emails. Send these emails to your markets and use them in promos and other campaigns.
OptinMonster Features
Some of the top features that OptinMonster users enjoy include:
A/B Testing
A/B testing is a smart way of improving your customer’s shopping experience. It helps you determine which content or functionality resonates more with your site visitors. As an online store, your conversions will depend on your site’s optimization level. If you want to make changes, an A/B test can help you check a possible new feature with the old. By showing you which works better, it boosts your conversion chances.
The process of creating an A/B test on OptinMonster is simple. Head to your dashboard where you can access your campaigns. Select the campaign you want to split test, and you will see the option to create an A/B test under “More Options.” You can name your test, add notes to track, and publish your lists.
Once complete, the split test will appear in the dashboard along with your original campaign.
Full-Screen Welcome Mat
Along with the exit-intent pop-ups, OptinMonster also adds a Full-Screen Welcome Mat. As expected, the pop-up takes the entire screen, and your visitors will see it immediately when they log on to your website.
OptinMonster says its Full-Screen Welcome Mat can boost conversion by 80 percent.
You can put a full-screen welcome mat to use in the following ways:
- Highlight a coupon code or some other promotion for first-time visitors
- Inform customers of a promo or a clearance sale
- Highlight new services and products
- Give a preview of what visitors can expect on your site
- Draw attention to an upcoming launch or some other event
Welcome mats could count against your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google ranking efforts. In 2016, Google began devaluing pop-ups and other intrusive browser interstitials.
OptinMonster tries to work around this by allowing you to delay the welcome mat’s appearance for some seconds. If you think this is a worthy gamble, you can take the risk.
Lightbox Pop-Ups
Also known as a modal dialog, a lightbox pop-up helps you to create highly converting pop-up forms. These forms will deliver targeted messages at the right time, thus maximizing your engagement.
When you show a lightbox pop-up, users will have to engage with it. Everything else on the page fades into the background, so there are no distractions.
With OptinMonster, you can set up a trigger that displays the pop-up after a prerequisite. For instance, you can choose to display it after the user has been scrolling for a few seconds. You can also have criteria like geolocation, device-based targeting, and more.
The service also allows you to display a pop-up based on a visitor’s past behavior. So, you can target your messages better.
Slide-in Scroll Boxes
The slide-in across boxes are a great way to get visitors’ attention without disrupting their browsing experience. These boxes quietly come into the webpage, but stay away from the main content.
Customers who don’t want pop-ups can use slide-in scroll boxes instead. They appear at the bottom-right corner of the site as your visitors scroll down. They present an opportunity for you to show your campaign’s full features at the right time, thus improving your chances of conversion.
Floating Bars
Online stores can also use Floating Bars to collect visitors’ email addresses and bolster conversions without disrupting visitors’ experiences. They’re called “floating” because they don’t move even as the visitor scrolls.
With OptinMonster, you can display a floating bar at the top or bottom part of the screen. With the Floating Bar, you execute do any of the following:
- Highlight expiring offers
- Advertise promotions and clearance sales
- Generate demand for expiring offers
- Get subscriptions to your newsletter
- Welcome first-time visitors and offer possible incentives
OptinMonster has a set of rules that ensure no repetitions for floating bars. Once a visitor accepts the offer that they have, they won’t see the bars again.
Yes/No Forms
The Yes/No form uses the Zeigarnik Effect — a psychological principle that claims people who start a specific action will most likely complete it. With these forms on OptinMonster, you can harness this effect and make some impressive conversions.
Say you run an online sports store, and a visitor comes to your website. You can have a pop-up that asks: “How would you like to get weekly reports highlighting some of the NFL’s top developments?” Below that question, you can display two buttons — “Yes” and “No.”
When a visitor clicks in the affirmative, they send you their email address, and you can send them newsletters and other product offerings. The Zeigarnik Effect’s theory postulates that a visitor will be more likely to give you their email because they clicked “Yes” on your pop-up.
OptinMonster Integrations
Besides its functionality, you can use OptinMonster with other tools that you already know and love. These include:
- Mailchimp: With OptinMonster, you can create high-converting signup forms for your Mailchimp email marketing campaign. You can personalize these signup forms based on your customers’ behavior, thus improving your conversion chances.
- WordPress: If you run your store through WordPress, you can access an OptinMonster add-on to integrate its features to your site directly
- Hubspot: With OptinMonster, you can send leads directly to HubSpot. You can also use the HubSpot Tracking Cookie to track the leads and their progress down the sales funnel.
- GetResponse: OptinMonster has features to help you grow your GetResponse email list quickly. It allows you to design beautiful, high-converting forms and use behavioral automation to show personalized messages at the right time.
- Google Analytics: Google Analytics integration allows you to track your opt-in campaigns and their performance.
- Salesforce Pardot: Pardot is the B2B marketing automation service developed by Salesforce. It uses smart tools to optimize your sales and reach more people.
OptinMonster’s e-Commerce Capabilities
OnSite Retargeting
You can use OptinMonster for different triggering and targeting methods. With OptinMonster Retargeting, you can market to your regular visitors and offer services or products that are related to their interests.
The feature collects information based on a visitor’s previous site activities. It uses this information to classify your products and present them to the customers regularly.
The OnSite Retargeting feature also supports Dynamic Text Replacement, which allows you to call visitors by their first name.
List Segmentation
List segmentation is a critical tool for any e-commerce business. With OptinMonster, you can segment your lists to send targeted messages to your customers. Even better, you can integrate the feature into several top email marketing and customer relationship management resources.
The list segmentation feature uses Yes/No forms to segment your site visitors, while exit-intent technology is available to try convincing customers to stay on your site.
Performance Analytics
You want to know that your tool is working. You can integrate Google Analytics into OptinMonster to check things like search result rankings, conversion rates, and other relevant data to measure how successful your campaign is.
The challenge with this, however, is that you can only use Google Analytics to check your performance statistics. OptinMonster isn’t compatible with any other analytics tool.
A split testing tool is also available to decide the best strategy for your subscribers. If you have options for pop-ups or you want to change different settings, you can test options by adding subscribers to a split test and understand what works.
OptinMonster will pull data from your original campaign and compare it to your test, which already has the changes.
How to Create an Email Opt-in with OptinMonster
Head over to the site and signup for an account to get started.
Step 1: Create a New Campaign
Click on “Create Campaign.” This could be a floating bar on a page, a lightbox pop-up, or anything else. OptinMonster allows you to run multiple campaigns on your store. So, you can do that if you want.
Click on “Select Your Campaign Type” and choose whatever campaign form you would like. Depending on the type of campaign you select, click on “Choose a Campaign Template.”
You want to have a template because it allows you to create a relevant opt-in rapidly. OptinMonster provides different options for you. For instance, the lightbox pop-up campaign type has over 20 templates for you.
When you select a template, you name your campaign and choose the website that you want it to display on.
Step 2: Configure Your Form in the Editor
OptinMonster will take you into the editor from here. On the interface, you will find the following:
- Options for form configuration on the left. These are divided into several tabs.
- A preview of the form, which shows on the right
So, if you want to change the text on your form, just click on the live preview and edit it. There are also some critical tabs you want to check out to configure your opt-in form. These include:
Display Settings
In this tab, you want to check out the “Cookie Duration” feature. This feature determines the duration that the form will be hidden for if a user closes or submits it. The feature is a pretty standard one for any opt-in tool, and it improves your visitors’ experience as you won’t have to pester them with any repetitive pop-ups.
OptIn
You will configure a vast majority of your opt-in form in the “OptIn” tab. Some of the things you can configure includes:
- If you want to show the name field with the email field
- Placeholders for the form field
- Field colors and fonts
- Custom CSS
Yes/No
The Yes/No tab is a simple section that allows you to enable a negative option opt-out. When you enable it, visitors will have to choose between “yes or no” options before seeing the opt-in form itself.
Be careful with how you phrase the Yes/No form. Think about visiting a blog post on sales generation and seeing an opt-in for the website’s services. The website offers you the chance to use its service for free, and you see two options that read:
“Yes, I need this to grow my business”
and
“No, I’m fine with the small leads my website is seeing”
You won’t be so inclined to do business with them with how they phrase the form’s content. So, note that you shouldn’t be obnoxious with your options. When done right, this tool can be quite useful. OptinMonster comes with different examples of how you can do this right.
Success
With the “Success” tab, you can configure what happens when a visitor submits your form. You can choose to:
- Show a success message
- Redirect the customer to a separate page
- Close the campaign and let them continue browsing through your site
Display Rules
The “Display Rules” tab allows you to control the following:
- When the opt-in appears
- The pages that will house the opt-in
- The types of visitors that see the opt-in
With OptinMonster, you have different options. You can have the pop-up triggered by:
- A specific time
- When the visitor clicks to exit your page
- The depth of a visitor’s scroll through a page
- A click
- A period of inactivity
- The visitor’s local time
The Display Rules tab also offers you a different range of targeting options. These include
- Geo-location
- Campaign interactions
- Pageviews
- Referrals
- Specific URLs
- Cookies
Even better, OptinMonster allows you to create different rule sets for a single campaign. You can set a rule to display a pop-up on your Home page after a visitor clicks to exit, and on your “Contact Us” page for visitors in the United Kingdom.
This way, you can target different groups of visitors.
Integrations
The “Integrations” tab is where you sync to your preferred email marketing service.
Analytics
This tab lets you connect your campaign to Google Analytics and track its performance. Considering that most webmasters use Google Analytics, the fact that OptinMonster forces you to connect to it isn’t much of a demerit.
Step 3: Publish the Form on Your Site
When you’re done with configuring the form, click the “Publish” button in the far-right corner. You can choose the URL to publish it and the platform it will be hosted on.
While you can use a code snippet to integrate OptinMonster into any website, the service has a plugin that works for people without coding experience. Just enter your API key, which you will get via your OptinMonster account.
Then, you can manage your campaign from your webmaster dashboard. Your pop-up is online and ready to go.
OptinMonster Pricing
OptinMonster comes with four packages. Each of them is backed with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
The pricing tiers include:
The Basic Plan
The Basic Plan costs $14 per month when paid monthly and $9 billed annually. The annual billing saves you $45 per year.
The plan comes with support for just one site. With that, you get the following features:
- Unlimited Campaigns
- All Campaign Types
- Page-Level Targeting
- List Segmentation
- Subscriber Recognition
- Success Messages
- Basic Integrations
- Simple Reporting
- Optinmonster University
- Up to 3,500 Pageviews
The Plus Plan
Under the Plus Plan, you pay $30 per month on the monthly plan and $19 per month when billed annually. If you have a growing e-commerce business and you want to intensify your efforts, this is the plan for you.
With this plan, you get support for two sites. It includes everything available in the Basic Plan plus the following:
- Integrated A/B Testing
- Full Reporting
- Attention Activation™
- Content Locking
- Advanced Integrations
- Inactivity Sensor™
- Device Targeting
- MonsterEffects™
- MonsterSounds™
- Up to 15,000 Pageviews
The Pro Plan
The Pro Plan costs $47 per month in the monthly billing section and $29 per month billed annually. Established e-commerce businesses will love what it has to offer.
The Plus plan allows support for three sites. It features everything in the previous two, as well as the following:
- Exit Intent® Technology
- Mobile-Specific Campaigns
- Pro Integrations
- MonsterLinks™
- Cart & Form Abandonment
- 2 Sub-Accounts
- Remove Branding
- Priority Support
- 50,000 Pageviews
The Growth Plan
The Growth Plan costs $80 per month on the monthly plan and $49 per month on annual billing. It is ideal for established companies looking to test the limits of their abilities.
The Growth Plan comes with everything the other plans have, as well as the following:
- Onsite Retargeting®
- Follow-up Campaigns®
- Real-Time Personalization
- Activity Logging
- Advanced Reporting
- Unlimited Sub-Accounts
- Up to 250,000 Pageviews
It supports up to five websites.
OptinMonster Comparisons
OptinMonster vs. LeadPages
LeadPages is a famous landing page builder that allows ecommerce businesses to create responsive landing pages, collect leads, and close sales in minutes.
Both tools are powerful lead generation software that can boost conversion and email subscribers. However, they do this with varying techniques.
OptinMonster is ideal for stores that need help with handling their opt-in forms from a centralized platform. There’s a huge collection of built-in conversion optimization features in the app. It’s affordable and easy to set up even for store owners that lack development knowledge.
LeadPages, on the other hand, comes preloaded with a vast landing page library that is mobile-friendly and responsive. LeadPages also come with tracking and analysis and a central station to manage your pages and forms. What’s more? The forms and templates on LeadPages can be sorted by conversion rates, but it doesn’t come cheap. The average plan costs $25 compared to $9 on OptinMonster.
OptinMonster vs. Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is another top email opt-in solutions. The tool helps you to build your email lists quickly using a series of optin forms, including pop-ups, floating bars, and others.
While OptinMonster and Thrive Leads have similar features, OptinMonster is a bit broader in its scope. Thrive Leads is a WordPress plugin, making it only suitable for ecommerce sites built on WordPress. In terms of pricing, Thrive Leads is cheaper. Thrive will cost you about $67 annually, while OptinMonster costs $108 per year. With OptinMonster, you also won’t get some features unless you upgrade to the Plus plan. Thrive gives you everything right off the bat.
Conclusion
OptinMonster is another tool we have been using for many years here at Kooc Media, we have used it on content sites, blogs, digital and physical product eCommerce sites and it has worked well for us boosting our newsletter subscribers and also driving visitors to offers and products we wanted to highlight. The creator is Syed Balkhi, his company has been making WordPress products for years and is highly regarded in the community so the product development and support is first-class.
If you’re serious about lead generation for your eCommerce store, OptinMonster is a must-have tool. The platform offers professionally designed templates that are mobile-ready without any development knowledge.
You’ll have access to the page bringing in the most leads, the forms that are converting the most, and the ability to run sophisticated A/B tests. OptinMonster provides you with the tools and analytics needed to grow your business and drive those signups.
Stay Ahead of the Market with Benzinga Pro!
Want to trade like a pro? Benzinga Pro gives you the edge you need in today's fast-paced markets. Get real-time news, exclusive insights, and powerful tools trusted by professional traders:- Breaking market-moving stories before they hit mainstream media
- Live audio squawk for hands-free market updates
- Advanced stock scanner to spot promising trades
- Expert trade ideas and on-demand support