Building up a strong SEO profile takes ages, PPC advertising costs a fortune. If you’re looking for the best B2B marketing strategy in terms of ROI, email marketing is probably one of the best alternatives.
It may take some time to build up an audience of subscribers, but once you do have a few thousand people on the newsletter, you’re in the black! Many will continue making purchases from you thanks to your email marketing efforts. Instead of working with cold leads, you’ll be marketing to loyal customers.
However, there’s still the issue of building the subscriber list in the first place. That can be a hard task for a beginner. Give these six freshly updated WordPress plugins a look, and you’ll find most of the tools you’ll ever need to kick off your email marketing.
OptinMonster
OptinMoster is definitely one of the most popular WordPress plugins for building an email list. It has almost a million downloads on WordPress.org, a few hundred reviews (most of them positive), and receives regular updates and support.
With almost a million users, it’s no wonder that it has all the funding in the world to stay competitive and keep rolling out regular updates every month. What comes in that package? A lot, to say the least.
OptinMoster is an all-around tool for building opt-in popups and improving on your strategy. Build a popup yourself in the drag&drop builder or choose among dozens of free templates, put it up on your website, and configure A/B testing. This will let you learn what popup works better, eventually giving you a huge increase in revenue.
If you want to be even more precise with your pop-ups, you can try OptinMonster’s targeting tools. You can show a specific email opt-in form for users who did a certain action on the website, users that are located in a specific region or based on user behavior. Combine this advanced targeting techniques with A/B testing, and you will build a decent-sized email list in no time.
Of course, most of these functions don’t come for free. The free version of OptinMoster is serviceable, but the real benefits come when you update to the paid version.
You’ll need to purchase the $30 per month plan to get access to A/B testing and an $80 plan to get access to all features and premium support.
MailPoet
MailPoet has a weird history. Each major update was presented as a new plugin. With three major updates, there are now three MailPoet apps on WordPress, and only one is getting all the support. Make sure you get yourself MailPoet 3, not the previous plugins. MailPoet 2 now has more downloads than the last version which may confuse you.
Now, this convoluted history didn’t affect the plugin’s success negatively. The previous version has over 200,000 downloads and an enormous number of reviews on WordPress, well over 2,000. The current version is climbing up that ladder and is currently at 100,000 downloads.
It may lack some advanced statistics, but it provides the basic email marketing features and a bit more on top. This plugin lets you build a simple but good-looking opt-in form, build and manage a subscriber list in WordPress, and handle your email marketing campaigns from the admin panel. You can also create automated emails that will be sent to new customers, or based on a trigger action.
The best part about this plugin is that the premium is free if you have less than 1,000 subscribers. It makes it perfect for all those starting out as it lets you figure out everything without worrying about expenses.
When you do upgrade, it starts being pricy pretty quickly. Jump to just 5,000 subscribers, and you’ll be charged $46 every month. The price rises with every few hundred subscribers you get, and the only premium feature you receive for the price is CTR analytics.
Opt-In Panda
Opt-in Panda is a project backed by a small team. It only has around 3,000 active downloads on WordPress, but it’s a pretty good tool for the price. There’s only one tier that costs $26, and it’s not a SaaS deal. You’re getting a lifetime license when you pay for it.
For $26 total, Opt-in Panda is a very simple tool. Basically, it lets you hide your most interesting content behind an email wall and grow your audience. Veronica Seann, Head of Content from Pro Essay Writer, comments that while most people think of popups as the best way to grow the email list, her experience shows walling off content is an amazing driver of subscriptions as well.
If you have a robust content marketing strategy and create great content that gets viewed and shared, asking for an email to view the best articles may get you hundreds of new leads. This strategy works for media giants like Forbes, and it will work for you.
If you get the free version of Opt-in Panda off WordPress.org, you’ll be able to create an opt-in form, attach it to a page with valuable content, and build a list of leads in the admin panel. Work with those leads by using one of the dozen services Opt-in Panda integrates with like MailChimp or GetResponse, or use other WordPress plugins like Mailjet or Postmark. It works with Amazon SES too.
What do you get if you buy a lifetime license? You can customize your opt-in form however you want. Add custom fields, Facebook and Twitter log-in buttons, or change how it loads with Ajax. You can also implement a blurring effect on the content you’re walling off, apply any other visibility option, or delay the locked content popup.
Newsletter
As the name suggests, Newsletter by Stefano Lissa & The Newsletter Team is a WordPress plugin that helps users create and manage newsletters. It has a drag & drop email builder that lets you create beautiful emails for your newsletter subscribers. But that’s not the only good feature of this plugin.
It allows you to create several lists of subscribers and customize the newsletter for each group. Import a file of subscribers or start building a new one with the custom subscription widget, and you will get everything you need for running email marketing.
For an additional payment of $90 per year, you will get access to advanced integrations with major mailing services as well as automated newsletters. The automation feature compiles the recent blog posts in an email and sends it to the subscriber list.
The only drawback is that the subscription options are limited. You won’t be able to set up a pop-up or a sticky header with the subscription form.
Icegram
If you check Icegram’s page on WordPress.org and see 40,000 active downloads, you may be thinking it’s another mid-tier email subscription plugin. You couldn’t be more wrong. Despite having a medium amount of users, this plugin can serve you well from your first steps as an entrepreneur to you becoming a pro.
With a free version, you get access to several well-designed email subscription forms and multiple ways to present them, via a popup, a sticky header, a slide-in message, or a toast notification. Build your list in the WordPress database, connect to your email marketing service of choice, and you’re all set.
If you purchase the premium version at $97 annually, you’ll get so much more. Precise targeting based on user location or behavior, A/B testing, and more visual elements are just the tip of the iceberg. You can also create triggered popups based on user intent. Show them a popup when they’re about to leave the website, or add advanced actions based on the CTA button.
That’s an ample room to grow for a beginner email marketer, but that’s not all. For the most expensive license that comes at $147 per year, you can take this functionality with you if you ever decide to move from WordPress.
WP Subscribe
WP Subscribe is a simple yet practical email subscription plugin developed by MyThemesShop. It has a pretty decent subscriber base at 30,000 active downloads on WordPress. You won’t get an all-in-one tool, but as for a free plugin, it can do its job pretty well.
Choose one of the pre-designed themes and customize it in the admin panel, configure what pages it should be showing up on, and you can grow your audience. You can export the list of leads to FeedBurner or Aweber with the free version.
If you want to integrate with MailChimp or a dozen or so other email marketing services, you’ll need a license. A license that covers three websites for a year will only cost you $39, and the developers hold sales pretty often, so you may get it for a bargain.
Apart from advanced integrations, you’ll get access to analytics and advanced trigger options. You’ll be able to control exactly how and when your popups appear as well as get access to more customization. It’s even possible to customize with CSS or HTML code.
What WordPress plugin for growing the subscriber list should I choose?
The answer to that question depends on your needs as an email marketer. Do you need an all-in-one tool that gives you a lot of room to grow and has advanced tools like analytics and split testing? OptinMonster would do great in that respect.
Do you need a tool that doesn’t require you to have a subscription on MailChimp to manage email marketing? MailPoet would do best. Do you need a more simple tool for a fraction of the price? Go for Opt-in Panda or WP Subscribe.
If you need an entry-level tool that can last you a long time, go for Icegram or Newsletter. They seem to have the most value for your buck, and even though they does lack some advanced features, it may be all you need for a long time.
No matter what platform you choose, you need to remember that it’s your skills that matter the most, not the tools. Keep on learning, and you’ll manage to grow your subscriber list and master email marketing like a pro.
