OptinMonster: Features, Pros, Cons, & User Reviews

OptinMonster is the most powerful lead generation software for marketing agencies, bloggers, eCommerce websites, and all small businesses.

Growing your mailing list is one of the absolute best ways to find success with your blog and business.

The unfortunate sad truth is that 70% of the people that come to your site for the first time are NEVER going to come back.

You can try and get them to follow you on social media and join your Fan Page, but we are know nobody really checks these pages or even sees your updates through Facebook anyway.

The ONLY and TRUE way to get people to keep coming back to your site time and time again is by getting your visitors on your mailing list.

I’ve been adding emails to my mailing lists since the mid 90s and I know a thing or two about how to get people to take action and submit there email.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of different methods, tools, tips and tricks… but at the end of the day, nothing works better than the OptinMonster WordPress plugin!

OptinMonster Explodes Conversions Immediately!

So we know that 70% of the people to your site are never going to come back… so how can we get subscribers to join our mailing list when they get to our site.

The most common methods for getting mailing list subscribers are the following:

• Using text to ask for a subscribe at the end of each post
• Adding a sign up form on your side bar
• Creating a unique landing page

Each of these work, but also have their own faults as well.

With OptinMonster you have a wide variate of ways to increase your subscriber count, but the most effective way is through the lightbox popup window that appears over your site when someone visits for the first time.

You can see an example of this in the screenshot below.

The example in the screenshot above is actually from WPBeiginner.com, which is owned by Syed, who is the co-creator of OptinMonster.

Syed also reported that once he setup the popup plugin on his site he was seeing an instant increase in subscriber growth by over 600%!

If you think that number is high, you should hear some of the other numbers from sites using OptinMonster and reporting over 1,200% increases in signups!

How OptinMonster Works

Setting up OptinMonster is extremely easy. Once you install the plugin you go through a simple 4 step process.

1. SETUP – Select the type of lead generation you would like to create. In most cases this would be the “Lightbox Popup” solution.
2. CONFIGURE – Here you put in the specs of your lightbox popup, such as how often it should display and after how many seconds.
3. DESIGN – Now you get to choose a template and design your lightbox popup window. With a few simple clicks you can also connect OptinMonster to your mailing list solution, such as Aweber.
4. OUTPUT SETTINGS – The last step is to make any final specifications to your popup such as pages you might want it (or not want it) to appear on.

Once completed you can start running the popup on your site and do some split testing as well.
You’ve probably seen the OptinMonster popup we’ve had running on BloggingTips.com for a few months now.

You may also have seen that we were running two different variations for split testing.
Here are the two different variations we’ve been running.

Without reading on… which do you think performed best?
Here are the results from that split test.

Not only was the comparison between the two not even close… it would actually be quite detrimental to the success of a site if it was to stick with one design and not split test.

As you can see, the clear winner was the “My Secret Blogging Success Video Course has been Leaked“… by nearly double the conversions as the “Want to Buy a Car with Blogging Profits?“.

Split testing is just one of the many easy to implement features of OptinMonster.

The Amazing Features Within OptinMonster

The example above was the most basic form on what OptinMonster has to offer.

Here are the many other features built within the plugin.

Beautiful Optin Form Designs

I’m not a graphic designer or coder and it’s likely that you aren’t either.

One of the main reasons why OptinMonster is such a great tool for site owners and bloggers across the board is because of it’s built in design editor.

All you need to do is find a template you like and then click and edit the different areas to match the look and feel of your site.

Dead simple to use and awesome for split testing.

A/B Testing

I already showed you the importance of split testing in my example above.

OptinMonster makes it extremely easy to create split tests.

All you need to do is create one template, then click on the split test button and make a few tweaks.

The system will then start serving each of your different ad copies to see which performs best.

Once you have the data you need to see which performs best, simply click the OFF button and let your best ad copy continue to do it’s magic!

Page Level Targeting

In most cases, you are probably going to have your popup window appear on all pages of your site.

However, there might be some areas you don’t want it to appear, such as your CONTACT or ABOUT ME page.

You may also want to setup different popups for different pages, such as creating a unique popup and call to action if someone is on your SALES page or about to leave your site.

All of these amazing features are built right into OptinMonster for you to play around with.

Exit-Intent Technology

I keep mentioning that 70% of the people to your site are never going to come back again.

OptinMonster has an exit-intent feature that will show your popup when the visitor scrolls their mouse to the top navigation bar when people are trying to leave your site.

There is simply no better way to make a last section effort to get someone on your mailing list than when they are trying to leave your site.

Try it out and you will be amazing with the results!

Analytics

You can split test and do all the different crazy features that OptinMonster has built in, but if you didn’t have the stats to back it up, then you are right back to when you first started.

The good news is that OptinMonster already has all of the analytics features built in, so you can do all of the split testing you want and you don’t even need to mess with Google Analytics to get it done.

Run all the crazy tests you like, see what works best and dominate the traffic coming to your site!

As you can see, there are plenty of amazing features built within OptinMonster.

One of the major reasons for the success of the plugin and why it’s built with some many amazing features, is that it was co-created by a professional online marketer and WordPress expert — Syed Balkhi.

OptinMonster – Created by Syed Balkhi

OptinMonster was co-created by Syed Balki, who is not only an internet marketing and WordPress expert, but he’s also a good friend of mine that I’ve known for many years now.

You can learn more on Syed in my video interview with him as he is one of the Featured Experts within the Blogging.org Mastermind community.

As the creator of OptinMonster, Syed has been able to work with some of the largest sites online and help them with tweaking their ad copies and popup windows to get the maximum perform.

During my interview with Syed, he tells us that free gifts and “secret tools” pdf reports work the best across the board (which we also saw through my internal split testing above).

Grab Your Copy of OptinMonster

You know the value in growing your mailing list and you’ve seen the results Syed and myself have achieved thanks to the power of this plugin.

Each day that you don’t have OptinMonster running on your site, 70% of your traffic is leaving and never coming back.

By
Brett Helling

Brett has been starting, growing, and monetizing websites since 2014. While in college, he began to learn about digital marketing. After graduating, he continued to build a diverse portfolio of websites while working a full time job. After years of building the portfolio on the side, he made the jump to run his websites full time.