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OptinMonster Review: Is It the Best Tool for Growth?

OptinMonster Review 2024: Is It the Best Tool for Growth? 

Written By: author image Stacey Corrin
author image Stacey Corrin
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.
     Reviewed By: Turner John
reviewer image Turner John
John Turner is the co-founder of SeedProd. He has over 20+ years of business and development experience and his plugins have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Are you looking for a detailed OptinMonster Review?

OptinMonster is the #1 SaaS lead generation tool, helping you get more page views, increase conversions, and boost sales across your small business website.

No matter what kind of online business you run, nurturing the right kind of leads is crucial if you want to grow. For that, you’ll need the right tool for the job.

By the end of this OptinMonster review, you’ll see why it’s your best option for lead generation software, especially if you’re serious about improving your site’s email subscribers and conversions. 

But before we dive into this OptinMonster review, let’s get clear on why you should have a lead generation tool like this.

Why Do You Need a Lead Generation Plugin?

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is finding, capturing, and nurturing new leads.

That’s because there are many competing websites, making it hard for yours to stand out from the crowd. Plus, once you DO have people’s attention, you need to know what to do with it.

That’s where a lead generation plugin and app like OptinMonster comes in.

What Is the OptinMonster Plugin?

OptinMonster Review

OptinMonster helps you grow an email list and convert traffic into warm leads. So once you have your visitor’s contact information, you can develop a relationship through your email marketing campaigns.

Plus, there are several advantages to nurturing leads via email opt-in as opposed to other platforms, including:

  • Owning Your Traffic: Unlike organic traffic or social media, you won’t have to worry about algorithm changes affecting your sales. When you’ve mastered email marketing, you can generate consistent profits. 
  • Boosting Passive Income: In many cases, you can use email marketing to supplement sales from your main website. This means adding to all the sales you’re already making to increase your bottom line. 
  • Improving SEO: When you have an email list of thousands of engaged customers, it’s much easier to get traction with newly created content. You’ll instantly have thousands of people engaging with your content and sending positive SEO signals to Google.  

But won’t a simple signup form on your website work? 

As consumers spend more time online, engaging with them is harder. It would help if you had a lead generation tool that allows you to stand out with great-looking optin campaigns, including:

  • Floating bars with countdown timers
  • Slide in scroll boxes
  • Full-screen popups
  • Sidebar forms
  • Lightbox popups
  • Full-screen welcome mats

In other words, lead generation tools like OptinMonster are the best way to accomplish 3 things: 

  1. Create different campaigns without code or CSS
  2. Convert new website visitors into loyal subscribers or paying customers 
  3. Ensure returning customers continue to do business with your brand in the future

Now that you know why you need a lead generation plugin, the question remains: what is the best lead generation tool available?

We believe the answer is OptinMonster. And as you go through this article, we think you’ll see why.

How to Use OptinMonster

If you run an online blog or magazine, you may not have physical products to sell. So you might wonder, “Can a lead generation tool like OptinMonster really grow my business?”

Here are a few concrete ways OptinMonster helps online publishers. 

1. Grow Your Email List More Quickly

Many companies will add a “sign up” form to their website, produce content, and wonder why it’s taking them so long to get a few hundred email signups on their list.

The problem isn’t their website, and it’s not even their content. The problem is that they aren’t using the right tool to engage their audience.

OptinMonster lets you build stunning 2-step optin campaigns that grow your email list fast with its drag-and-drop builder and ready-made templates. Then you can use OptinMonster’s advanced targeting rules to make sure these campaigns are seen by the right people and at just the right time as they interact with your site.

So imagine you run an online health and fitness company. And a section of your blog is dedicated to healthy recipes and tutorials. You could create a cookbook as a lead magnet to display your offer on all pages that show recipes:

OptinMonster ebook lead magnet

This is one of the most simple examples of targeting rules you can use to reach your audience. As you’ll see throughout this review, you can also target users based on their behavior, physical location, browser device, and so much more.

2. Increase Pageviews 

OptinMonster is also an excellent tool for increasing page views across your site. This works by using custom Yes/No campaigns to redirect users to different pages of your website.

Here’s an example of what one of these campaigns might look like using this powerful feature:

OptinMonster yes/no campaign

You could show this to existing subscribers or users who didn’t opt into your offer but they’re still browsing your content.

Either way, these simple Yes/No campaigns are an excellent way to get more page views on your site. As a result, you can generate more income by selling ad space, getting more eyes in front of your affiliate links, or boosting SEO by keeping visitors on your site longer.

3. Earn More Affiliate Revenue

The last section touched on how OptinMonster can redirect users to the articles you want them to see. This is an excellent strategy for boosting affiliate income.

Many customers in the past have used OptinMonster for affiliate marketing. Their method is simple.

First, they check their analytics to see the highest-converting posts. To do so, you can check your Google Analytics account. Or to make things easier, you can use a Google Analytics plugin like MonsterInsights:

MonsterInsights homepage

MonsterInsights keeps all your data directly in your WordPress dashboard and makes it super easy to understand. 

Once you know your top converting posts (the ones that generate the most affiliate sales), you can locate the posts that generate the most organic traffic.

Again, a tool like MonsterInsights can get you this information in seconds. 

Then you can create campaigns with OptinMonster that redirect users from pages with the highest traffic to the pages and landing pages that generate the most affiliate sales:

OptinMonster redirect popup

This gets more eyes in front of your affiliate links and ultimately generates more revenue for you.

4. Reduce Site Abandonment 

Did you know that 70-90% of online consumers won’t ever return to your website once they leave?

That’s many lost potential leads from people who showed a high interest in your topic or niche just by landing on your site. These are definitely people you want to come back to again and again.

So how do you convert abandoning visitors saying “goodbye” into loyal customers saying “goodbye for now.”?

One powerful method is using OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® Technology

With an exit-intent popup campaign, you can catch your traffic as they’re leaving your site:

site abandonment exit intent popup

Then you can show them an offer they can’t refuse at this critical juncture in their customer journey.

Suppose your lead magnet suits your target audience (the visitor is part of that audience). In that case, OptinMonster will help you convert those abandoning visitors into long-term subscribers or customers. 

Now let’s see how OptinMonster can help online businesses sell physical or digital products.

5. Reduce Cart Abandonment

Earlier, we talked about how OptinMonster can help you engage users leaving your site with display rules. In other words, OptinMonster drastically reduces site abandonment.

But it’s also incredibly effective at reducing shopping cart abandonment too. 

Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest obstacles online business owners face. Every year, trillions of dollars are lost in the eCommerce space by consumers who load items in their cart and never check out. 

Using OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® Technology, you can build popups to prevent shoppers from leaving your site without paying for the items in their cart:

Shopping cart abandonment popup

By presenting them with a special offer or coupon at checkout, you’ll increase their chances of paying. The best time to present this offer is if they show signs of leaving their shopping cart page.

But this is only one example of how you can reduce shopping cart abandonment with OptinMonster. You can use other powerful targeting rules such as custom HTML or JavaScript functionality to show targeted campaigns when:

  • Specific items are (or aren’t) placed in a customer’s shopping cart 
  • A total number of items are placed in their cart 
  • Your customer’s subtotal reaches a certain amount 

And much more.

OptinMonster is one of the most effective ways to reduce cart abandonment from your online store.

6. Grow Your Contact List 

We’ve already discussed the importance of having a thriving email list for online publishers. But it’s just as important in the world of eCommerce, too. 

That’s because an email list is a perfect place to make announcements for product launches, upsells, seasonal sales, and other promotional content that will generate more profit for your online store.

Again, OptinMonster is simply the best tool for the job. Not only does OptinMonster help you get more customer emails, but you can also use it to get your customers’ phone numbers for SMS marketing.

Here’s an example of a campaign that does just that:

SMS marketing popup example

The other advantage of using OptinMonster to grow your email list is that you can always be sure your email campaigns are GDPR compliant.

Regardless of where your company is based, GDPR laws protect citizens’ data from the European Union (EU). That means you need explicit consent to send them promotional email campaigns.

And if your email list doesn’t follow GDPR guidelines, you risk fines of up to €20 million or 4% of your global revenue.

OptinMonster lets you quickly and easily add consent checkboxes to all your optin forms or enable an email confirmation to ensure users want to be added to your list.

But the best part is that you can add these extra steps specifically to traffic coming from the EU. That means you won’t lose any leads from other regions where GDPR compliance isn’t required.  

For more information on this, check out these helpful articles:

OptinMonster is hands down your best option for growing a contact list quickly and safely. 

7. Retarget Customers on Your Site

Yes, “retargeting” has become a buzzword in the eCommerce industry. But for a good reason.

Since consumers rarely purchase on their first visit to your website, retargeting allows you to follow up with customers until they’re ready to buy the products they love.

Traditionally, retargeting means tracking people who have come on your site, then paying for them to see ads for your products once they’re off your site.

But OptinMonster lets you kick things up a notch with OnSite Retargeting® and Geo-Location targeting.

OnSite Retargeting® allows you to show different optin campaigns and promotional offers to repeat visitors based on how they’ve interacted with your site in the past. 

This is an excellent way to personalize your user experience (UX) and get faster results for your bottom line. In fact, OnSite Retargeting® is the same strategy Podcast Insights increased their conversions by 1099%

OnSite Retargeting® is the best way to:

  • Make targeted product recommendations
  • Increase revenue with upsells, downsells, and cross-sells
  • Improve webinar attendance
  • Get more valuable feedback from customer surveys 
  • Collect most customer testimonials and reviews 
  • And so much more

You can also add OptinMonster’s Smart Tags to make each campaign genuinely personal. This lets you add your customer’s name or location directly to the types of campaigns they’ll see. 

Here’s an example of a campaign we saw earlier in this review that uses smart tags to address the user by their first name:

OptinMonster popup with personalization and smart targeting

This level of personalization is guaranteed to boost your overall conversion rates.

8. Get High Quality Leads

No matter what type of online business you have, you’ll need to have a consistent way to find and nurture leads if you want to grow.

That’s true whether you run an online magazine or a retail store. 

It’s essential to make sure your email list has only the highest quality leads for a few reasons:

  • Stop Paying too Much for Your List: Most email marketing services charge you for the number of contacts on your list, regardless of how good they are. If half of your emails are from spambot submissions, you’ll pay to keep those leads on your list.
  • Get Better Deliverability Rates: If you have quality leads on your list, your email campaigns will be more likely to get higher engagement. That means more open and click-through rates, which helps your overall deliverability.
  • Generate More Profit: When your mailing list has leads from your target audience, you can expect to sell more of your products through your email campaigns.

But how do you make sure the people on your list are the kinds of leads you want? This is what OptinMonster’s lead verification algorithm, TruLead™, was designed to do.

TruLead™ is an original algorithm created by OptinMonster that verifies your leads before they make it to your list. With TruLead™, you can block email submissions:

  • Coming from a specific IP address
  • Including unique characters, patterns, or strings of characters
  • Using free email accounts (like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo)
  • Having generic information (help@, info@, support@, and so on)
  • And much more
OptinMonster TruLead™ verification system

With TruLead™, you can ensure that every lead added to your contact list is the kind of lead you’re looking for.

Plus, you can manually verify the leads to ensure nothing slipped through the cracks. This gives you 100% control over building a profitable email list

To learn more, check out this helpful post: How to Easily Verify an Email Address and Qualify Your Leads.

As we wrap up this review, let’s quickly look at how OptinMonster’s pricing and support break down. 

Can You Use OptinMonster in WordPress?

OptinMonster is a standalone product, which means that it will work for any platform you use to build or host your website. 

But OptinMonster also comes as a WordPress plugin, simplifying things for many users. That’s because you’ll have access to your campaigns and analytics directly from your WordPress dashboard:

OptinMonster WordPress plugin

Plus, you can install and connect OptinMonster the same way you’d install and activate any other plugin you use for WordPress. 

There are a few advantages to this:

  • Get all the Benefits of WordPress: OptinMonster fits seamlessly with your WordPress site and offers integrations for most major marketing tools. That means you can add the OptinMonster plugin and keep things running smoothly.
  • Get Advanced Triggers for WordPress eCommerce: OptinMonster has advanced targeting rules such as MonsterLinks, for large eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. These advanced rules are easy to set up, take minimal configuration, and will drastically help improve sales. 
  • Save Your Site’s Bandwidth: As we already said, OptinMonster is a standalone product. That means it doesn’t rely on your site’s hosting services to run (unlike other lead generation plugins designed specifically for WordPress). 
  • Faster Access to Your Dashboard: With the OptinMonster plugin, you can access your campaigns directly from your WordPress dashboard. This includes getting analytics for your campaigns’ performance and running convenient split tests and a/b testing to optimize your conversions.

The fact that OptinMonster is both a standalone product and a WordPress plugin gives you the best of both worlds: you get easy access to a tool that fits with your current marketing stack, but you also get a tool that won’t use your site’s resources and bandwidth. 

OptinMonster Review: Pricing and Support 

The OptinMonster pricing has several paid plans that you can choose from: 

  • Basic plan: $9/month
  • Plus plan: $19/month
  • Pro plan: $29/month
  • Growth plan: $49/month
OptinMonster pricing page

This flexibility ensures that you’re only paying for the tools you need to get to the next level. For smaller companies on a budget, you could start with a Basic or Plus plan. 

Then as OptinMonster helps your company grow, you can upgrade your plan as needed. 

But with all the ways that OptinMonster can increase conversions and sales on your site, it’s a lead-generation tool that quite literally pays for itself. 

Plus, you never have to worry about feeling “stuck” as you’re gathering new leads. OptinMonster has many channels of support, including:

  • Live chat
  • Capture email ticket submissions 
  • Thorough and clear documentation
  • Blog
  • YouTube channel
  • Social media platforms

At any time you need help, OptinMonster’s support team can help you find the solution you’re looking for. It’s no wonder why their support team has such an excellent reputation. 

Consider this review from the popular review site G2:

OptinMonster review from G2

Or this one from Capterra:

OptinMonster review from Capterra

These are only a few examples demonstrating how happy customers and digital marketers are with OptinMonster’s support team. 

But OptinMonster helps you at every stage: before, during, and after people opt-in. 

OptinMonster FAQs

Is OptinMonster Free?

No, OptinMonster is not free. It also doesn’t offer a free version or “freemium” plan. However, OptinMonster does offer some of the most powerful marketing and lead-generation tools at an incredibly affordable price.

Does OptinMonster integrate with Shopify?

Yes. You can install OptinMonster automatically on your Shopify store with a Growth plan.

Does OptinMonster work with MailChimp?

Absolutely! You can integrate your Mailchimp email list with OptinMonster’s direct integrations.

What are opt-in forms?

Optin forms are consent forms that allow users to authorize 3rd parties to contact them.

Is OptinMonster the Best for Lead Generation? 

Yes, OptinMonster is hands down the best lead generation tool to grow your business. 

OptinMonster offers more campaign types, triggers, and targeting rules than any other service on the market. Plus, it repeatedly gets massive results for businesses of all sizes – including those working on a shoestring budget.

In fact, you might want to check out some of these customer stories to learn more about what OptinMonster can do for you:

Plus, when it comes to ease of use, OptinMonster’s campaign builder is unmatched. Installing OptinMonster on your website requires zero “tech skills” or coding knowledge. It offers inline text editing, custom fonts and colors, and numerous templates.

And with tons of automation integrations, you can easily connect to email marketing services like Mailchimp, AWeber, etc.

Because it’s such a comprehensive tool offered at such a low price, we can confidently say that OptinMonster is the best lead generation tool available. 

Want to check it out for yourself?

Sign up for your risk-free OptinMonster account today!

Why not learn how OptinMonster used SeedProd to reduce CPA while you’re here/

We hope you found this OptinMonster review helpful. If so, please follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more great content to help grow your business.

author avatar
Stacey Corrin Writer
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

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