In this time and age of digital marketing, developing and maintaining an efficient and state-of-the-art website, web shops, blogs or any other form of business, requires your constant presence. However, once you decide to upgrade your business and obtain more subscribers, your email, and its content, is one of the fundamental aspects that will make you or break you online.
This article provides an overview of the purpose of the MaiOptin plugin, its main advantages and features, different integration options and the pricing as well. Since a free version of this plugin is available, this review will list the applications where this free of charge version is suitable to be used. The premium version has some important features significant for some specific applications.
The plugin has an extremely user-friendly form that allows users to design eye-catching and professional forms. It is exceedingly simple to install and use, thus no previous technical knowledge is required for the setup. The only task the owner of the site is left with is to choose proper eye-catching form for their specific application to fit in perfectly with the design and purpose of the site.
General overview
Since its primary focus is on assisting the owner of the website/blog to collect the users’ contacts, especially in the email form, MailOptin offers a wide variety of options for personalizing the invitations to subscribe. The contacts are crucially important and the best way to catch more readers or customers. We will focus more on this in the section dedicated to MailOptin features.
Given that some businesses require sending numerous promotions or newsletters to different groups of customers or readers, MailOptin is equipped with automation feature that assists in sending emails and newsletters to subscribers. This option helps to automatize and grow the owner’s activities. Different readers/customers are interested in diverse products or topics.
By using the cookies all relevant information about web page visitors interest can be collected. This feature can be used to create different groups of users. Here it is possible to adjust when and how the subscribers will receive emails from the site. This feature includes the following settings:
- Selecting tags and/or categories for delivering automated emails
- Selecting which email service to use
- Setting up the time/date of sending the email with regard to the post’s publishing date
MailOptin is developed in two packages; LITE – the free version, and Premium – available in three separate sets depending on the users’ needs. More information on this is given later in the article.
GDPR and MailOptin – important Privacy Policy Regulation
GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation. It was adopted by the European Commission in May 2018 with the aim to protect the privacy of EU citizens. Every internet company or website which uses contact forms and email marketing must comply with this Regulation.
Basically, GDPR requires unambiguous, explicit and clear consent for marketing to EU residents. For this purpose, MailOptin has added the option to display a checkbox alongside the website’s privacy policies, terms of service or any other agreement users must consent to.
This way MailOptin automatically saves the consent with the profile, as a custom field, tag or utilizing the API of the ESP to pass across the consent.
A second option is available for getting the required permission to send marketing emails – the use of double opt-in. In this feature, the visitor must confirm their email address before receiving further emails from the website. This approach has proven to be less effective since it requires the visitor to check their inbox and click a link to confirm. Generally, visitors prefer simplicity, thus adding more steps in an action frustrates them.
MailOptin features
Once you install the MailOptin plugin, several tabs appear in the MailOptin menu. You can choose from several forms: lightbox popup, notification bar, widget form, before/after post forms, sticky bar, slide-in, and call-to-action buttons.
Two of the most commonly used forms are the lightbox popup (available in LITE and premium version) and the notification bar (available only in premium version) opt-in form.
Lightbox popup opt-in forms mostly appear immediately when a visitor opens a site. Since this prevents the user from reading any of the site’s content, most of them cancel the popup window and continue reading. This means that nothing on the site will prompt the visitor to subscribe later on.
It is important to mention that popups often bother the visitors and MailOptin has solved this issue by introducing the exit intent trigger. This enables the plugin to monitor the visitor’s mouse behavior, thus when their mouse cursor moves with the intent to leave the site, the popup is triggered on time to offer subscription.
The notification bar opt-in form remains fixed at the top or bottom of the website. It is also known as a floating bar, thus while the visitor is navigating the site, it appears to be floating on the top or bottom of the screen. It is very useful to offer something interesting to the customer to attract them to subscribe because it can be the last chance to take one more subscriber before he leaves the page.
In addition to these two most frequently used types, MailOptin has other styles which appear less intrusive:
- Slide-in – tracks the visitor’s behavior and can appear when pre-determined triggers are activated (for example, a page scroll)
- After/Before Post opt-in form – a static form that can be placed before or after a post.
- Widget form – can be placed in anywhere on the website
Once again for each type of form, there are several templates to choose from. These vary in their design and imagery. As already mentioned, the form needs to be fitted in the web site form which will attract the visitors to subscribe on the webpage.
WordPress Customizer is used for the greater part of the customizations, should you wish to make any. Elements such as the content of the message, the image – and its orientation, borders, effect and colors are simply modified. It is not necessary to reload the site to see the modifications since the plugin has a live editor automatically displaying the changes made after saving, which saves the time and make the web developing easier.
MailOptin Versions
The free version of MailOptin is also known as the LITE version. The free version has the same speed as the premium version, supports all major email providers, and offers the following features:
- Three opt-in methods: lightbox popup, sidebar/widget and before/after post
- Support for sidebar and widget opt-in forms
- Email automation – an option to send automated and event-triggered emails
The free version has sufficient features to start a business. It’s also a nice way to test out the plugin before committing to buy the premium version. The free version can be downloaded via this link: https://mailoptin.io/lite/
As mentioned at the beginning, the Premium package is available in three separate versions:
- The Standard Package starts at $69 and covers only one site. This package includes all LITE features, with the addition of unlimited sites, premium themes and templates, opt-in forms, user-based targeting, branding removal, unlimited email campaigns, and page level targeting.
- The Pro Package is available at $169 per year and covers 3 sites. In addition to all Standard Package features, it offers time on site opt-in trigger, conversion backups, scroll opt-in trigger, pageviews trigger, advance opt-in analytics, opt-in campaign scheduling, opt-in custom CSS, display effect, AdBlock detection, email digest, an autoresponder, new and returning visitor detection, and an automated monthly or weekly digest you can send out.
- The Agency Package covers all three above mentioned packages for the unlimited number of sites. It starts at $269 per year and provides priority customer support, Easy Digital Downloads integrations, WooCommerce integrations, and third-party app integrations.
MailOptin also offers a hosted demo that gives access to all of the mentioned features. This is the easiest way to test the plugin and see its abilities before making a final decision. It is also worth mentioning that the plugin has a 14-day refund guarantee in case you are not satisfied.
Conclusion
In the end, it is important to emphasize that the plugin has a 5-star rating, more than 10,000 installations and is updated frequently. Overall, MailOptin is an affordable plugin, since its primary features are all included in the Standard package. It works with all WordPress templates and is provided with great support.
MailOptin’s simplified features make list building easy and effective. The fact that you can select how you want to get your visitors’ email addresses puts you in charge of gaining more subscribers. The possibility of editing every element of the selected template is a big plus. In addition to this, the interface is well designed and intuitive to use.
Should the need for assistance arise, access to well-detailed documentation is available. There is also the option to send any technical support questions through the MailOptin official site. It is necessary to emphasize that only the users will premium plan have access to priority support.