An introduction to Better Optin
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BetterOptin: The Visitors Friendly WordPress Popup Plugin
Ok. Popups usually convert better. But how annoying are they? Do you know how much you piss your visitors off? Actually yes, you do. How much does it annoy YOU when a site throws a popup at your face as soon as you land on it?
You know what? We’re just like you. We don’t like being harrassed when we browse the internet. That’s why we developed a new WordPress popup plugin: BetterOptin, a better way to use popups. And it converts even better!
Why is BetterOptin Better?
Not only because of its name obviously Let me explain how it works and you’ll understand why it’s better right away…
The Problem
BetterOptin is based on a simple observation: people don’t like popups thrown at their face for no apparent reason.
Seriously, let’s say you land on a site after a Google search. Maybe you’ll like the site. Maybe you’ll enjoy reading the content and you’ll become a subscriber. But what happens with traditional popups is you’re asked to subscribe / like / download this / do that before even reading a sentense!
Some popup systems tried to change that by adding a delay before triggering the popup. But really? Will you be happier if a popup shows up in the middle of your reading? I don’t think so.
With BetterOptin, you stay away from all these bad impressions given to visitors and you keep your brand image unharmed.
Our Solution
With BetterOptin, you only ask people to complete an action (be it subscribing to your newsletter, downloading your e-book or else) at an appropriate moment. And this particular moment is when the visitor is about to leave without having completed the action first. This is called exit-intent.
BetterOptin is capable of detecting when the visitors leaves your site and will trigger the popup just then.
Your site WITHOUT BetterOptin
Meet John. John is browsing your site. He found it after searching for “increase traffic on my blog” on Google.
He is about to start reading the article he just found, and BOOM, a big popup appears covering all the content.
“F#ck!”, says John, “I don’t even know what the hell this article is saying.”
If you’re lucky, John will close the popup, read the article and then leave the site. Otherwise he’ll just close the tab. You lost him.
Your site WITH BetterOptin
Meet John. John is browsing your site. He found it after searching for “increase traffic on my blog” on Google.
He’s read a couple of article and finds the content very useful. You just gave him a few tips for traffic growth, and John wants to try it right away on his own blog.
John is about to leave your site and log-in his own to make a couple of changes and install the plugin you recommanded. He is dragging his cursor towards the “close tab” button, and BOOM, a nice designed popup asks his if he want to register to your newsletter.
Actually, he didn’t even know you had a newsletter, but your tips and tricks were good. So let’s subscribe!
Do You Care About John?
If you do care about John, you won’t bother him with thing he doesn’t want to do just yet! Wait for the appropriate moment, and only then you’ll get John in your list
How Do I Create Popups?
Creating a popup can take as little as a minute, but it can also take a lot more time if you want to fine tune it.
The creation process is as follows:
1. Choose a template
The plugin comes with 8 pre-designed templates that you can customize. If you know HTML, you can even create your own template (see below “Templating System“).
2. Customize the settings
The popup behavior can be affected through various settings. For each popup, you’ll be able to decide:
- How can the popup be closed,
- For how long should a visitor NOT be bugged after he closed a popup,
- The overlay color,
- The overlay opacity
3. Choose where to display the popup
Define where the popup will show up (everywhere on your site, on a specific page…). This allows for very targeted campaigns (see below “Create Targeted Campaigns“).
And this is not limited to posts and pages! You can select any page from any post type you have on your site. This includes post types possibly added by other plugins.
4. Customize the popup
This is a big part of our pride! We have developed our own interface for popup customization. It is very simple and intuitive. It’s been intensively tested by real life users during a beta-test phase. To customize a popup element, just click it and all the available controls will instantly show up.
Create Targeted Campaigns
By mixing two features of BetterOptin, you can create highly targeted opt-in campains and optimize your sales. Let me explain…
The first important feature is that you can create a popup that displays on specific pages only. This will allow for a non-intrusive experience. For instance, you can create a promotional popup for one of your partners that triggers only on the guest post your partner wrote.
Now let’s go even further. The second interesting featured is the mailing list selection per popup (with MailChimp for now). So, still on the same popup, instead of sending the leads you collect to your general list, you can send them to a “Sponsor Interest” list, just for this popup.
See? You just created an extremely targeted popup!
Can I Compare Popups and Identify the Best Ones?
We have developed an Analytics feature in BetterOptin that lets you see your overall performance during a specific period of time. You can also view the performance of each popup individually.
For each popup our Analytics tool will show you:
- Number of impressions
- Number of converisons
- Conversion rate
Where Do My Leads Go?
That’s an important part right? Well, at the time, the plugin has two possible destinations for the leads you collect:
- WordPress itself
- MailChimp
Collecting Leads with WordPress
If you decide to keep your leads in WordPress, BetterOptin creates a custom role allowing you to easily identify users who subscribed through one of your popups. However, you can define any role you want as the default role. Anyway, you’ll always be able to find the users that came through a popup as we mark them with a user meta. You’ll never loose leads in your users list!
Collecting Leads with MailChimp
If you decide to go with MailChimp, just set your API key. We will then retrieve your lists. No need to look deep down into MailChimp to find the list ID!
Once you entered your API key and selected a destination list, you’re ready to create popups. But what if you want to send visitors who subscribed through one popup in a different list than the rest? Well, you can! And it’s pretty easy.
During the popup creation process (or when you edit an existing popup), you can select a specific list… for each popup! That’s a great thing isn’t it? Now you can build very, very targeted lists.
Technical Mumbo-Jumbo
Because every once in a while somebody asks for technical specifities, here is a little technical stuff…
Templating System
You know HTML? You’ll love what you’re about to hear…
One of the great advantages of BetterOptin is that we built it with a very, very simple templating system for popups. The plugin comes with 8 templates, but you can create your own. It only requires HTML. Just code the template as you would do for any HTML page, and add our “template tags” in data attributes. This will tell the customizer what he can or cannot customize.
Custom Table & Statistics API
In order to provide valuable insights without slowing down your site, BetterOptin uses a custom database table to save all the “hits”.
As working with SQL queries is not safe if done the wrong way, we developed an API within the plugin to let you easily and safely interact with the custom table. No need to write any SQL queries, our helper functions will do it for you. Of course the API uses the WordPress $wpdb object when working with the database.
Titan Framework
BetterOptin relies on Titan Framework to handle plugin options. This framework is built by expert WordPress developers and well maintained on GitHub.
Addons Compatibility
The beauty of BetterOptin (and a painful part for the developers ;)) is that it’s built around a flexible core, allowing for new features to be added as extensions of the plugin. This means that we will develop new features in the future, and, if you have the skills, you can do it too.
Roadmap
Wanna know what’s coming next in BetterOptin? Check out the roadmap. You can also vote for the ideas you like best.
Changelog
Version 1.0.0
- First stable version