Note: Optinmonster has sponsored this post and I am also an affiliate for this company, which means I can earn a commission after my visitors open my affiliate link* and then purchase a product from the site.
Word-of-mouth has been the main driver of my freelance business, but when I started building scalable income streams, I realized that I also needed a way to automate my email list growth as well, so I could focus my time and energy on supporting clients, developing my skills and marketing myself while also growing business opportunities.
I also realized that I wasn’t going to be able to launch everything on my website at the same time and I knew I could generate leads for my new ventures from my blog posts and other organic content I’m developing (stay tuned!) before they are even live and also glean insights about what content will engage people most in my courses.
I discovered Optinmonster* and chose it because it had the most display rule options for targeting audiences and the most possibilities for combining them. My newsletter provider does have pop-ups, but they aren’t nearly as sophisticated as Optinmonster, so it’s definitely a worthwhile purchase for me despite this overlap. The display rules alone make this a worthwhile purchase and there are so many other features, too.
What I especially love about Optinmonster is that I can set it up to display certain content on certain URLs and/or to people who have viewed certain URLs. This is going to make it very easy to target my lead magnets to my intended audiences and avoid giving people things that are irrelevant to their needs. Other display rules I love: time on site and distance scrolled. These are really fantastic for figuring out what user behaviours indicates interest and I can use A/B testing to experiment to see what combination of display rules converts bests.
I’ve compared Optinmonster’s on-site cart abandonment campaigns with email cart abandonment campaigns and I’ve concluded that on-site is generally a stronger fit for me and my audience because of how I can target them with these display rules.
Seeing the possibilities behind the display rule combinations inspired me to build niche-specific streams of income, content and campaigns for hyper-targeting certain groups. Before this, I had planned to do most of this targeting manually and mostly through outreach and I wasn’t really targeting niches. This tool has opened up so many doors for my business without adding extra work. I just have to create the content, set up the campaigns and monitor them.
Another reason I chose Optinmonster was because they have so many resources about lead magnets I can design, how to strategically implement them and how to create content that engages your target audience. All I have to do is Google a question I have about lead magnets or personalization and a bunch of Optinmonster blog posts show up in the results, explaining how to do that and providing suggestions for content. Optinmonster has more educational resources than any other platform I’ve used and their customer service is so prompt, helpful and professional.
It was also very easy and fast to set up Optinmonster with my website analytics and newsletter platform. It just took me a few minutes. It’s also very easy and fast to edit my campaigns, even when they are already live on my site.
I wanted to use Optinmonster to create my upcoming course sign-up landing page, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. I could set it to appear from the get-go by selecting 0 seconds in the “time on site” display rule and that’s easy enough to do, but there is no option to prevent users from clicking the page closed and I would have had to to manually add additional formatting to include the landing page copy and design I want, so it wasn’t appropriate for my particular situation. So I am going to create a “coming soon” landing page in my email newsletter provider instead. This is just fine because I can still apply Optinmonster display rules to this sign-up page and my newsletter provider has a fantastic integration with Optinmonster, so I can gather insights from it and apply them to my campaigns.
There are a few other things I would change about Optinmonster.
I would love to be able to resell accounts. The Plus, Pro and Growth plans all include multiple sites, but they are all sub-accounts under mine, not individual, autonomous accounts. So to give someone access, I would not only be able to see all of their data, but I would remain fully responsible for their campaigns and that’s not a good fit for what I do or what my clients want. The sub-accounts are great for freelancers who manage accounts for people, but I don’t do that. I also only have one website, so the feature of sub-accounts isn’t useful to me in that way, either. I would love it if there was a special perk for consultants like me as there is for people who manage accounts.
Also, there aren’t a lot of design possibilities for the pop-ups and few filters to find the best form for your situation. It would be great if there was a library of photos and icons and the ability to change the colours of icons in the graphics or swap the icons and images for other choices. The absence of this flexibility makes it a bit tricky for branding and does create some extra work.
Finally, I would love it the forms were more sophisticated, so I could collect more information and segment in more ways within Optinmonster itself. It gets a bit frustrating having to use and coordinate several vendors just to collect information in forms.
I highly recommmend Optinmonster as a tool for growing your email list, targeting and engaging prospects and building loyalty.