Tyler G. Merkel Blog: 8 Best WordPress Mailing List Plugins For Getting More Subscribers

With over 1 Billion users on Gmail alone, marketers now claim email to be one of the best marketing strategies that bring in a 4,300% Return On Invest (ROI), offering a return of $44 for every dollar spent on email marketing.

Yet it’s sad to see that most bloggers and marketers often give up on email marketing considering it an outdated strategy, just because they fail to grow their email list.

Maybe, if they actually bothered to see what’s wrong with their strategy, they could’ve achieved so much more for their business.

Email provide you a great way to drive more sales, conversions, and bring in traffic to your website. And the first step to creating a successful email marketing strategy is growing your email list.

That won’t be too difficult if you have the right tools at your disposal. And we’re about to show you the best WordPress mailing list plugins you can use to get more subscribers for your email list.

What Makes A Great Mailing List Plugin?

Have you seen those messages that pop-up on your screen when you visit a blog asking you to sign up for a newsletter? Well, that whole process is made possible by a mailing list plugin. A piece of software that allows you to create custom pop-up messages and integrate onto your blog to attract more subscribers to grow your email list.

A mailing list plugin also comes with several important features:

Ability to integrate with an email marketing service.
Different pop-up message templates.
Different ways to integrate pop-up forms (eg: pop-up, slide-in, in content)
Technologies for better conversions (eg: Exit intent).
A/B testing pop-up messages capabilities.

Why Should You Use One?

Most email marketing services, like MailChimp and AWeber, only provides you with ugly and low-quality subscriber forms and templates. These are tough to customize without coding experience and not very beginner-friendly at all.

A mailing list plugin, on the other hand, will give you a better and a beautiful way to attract the attention of your audience. These plugins come with pre-designed templates for pop-up messages, which you can customize to fit your branding. And feature special technologies to help you to get more subscribers, like exit intent for displaying pop-up messages before a visitor leave a page. No coding experience required.

However, different list building plugins have different features. So, make sure to take a closer look before you settle down for a plugin.

#1 Ninja Popups [Recommended]

Ninja Popups is one of the most popular plugins for setting up pop-up messages on your WordPress blog. The plugin comes with over 65 beautiful designs for delivering different types of pop-up messages and it’s been installed on over 25,000 blogs.

Main Features

In addition to the 65+ pre-designed pop-up message themes, Ninja Popups also includes a drag-and-drop theme editor that allows you to easily create your own pop-up messages.

Ninja Popups also supports exit intent pop-ups, A/B testing, display pop-ups when a user has scrolled a certain amount of your page, and many other technologies for getting the most out of your pop-up messages.

Compatible With

Ninja Popups works with almost all major email marketing services, including MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, AWeber, GetResponse, InfusionSoft, and more.

Pricing

A great thing about Ninja Popups is that it’s affordable. It only cost you a one-time price of $25 to use the plugin for the rest of your life and there are no monthly charges.

#2 OptinMonster

OptinMonster is well-known for its effective exit intent technology, which is capable of showing pop-up messages right before a visitor is about to leave a website. According to the website, “over a billion people see a website with OptinMonster on it every month.” That’s how popular this service really is.

Main Features

OptinMonster comes with a drag-and-drop builder for easily customizing your pop-up message designs and features plenty of pre-made themes. OptinMonster also features pop-ups designed specifically for mobile screens.

In addition to pop-up messages, OptinMonster lets you convert more visitors with floating bars, slide-in forms, add inline opt-in forms inside your posts, and much more.

Here are some of the other technologies you’ll get with OptinMonster:

Floating Bar
Slide-in Forms
Sidebar Optin Forms
Fullscreen Welcome Gate
Page Level Targeting
Easy A/B Split Testing
Conversion Analytics

Compatible With

OptinMonster works with MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, and many other email marketing services. And it also easily integrates with WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Squarespace, and other platforms as well.

Pricing

OptinMonster is a Software as a service (SaaS) company. Which means it provides the software as a service to you on a monthly pricing plan. It’s completely different from when you buy a plugin.

OptinMonster costs $19 per month. But, if you can pay annually, you will save 25% and it will only cost $9 per month for the Basic plan.

#3 Icegram

Over 23,000 blogs are using Icegram to deliver pop-up messages. Why? Because it’s one of the very few Free services that provides you with great-looking pop-up messages and many other tools.

Main Features

Icegram is not just about popup messages. It also comes with a set of other useful tools, like sidebar messages, overlay pop-ups, inline subscribe forms, tabs, sticky messages, and more.

A/B testing, exit intent technology, analytics, and advanced targeting systems are also supported by Icegram for increasing conversions.

Compatible With

Icegram works with all email marketing services, including MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, and more as well as other WordPress plugins such as Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, and Gravity.

Pricing

Similar to OptinMonster, Icegram is a SaaS company. But, it offers the service for Free for individuals, which provides enough features for a basic blog. And its startup plan only costs $9 per year.

#4 Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is a beginner-friendly list builder plugin that comes with a series of useful features and a set of “conversion focused opt-in forms” for getting more subscribers. All of its pop-up message themes are fully customizable as well.

Main Features

Thrive Leads also feature the new 2-step opt-in messages system that’s been found to increase conversion on certain blogs. And the service also lets you integrate in-content subscribe forms, slide-in messages, and create SmartLinks that launches a pop-up message when a user clicks on a SmartLink on your website.

Compatible With

Thrive Leads works with MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, iContact, and all major email marketing services.

Pricing

Thrive Leads is one of the several products offered by Thrive Themes. Which means, a $19 per month subscription will not only give you access to Thrive Leads but it will also let you use Thrive Landing Pages, Content Builder, Headline Optimizer and many others.

Or you could simply get a single copy of Thrive Leads for a one-time price of $67.

#5 MailMunch

MailMunch is a popular service that many bloggers use to integrate beautiful opt-in boxes inside articles and in between content. But, the service also lets you install pop-up messages and slide-in boxes as well.

Main Features

This is plugin is known for its selection of beautifully designed embedded forms, which you can easily integrate within your posts to grab the attention of your visitors and convert them into subscribers.

It also features a set of attractive pop-up message themes and top header bars as well.

Compatible With

MailMunch works with many major email marketing services like MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, and Constant Contact. But it doesn’t support few of the less popular platforms like iContact.

MailMunch also supports Shopify shops and Tumblr blogs as well.

Pricing

MailMunch is Free for a single-site use and lets you create unlimited forms with MailMunch branding. To get rid of the branding and get analytics/reports, it will cost you $6.30 per month and $13.30 per month for A/B testing and custom CSS features.

#6 Optin Forms

Optin Forms is a Free WordPress plugin that you can use to create beautiful opt-in forms to integrate into your posts, pages, and inside content using a shortcode. The plugin is being used on over 10,000 WordPress blogs.

Main Features

The main feature of the plugin is that it makes things easier for you to add an opt-in form directly inside a post or a page with just a single click.

The plugin only features 5 different form designs, which is not quite a lot compared to other plugins. But, you can easily customize them to match your branding.

Compatible With

The plugin works with all major email marketing services, including ConvertKit, GetResponse, and iContact. But, not with Active Campaign or Constant Contact.

Pricing

Optin Forms is completely Free to use. There are no payments involved.

#7 WP Subscribe Pro

WP Subscribe Pro is a list building plugin that supports all types of opt-in forms and messages, including pop-ups, embeddable forms, in content opt-in boxes, and much more.

Main Features

WP Subscribe Pro is a very lightweight plugin that will make sure your website pages will load without any extra delays. It also features responsive opt-in form designs and exit-intent technology.

A major downside to using this plugin is its dashboard, which is quite difficult to understand for a beginner to customize their pop-up messages.

Compatible With

WP Subscribe Pro works with only a few of the popular email marketing services, those are MailChimp, AWeber, GetResponse, MailerLite, Benchmark Email, and Mailrelay.

Pricing

You can get WP Subscribe Pro plugin for a one-time fee of $29. And it lets you use the plugin on an unlimited number of websites.

#8 Sumo (SumoMe)

Sumo (previously SumoMe) is one of the most powerful list building plugins available today which powers over 530,000 websites around the world. The service comes with a set of advanced tools and features for getting more subscribers from your blog visitors.

Main Features

In addition to the pop-up messages, which includes a set of the most beautiful theme designs, Sumo also features slide-in messages, image sharer, floating share bar, and many others. Some of them are:

Heat Maps
Welcome Mat
Smart Bar
Content Analytics
A/B Testing

Compatible With

Sumo works with all email marketing services, including GetResponse, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Campaign Monitor, and many others.

Pricing

Sumo offered a great Free plan with lots of cool features. But, after its recent rebranding, the current Free plan doesn’t offer any useful features or even the ability to integrate an email marketing service.

Now, you have to subscribe for its $29 per month plan to integrate an email marketing service. And yet it’s also limited to websites that only get 5,000 monthly visits or lower. For larger websites that receive around 50K visitors a month, Sumo costs $59 per month.

Bonus: HelloBar

HelloBar is yet another amazing free tool you can use to generate more subscribers. This tool started out as a simple plugin that lets you add a small welcome bar on top of your blog pages, but now, it is capable of doing so much more.

Main Features

In addition to the top subscriber message bar, HelloBar also lets you integrate pop-up messages of different sizes, including welcome mats which will take over the entire page to direct the attention of your visitors to a single message or an announcement.

Compatible With

You can use HelloBar without any email marketing services. It will store all collected emails within the HelloBar dashboard. Or you can sync your email lists with your email service. It supports MailChimp, AWeber, ConvertKit, Campaign Monitor, and more.

Pricing

HelloBar is Free to use on a single website. You’ll need a Google account to sign up for HelloBar. Pro plan costs $15 per month and it removes HelloBar branding and gives you more advanced features.

Summary

When you’re starting out from scratch, you’ll obviously want to save money and avoid taking too big of a risk. Which is why Ninja Popups is the best option for fresh blogs. It’s affordable and beginner-friendly.

However, if you’re serious about growing your email list and growing your business, go with a service like OptinMonster. It offers the best and most advanced features for the best price.