Want to use a WordPress email subscription plugin to build your email list and make more money from your audience?
Using an email newsletter popup box on WordPress is one of the very best ways to collect email addresses, along with having signup boxes embedded on your website.
To collect the most email addresses, you’ll want an email subscription plugin with all the right features. However, there are a lot of available WordPress email subscription plugins that claim to be the best!
In this article, we’ll take a look at the most popular email subscription plugins to help you choose the right one for your unique website.
What Do You Need In a WordPress Email Subscription Plugin?
What features you need in an email subscription plugin depend a lot on what you want it to do on your site. Let’s take a look at the top features you might need:
- Different types of forms or popups: Experimenting with different types of forms and popups to find out what your audience responds to the most is really helpful. Example popups include full-screen takeovers, inline boxes (that fit right in with your content), lightboxes, slide-in boxes, and more. With forms, you can experiment with adding and removing different fields, and putting them in different locations on your site.
- Widgets: Many blogs keep an email subscription widget in the sidebar, and possibly also in the footer to grab as many sign-ups as possible.
- Customization: You’ll probably want your popup or form to match your blog in terms of colors and styles.
- Connections: Do you have an email marketing tool you’re using already to send emails, like Constant Contact for example? You’ll want to make sure the email subscription plugin you choose connects with it.
- Fast: Nobody wants an email subscription plugin that slows down their site! Use one that’s vetted and has good reviews.
- Affordable: Of course, you don’t want to be spending too much of your hard-earned revenue on your email subscription plugin, so look for one in your budget.
Alright, let’s dive into our list!
Our Favorite WordPress Email Subscription Plugins
- OptinMonster
- WPForms
- Thrive Leads
- HubSpot WordPress Plugin
- Popup Maker
- RafflePress
- MailPoet
- Bloom
- Bonus: UserFeedback
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is our top WordPress email subscription plugin. It provides just about every type of popup subscription form you can think of, so there’s a lot of room to experiment and use different methods to gather email addresses from your visitors.
A few of the different kinds of popups you can use with OptinMonster include:
- Fullscreen mats
- Lightbox popups
- Scroll boxes
- Exit-intent popups
- Floating bars
- Gamified wheels
With so many options, it’s easy to find a couple types of popups that work the best for you.
OptinMonster also includes a great sidebar widget option, so you can put a traditional signup form in your sidebar in addition to your popups and other campaigns.
Don’t want your popups to come up right away? There are so many targeting options that you can use to make them show up right when you want them to. You can make your popups come up when:
- Visitors are about to leave your site
- Visitors scroll down your page a certain percentage
- When visitors are inactive for a certain amount of time
- After a visitor has been on your site for a certain amount of time
OptinMonster integrates with many email newsletter tools, including Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Brevo, Campaign Monitor, and more.
If you’re serious about growing your email list, OptinMonster is really the best plugin for the job.
Pricing: OptinMonster starts at $9 per month.
Get started with OptinMonster now!
2. WPForms
WPForms is our favorite forms plugin for WordPress, and it works really well as an email subscription plugin if you’re looking for widgets and forms instead of popups. With all its features, form types, drag-and-drop builder, and templates, it’s just the best forms plugin out there.
With WPForms, you can create email capture forms and put them anywhere on your site. Here are just a few ways you can use WPForms to build your email newsletter list:
- Add a “Subscribe to our newsletter?” checkbox to your Contact Us form
- Put an email subscription widget it your sidebar
- Put an email subscription widget in your footer
- Make all your forms super mobile friendly
- Use form landing pages to focus the user’s attention on filling out your form
WPForms integrates with all the most popular email newsletter tools.
With over 5 million active installs and a star rating of 4.9 out of 5, it’s clear that WPForms is an absolute must-have plugin.
Pricing: WPForms starts at $49.50 per year, or you can start with its most basic features for free.
Get started with WPForms today!
3. Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is a great email subscription plugin for WordPress website owners who want to boost their email lists. Similar to OptinMonster, Thrive Leads can be used to create different types of email opt-in forms, including lightbox popups, inline forms (embedded in your content), notification bars, welcome mats, slide-ins, and more.
Also similar to OptinMonster, you can choose different triggers for your email signup popups, including:
- When the visitor is about to exit
- When the visitor has scrolled a certain percentage down the page
- Right away on page load
You can also trigger different newsletter forms in WordPress depending on the category, page, or other content the visitor is viewing. Thrive Leads integrates with all the most popular email marketing services.
Thrive Leads is part of the Thrive Suite of plugins, which is a set of incredibly useful plugins that you can use to build quizzes, optimize and a/b test your landing pages, build new pages, display testimonials, and much more.
That being said, you can also purchase Thrive Leads as a standalone plugin, and by itself, it’s an awesome tool for creating a newsletter in WordPress and comes with all the features needed to grow your email list fast.
Pricing: Get Thrive Suite for $299 for a year, or grab Thrive Leads on its own for $99 for a year.
Get started with Thrive Leads today!
4. HubSpot WordPress Plugin
HubSpot WordPress Plugin is a free plugin that will help you build your email list, set up live chat, keep your leads organized in a CRM, and more.
We like the HubSpot plugin because it’s an easy way to get multiple important services for your website all at once, and they’re all connected. So, if someone does sign up for emails, they’ll be added right to your CRM.
This plugin also includes built-in analytics, so you can see which sales and marketing tactics are working the best, and which ones might need improvement.
Key features:
- Add email subscription forms anywhere on your site, including in popups
- Easily manage contacts in your connected CRM
- See which pages contacts viewed
- Send an automated email when someone fills out a form
- Add 24/7 chatbots to your website to help automate lead capture and support
- Integrates with over 1160 apps
Pricing: The HubSpot WordPress plugin is free to get started. Paid plans start from $45 per month.
Get started with HubSpot today!
5. Popup Maker
Popup Maker is a free WordPress popup plugin that’s actively installed on more than 700,000 websites. It also has a 4.9 out of 5 average ratings on WordPress.org.
Popup Maker is just what it sounds like — a popup maker! It helps you create a few different types of opt-in popups to collect email addresses, including:
- Lightboxes
- Slide-ins
- Exit-intent (premium feature)
- Click-based trigger popups
The free version allows you to paste a form from your preferred email marketing service into the popup to connect right with your list.
It doesn’t have many of the more advanced targeting and trigger options as offered in OptinMonster, but it’s a good free popup maker to get started with.
Pricing: Free or starting at $87 / year for the Start plan.
Get started with Popup Maker today!
6. RafflePress
RafflePress is different from the rest of the plugins on our list – it’s first and foremost a giveaway plugin, but it can massively and quickly grow your email list like an email subscription plugin.
With RafflePress, you can run a giveaway that requires signing up for your email newsletter list to enter. Imagine how many new email addresses that’ll bring in!
Plus, you can add more actions people can complete for more entries, like following you on social media, watching a video, and more.
At the Pro level, you’ll get a whole list of email integrations, including ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and many more.
Pricing: RafflePress starts at $39.50 for a year.
Get started with RafflePress now!
7. MailPoet
MailPoet is a WordPress email subscription plugin that will help you grow your email list and lets you send email newsletters right from your WordPress dashboard.
MailPoet has over 1,000 5-star ratings on wordpress.org, so it’s a good choice if you want to both collect email addresses and send your newsletters from your WordPress dashboard.
Using MailPoet, you can create several different kinds of email subscription forms, like:
- Popups
- Slide-ins
- Fixed bars
- Below-content forms
- Sidebar (widgets)
They also have several different templates you can use to get started with your popup designs.
Pricing: MailPoet is free to start, or $10 per month for more features.
Get started with MailPoet now!
8. Bloom
Bloom is an email opt-in and lead generation plugin for WordPress that was created by the Elegant Themes team.
Bloom has features that are similar to Thrive Themes, and it has many templates you can use to create different email opt-in forms on your site.
Email subscription forms you can create include:
- Fly-ins
- Inline opt-ins
- Below-content opt-ins
- Widgets
There’s also an option to lock your content behind an opt-in form.
You can trigger your popups after a timed delay, after readers reach the bottom of the post, after commenting, after purchasing, and after inactivity.
Bloom also integrates with 19 different popular email marketing services.
Pricing: Bloom is $89 per year.
9. BONUS: UserFeedback
Want to gather feedback and grab a few email subscribers while you’re at it? UserFeedback is a user feedback and survey plugin for WordPress that you can use to ask your visitors a question, then give them the opportunity to provide their email address to subscribe.
With analytics, you can find out what people are doing on your site. With UserFeedback, you can find out why.
For instance, you can see in Google Analytics that a particular page isn’t working to engage your audience, but you can’t find out why. So, add a UserFeedback popup to the page to ask how it could be improved, and let your users tell you what they need from it. Then, you can make the right improvements that’ll help you ultimately grow your business.
Plus, you can add an email subscription signup to every survey to help grow your list!
More features of UserFeedback include:
- Page-level targeting
- Conditional survey questions
- Unlimited questions and surveys
- Straightforward reporting
- Custom popup appearance
- Comment boxes
- Google Analytics integration
- Custom thank you message or page redirect after the user finishes the popup survey
Pricing: UserFeedback starts for free, or get more features starting at $49.50 for a year.
Get started with UserFeedback now!
That concludes our list of the best email subscription plugins for WordPress! We hope you found the right plugin(s) for your site.
If you liked this list, we bet you’d also like to check out:
How to Set Up Google Analytics Email Tracking (4 Easy Steps)
6+ Best Email Newsletter Tools & Services (Expert Pick)
How to Build and Grow Your Email List: 16 Highly Effective Ways
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