my personal experience with
Thrive Leads

Build a list they say... It'll be fun they say....

How is your list building going? Having a hard time with people coming to your site, you kindly asking them for their contact information, they then laugh in your face and close the website? Are you even asking for email addresses at all?

Statistics show that building your own bonafide email list is the way to go if you want to make real money with your Wordpress site. But with so much emphasis on building a list, it is really hard to do with the plugin's that are available out there. 

Very few of them seem to be geared toward attention grabbing, email collecting, and lead generating. 

I am sure you have used many different plugins to build a list. SO HAVE I! And I am able to build a list, but pretty slowly. I was met with a problem, do people just not want to give me their email address? or are they not being 'compelled' to give their email list?

Well after testing numerous plugins, I was able to see MASSIVE returns with Thrive Leads. When I say massive returns, I mean increases of nearly 300%! I went from collecting a few email addresses a week, to collecting dozens of leads a day!

​Your standard review would leave price toward the end, but I think when you start dumping money into a Wordpress plugin, it is time to be sure it is something that you are willing to invest in. 

​The old adage about 'needing money to make money' it is true. There are very few really good, proven, and tested free Wordpress plugins that are worth the time used to download them. 

You also do not have to worry with a 'freemium' type feel where certain things have to be "opened up" to you once you have tried it. The Thrive Leads plugin has a one-time price and it is yours FOREVER!

Thrive Leads charges on the number of 'licenses' you need. Meaning, how many websites do you want to install it on. 

• Single Site ($67)
• Unlimited Sites ($99) - must be your owned websites
• Agency License ($588 a year) -  for use with your client sites

Price is a serious consideration. It is a big deal. I get it. 

But when you really look at it, in comparison to other similar plugins like OptinMonster you are looking at spending a cool $199/year. (granted the license can be used on an unlimited number of websites)

If you are like most of us grinders in the world, the single site license is more than enough. Thrive Leads is the most affordable of the two by far! 

What ever your style Thrive Leads has a template to fit the scheme of your site. Whether you want splash after splash bombarding your visitors (which surprisingly enough actually works) or you are focused on user experience and wanting to go about your email list building a bit more subtly, there is a template for you!

For me this is the biggest part of the plug. If you are lost in how to build an opt-in type, or not sure where to go. There are literally dozens upon dozens of different templates that you can just edit, change a color here or there and BOOM! A professional looking, eye-catching, beautiful opt-in form. No experience required!

Here are the types available:

Lightbox:​​

The lightbox is essentially your run of the mill pop-up. It will take over the page only allow the user one way out by hitting the 'x' at the top right. 

Ribbon​:

Bar-style heading at the very top. It rides the top of the screen along the entire users visit. There is an 'x' to get it to go away. 

Widget​​​​​​:

This is something that is perfect for the sidebar. Perfect size and weight, you can put anything you want in it and get it to collect emails.

Slide-In:

You can choose a percentage of the screen covered by the time this slide in occurs

Screen Filler (my favorite):

This one probably converts the best for me, its the FULL screen filler that you can put the 'exit-intent' prompt on it. Making it pop up any time someone tries to click the 'x' on their browser to leave your site. It also has the scroll mat variation. This allows it to push your content slowly out of the way while the user scrolls. 

Post Footer:

This is another good one. It works because you can park it on the bottom of every blog post you have. 

In-Line Forms:

This is the native type one. It just occurs naturally in the wild like a wild animal. It works well because traffic begins to read it before they even realize it is a part of a email collecting form. 

Learning Curve? Is Thrive Leads Hard to Use?​​​​​

When creating a form, the process may seem a little overwhelming. To be honest, for someone totally unfamiliar with wordpress, it will take a little getting used to. 

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I honestly bought the product and was one step away from using the money-back guarantee because I got frustrated with it a few times. 

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But then I actually read the instructions and used the videos that Thrive Leads makes available in the plugin (conveniently located right next to all of the functions within the plugin) and I literally started to FALL IN LOVE WITH THIS THING! 

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I am not kidding either. Once you have a hang of it, you will start to see the potential in it and not want to use anything else. This interface makes the classic Wordpress theme look like a plain-jane.

Trust me when I tell you that the $67 that I paid for it was insignificant with what I was able to do once I had the plugin going. 

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So the learning curve is not a criticism. I say that because it is not poorly designed by any means. It is just one that is complex, comprehensive, includes everything! Believe me it grows on you very quickly.

How to Create an Optin Form

I thought that for the sake of those that have not used this product, it would be advantageous to walk through a process of setting up a form so that you can see first-hand the power that is at your fingertips. 

So after installing the plugin, you would go to the Thrive Dashboard > Thrive Leads. It is here that you will see sections like Lead Shortcode, Lead Groups, Signup Segue, ThriveBoxes, etc... We are going to likc on the first one 'Lead Groups' and select Add New.

A lead group is a feature that allows you to create collections of optin forms that can share a common set of rules. It can include many different rules or just one. 

So, for instance, you can set up a widget optin for posts that appear in a particular category of your site. It is insanely useful once your site grows because now you can mix up your freebie offer to be more appropriate for who is hitting the page. 

For me that was huge as I can target experienced internet marketers versus beginners. 

Now after you create the Lead Group, you can now TONS of options you have to choose from. I will just do the standard popup for the fun of it. 

If you notice right next to each one of the options, there is a little circle with a play button in it. That is the video that is available for you to watch where they give you a short 2-5 minutes of how to use, employ, and optimize that particular aspect of Thrive Leads. This is where I was blown away, it is almost impossible to get stuck with this software.

After selecting a form name,  you select Create Form and give the form a name. There is a blue gear on the right that will let you edit the design of the form itself. 

The AMAZING Drag and Drop Editor

As mentioned earlier, EVERY  (and I mean every) part of this page is customizable. All you need to do is view your options by clicking the element and make your adjustments. Size, color, font, font size, even padding around the other elements. It is your baby. 

The editor does take some getting used to, but that is because it is fully comprehensive. First time I looked at it, I was lost. But the support in the plugin as well as the support over at Thrive Themes makes it simple to get that one thing you are having trouble with. 

And if you are a daily blogger like myself, you will end up using these same functionalities over and over again until ti becomes second nature to you. 

Triggers! Decide How You Want Your Email Capturing to Appear!

Ok, so you have designed the perfect form. So when do you want it to pop up?

Well, there are a number of ways that this can happen. Just do what tickle's your fancy!

• Immediately
• Time Delay that you specify
• When something is clicked
• When something comes into the display of the user
• At the bottom of the page
• At a certain percentage of which the page has been scrolled. 
• When the visitor shows exit intent. (or the user tries to leave the page by clicking the 'x' on the browser)

I am sure that we can agree that popups and the like are annoying and get in the way. Especially if you are not interested in signing up, just looking for the answer to your question. 

Thankfully, Thrive Leads has thought of this, too. When a visit is unique, Thrive Leads will prompt the user with whatever email captures you want set however you want. THEN you can set a time period where it will not prompt that user again. Whether you want it for 1 day or 1000 days. Or you can just put it at 0 and it will display anytime, every time. 

When I tell you that Thrive Themes is comprehensive... it is COMPREHENSIVE. 

There are a host of other animations to choose from, about 30 or so with more being added all the time. If you can see from the image above as well, it can give you the analytics of each page as to how many times the popups were presented and how many times people converted and gave up the goods. 

This is huge when you can see what works and what doesn't. (More on that later).

How to choose when and where a Optin Prompt Occurs

You may be looking at that subheading thinking that we are about to rehash the same thing, but you would be wrong. This particular setting allows you to choose which pages and posts popups occur on. 

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This is kind of a big deal. In the world of internet marketing, we are constantly creating landing pages, sales pages, squeeze pages, etc... and sometime we do not need the optin form popping up unnecessarily. Here we can change that by telling Thrive Leads exactly where to come up!

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This type of targeting allows for laser-focused testing. 

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Under Thrive Dashboard > Thrive Leads, you will see a cog icon.

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You will no see the options available to you to choose where you want your forms to popup. 

It is broken down by: 

• Categories: optin prompts are based on the category of the page/post
• Posts: Choose the right post you want a particular one to land on
• Page Templates: Based on templates used by you when creating the page itself
• Post Types: Are there certain posts you want this to appear on? You may want it on product pages, but not product reviews. 
  
• Basic Settings: This includes all of the regular sites of your page, including the 404 page, homepage, search page, etc...

As with many things, there are exceptions and Thrive Leads allows for that too by you being able to select the exceptions below. You can see that in the pic above. 

A/B Testing, Yeah, Thrive Leads Has that, too!

Ok, we talked about this a little above, but this is where the optimization train hits the tracks. 

Optimization is necessary, as much as we may all hate to do it, but it is a necessary evil. Thankfully, Thrive Leads makes it easy to do and optimize. 

You can run split tests on different forms, different wordings, different pictures, etc... Thrive Leads will strategically change up who sees what and give you the data needed to make an effective decision. 

Thrive Leadswill determine: 

• Minimum duration of prompts - self explanatory
• Minimum number of conversions - also self explanatory
• Chance to beat the original - this one is a bit advanced. it is the CTBO or the Chance to beat the original. It is basically an aggregate number that helps you in selecting which prompt worked better. 

Just being honest, this is worth the money right here. A/B Testing sometimes requires a subscription to high priced trackers or lead websites... not here in this one-time plugin.

It works with any email marketing service! huge!

This kind of goes without saying, especially if you have read this far, but you need an auto-responder series before trying to collect emails. (No, Google will not work)

Fortunately, Thrive Leads is capable of connecting with over 19 different email marketing service. All of the major players are involved.

• MailChimp
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• etc....

Integration with these are fairly simple as well. You can either get the API code and connect your lists directly to Thrive Leads or you can copy the code yourself and paste it into the plugin. 

It works with any email marketing service! huge!

This kind of goes without saying, especially if you have read this far, but you need an auto-responder series before trying to collect emails. (No, Google will not work)

Fortunately, Thrive Leads is capable of connecting with over 19 different email marketing service. All of the major players are involved.

• MailChimp
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• etc....

Integration with these are fairly simple as well. You can either get the API code and connect your lists directly to Thrive Leads or you can copy the code yourself and paste it into the plugin. 

The final verdict on Thrive Leads

This plugin is excellent. Hands down the best Lead generation plugin that I have ever used. 

It covers everything and always is being updated. 

The editor will take a bit of getting used to, but realistically, it is not that difficult, you will be whisking through it like a pro in a days time. 

The help to maximize conversions with the powerful A/B Testing and targeting functionality is second to none. 

The number of templates make it easy to have a truly unique website that is yours to make money with. 

I love it and think any and everyone should give it a try. They have a money-back guarantee, but trust me, you will not need it. 

Other plugins like Bloom or the aforementioned OptinMonster are good in their own rights. Many people use them and swear by them. But from my chair in my office, Thrive Leads is the very best lead generating machine that I have ever come across. 

I owe Thrive Leads a ton of gratitude. The money I have made just by building my list has paid for this 10 fold.