Did you notice the new guest who welcomes you on my blog here?
If you have been a regular visitor here, you would have noticed a few pop-ups and slide-in here and there on my blog encouraging you to take up one of the many free resources and courses that I have put together for you all. This has been one of the constant features at my blog and I had been using 2 different plugins to get this done –
- Hybrid Connect – that does the lightbox popup and also the optin forms at the end of my blog posts.
- SumoMe – That does the stripe optin at the top of the blog, a slide-in at the bottom of the page and some other optin forms here and there.
I was a huge fan of Hybrid Connect from Shane Melaugh because of its simplicity and flexibility in customizing it as per your need. It was after about an year that I stumbled upon SumoMe and I was impressed with the options.
SumoMe is an amazing plugin and has a lot of features that a lot of other plugins would usually charge you for. And it were these features that got me installing it on my blog. It was primarily a list building plugin and the stripe optin form at the top of the blog post and the list builder feature were both very useful.
When Shane launched Thrive Content Builder, I was simply impressed with its features and the flexibility it gave me in managing my page designs. So when I heard that he is launching a lead capture lightbox plugin called Thrive Leads (aff), I did not have to think twice, if I should buy it or, not.
Anyways Hybrid Connect was becoming a little obsolete and with the speed at which technology and especially WordPress was changing, it only made sense to switch to a better and more useful option.
Thrive Leads Review – Easily Build Beautiful Lightbox Forms
It is more than 4 weeks that I have been using Thrive Leads now (I gobbled it out of a customer only discount that Shane had arranged for customers like me). I thought 4+ weeks was good enough time to do a complete Thrive Leads Review for you all.
PS: You might see some links in here which could be affiliate links that I get paid for. These will be marked by (aff). But that doesn’t influence my review of the product. I only recommend what I use and like 🙂
So, let me start with some of the reasons why I switched.
- I wanted something that could help me create a variety of forms to appear at multiple places, like a slider bar, a lightbox optin, an in post form, a top or, a bottom bar, a sidebar widget etc.
- I wanted something which did not involve too much of designing yet, could be flexible and customizable and also beautiful.
- I wanted something that could give me the flexibility of adding forms to specific posts and pages.
- I wanted the option of running split tests without going through too many hassles.
Thrive Leads had all of these and more built into it and was my natural choice because I was anyways using Hybrid Connect from the same developer and was pretty happy with its performance.
So now let me get into each of the features of Thrive Leads (aff)and my thoughts about them.
The Dashboard
The best thing I like about Thrive leads is the simple navigation and the simple options panel. You will not be overwhelmed with the options you see but as you click each of those buttons, it takes you deeper into the options. You can see here the left-hand panel options show you only 2 things – Dashboard and Reporting. But click on it and you get into details..
Thrive leads has a simple and nice dashboard with option to design the below three types of optin forms, in addition to a simple snapshot of daily statistics.
- Lead Groups
- Lead Shortcodes
- 2-Step Lightboxes
The daily snapshot shows you the impressions, conversions and the conversion rate.
The “View More” button takes you to a detailed statistics page like this one, where you have a choice of selecting from about 6 different conversion reports and lead tracking reports.
From the statistics dashboard, you also get the information about the leads, the lead groups which converted, the form type and the referrer URL.
The option to add optin forms using shortcodes is a handy option. It gives you the flexibility to add optin forms anywhere you want. You can use these short codes with your posts, pages, widgets etc.
2 Step lightboxes are a fresh breath of air so far as optin plugins are concerned. Since there is enough evidence that 2 step lightboxes tend to convert much better than normal optin forms, you might want to use this, if you prefer.
Simple to Create Forms
Another thing that I liked about Thrive Leads (aff) is the simplicity with which you can create forms. The “Lead Groups” is the most of handy of these. You can group all your forms around a single product or, bait and create a variety of forms like the Lightbox Optins, Ribbons, widgets, Post footer, Slide-in forms and in-content forms.
So, if you have a lead bait in the form of a traffic generation course, you can group all your optin forms into a single lead group.
Editing each of these is also very simple.
Simple switch on and off option governs the display status and the option of displaying it on Mobile phones. You can run a variety of split tests from this dashboard itself. In the above picture, you can see one of my split tests showing as “Test in Progress”. When you click on it, you are taken to another dashboard where you can see everything about the split tests that you are running. Simple.. isn’t it?
Now onto the split tests.
It is extremely easy to run split tests. You can change just about everything on the optin forms that you can want to run in the split tests – Design, point of appearance, behavior etc.
Editing and Designing Forms
I had absolutely enjoyed using Hybrid Connect because of the ease and flexibility in designing optin forms. Thrive Leads took it to another level. Thrive Leads divides the designing and placement into 2 different dashboard screens. Placement and appearance can all be setup with simple clickable options.
There are 3 simple steps to editing the placements and appearance.
- You can decide when you want the form to be displayed.
- You can set your options to cookie the visitors so that the forms appears only after a certain period to the same visitor.
- You can set the animation type.
There is a slight difference in the way you can edit the different types of forms. For instance, the widget options shows a different editing panel.
In this panel you can set the trigger that will load the widget and then you have the normal editing options to edit the design, clone it, reset the stats and archive the form, all of which are there in the other forms as well.
So editing is simple and is devoid of complicated editing options.
Form Designing and Templates
Thrive Leads comes with pre-built templates which you can use for your optin forms. Just pick any one of the many beautiful forms and edit it using the simple drag and drop editing panel and your optin form is ready.
Shane has done well to carry the many templates that Hybrid Connect had, through to Thrive Leads. While HC had the conventional type of for templates, Thrive Leads has taken it one step further by including some high converting and proven templates. Templates with minimal content is what has proven to convert well and that is what Thrive Leads come pre-installed with.
The best part about all of these templates is the fact that you can change pretty much everything in these templates. And since changing each of these elements or, adding new ones is all just a matter of dragging and dropping, changing these does not take more than about 5-7 minutes. And you have a completely new, custom built design that just flows with the design of your website. Since I like keeping a contrasting optin form, I decided to go with it. It is entirely your choice on which way to go.
The drag and drop editor is simple to use and you can edit or, add just about any elements using the editor. Shane and his team has done well to keep the editor and the options similar to that of the Thrive Content Builder (aff). Since the Content Builder also has an option of adding custom fonts and custom icons, you can use those with Thrive Leads as well.
Conclusion – Thrive Leads Review
After using the plugin for more than 4 weeks now, here is what I felt about the plugin.
- This is one of the most advanced and feature rich Optin Form Builder plugin that is available. Most other plugins charge much more than Thrive Leads and has far lesser options to customize.
- The number of templates is Thrive Leads is huge in comparison to the other plugins. And since the editing options can help you change just about anything, you can build thousands of new design using the built in templates.
- The Simple editing features ensures that you are not wasting a lot of time editing and designing.
- The Option to club all forms into a single Lead Group, make it easier to track the performance of your lead baits.
- The A/B testing option is also easy to use yet is very feature rich and effective.
Overall, the plugin is a steal for the price and can ensure that you need not worry about your lead capture system for the near future.
If you like watching review videos, then you can see the complete thrive leads review video below –