Thrive Leads Review: Best List Building Plugin For WordPress

What is Thrive Leads?

Thrive Leads is a WordPress plugin for creating optin forms on your website.  You can create an endless number of customized optin forms specifically designed to increase conversions on your site.

The best way to convert a website visitor into a customer down the road is by following up with them.

One of the best ways to follow up with a visitor is by capturing their email address to send them back to relevant content and offers. 

Who is Thrive Leads for?

When I think about who Thrive Leads is for, it becomes apparent that it’s honestly for anyone who has a blog or website.

Why do I say this?

Well, first of all you need to be capturing a visitor’s email address and contact info like I mentioned previously.  However, I’ve tried quite a few list building plugins for WordPress over time and there’s only one that comes out on top: Thrive Leads.

Thrive Leads gets my top recommendation for its affordability of only being a one-time-fee, integrating with tons of autoresponders, and having over 10 completely customizable optin forms. 

What is lead generation and why is it important?

Before we get too far down the road, let’s quickly cover what lead generation is and why it’s so important for any online business.

Lead generation is simply generating leads for your business which occurs when you collect the contact info of a website or sales funnel visitor.

Now, why is lead generation so important for your business?

Well, generating leads gives you the chance to follow up with potential customers directly.  You have the chance with the emails you send out through your autoresponder to build a relationship with your subscribers.

Once you’ve built a relationship, then it becomes so much easier to present an opportunity to purchase a product that you firmly believe they’ll benefit immensely from. 

Thrive Leads Features: Complete Breakdown

Let’s dive now into the features available from Thrive Leads.  Specifically, I’ll breakdown the various optin forms you’ll have at your disposal.

Here’s a list of each of the 10 optin forms:

• ThriveBox
• Sticky Ribbon
• In-Line Forms
• Slide-In
• Opt-In Widget
• Screen Filler Overlay
• Content Lock
• Scroll Mat
• Yes/No & Multiple Choice Forms

ThriveBox Optin Form

A ThriveBox optin form is essentially a lightbox popup that’s triggered when a visitor interacts with a specific element on a page.

There are three main ways you can trigger a ThriveBox for lead generation:

1. Text Link
2. Button Trigger
3. Image Trigger

Sticky Ribbon Optin Form

A sticky ribbon is what could be considered a hello bar. 

It’s a ribbon popup at the top of the page and remains sticky as the user scrolls down the page.

In-Line Optin Form

In-line optin forms are great for when you want to have a way for a visitor to optin anywhere within the content of a page.

This popup is great for being placed at the top of a page.  You can also choose to place it a certain percentage of the way down the page.

Slide-In Optin Form

Slide-In optin forms are really just what they sound like.

They are a type of popup that can slide into view of the screen in the corner.

Opt-In Widget

The opt-in widget is a customizable optin form that is typically placed on the sidebar of a post.

This optin form can be placed anywhere though on your site that allows for widgets.

Screen Filler Overlay

This one’s pretty interesting.

This is a type of popup that fills up the whole screen for the user to optin.

Consequently, it’s likely to have the highest conversion rate of all the optin forms since it fills the whole screen.

However, use it sparingly because you don’t want to be showing it every single time a visitor visits a new page on your site.  That directly affects the end-user experience and could in turn potentially impact your site’s SEO.

Instead, I’d recommend using it to be triggered upon exit intent.  In this way, the popup will fill the whole screen and won’t really impact experience on your site since they were going to leave anyway.

Content Lock Optin Form

This optin form is honestly pretty sweet because it allows you to create a post and lock its content until a visitor opts in.

I have yet to use this optin form but plan to in the near future.

The best type of post with this would be one with a really catchy title that would make the user want to optin to view the content. 

In addition, you’ll want to make sure that the content inside the post is jam-packed with value.

Scroll Mat Optin Form

The scroll mat opt-in form is similar to the screen filler option in that it fills the whole screen.

The difference here is that it pushes down the content when triggered.

This type of popup would likely be most useful when someone visits your post and the form is triggered upon page load.

Yes/No & Multiple Choice Optin Form

It’s a proven fact that yes/no and multiple-choice opt-in form converts well. 

By asking a simple question, you’re more likely to get targeted subscribers that are more interested in what you have to send to them.

Thrive Leads Optin Statistics 

The report above is the conversion report which shows conversions over time for each optin form.  

There are also several other reports available to choose from such as cumulative conversions report, list growth, lead tracking report and more.  

What are the best parts of Thrive Leads?

Best Part #1: 10+ Customizable Optin Forms

The best part about Thrive Leads is that you can choose from over 10 customizable optin forms.

All the Thrive Leads forms are directly edited using the Thrive Architect builder.

The customization features allow you to easily create two-step optin forms, connect with your favorite email autoresponder seamlessly, and maximize your forms for conversions.

Best Part #2: Optin Form Reports & Stats

The reports and statistics provided right inside the plugin is another one of my favorite features about Thrive Leads.

In particular, I like the list growth report which shows you a cumulative report of email subcribers who optin to each of the different forms on your site.

This gives you a clear indicator of what’s working to apply to other forms that are underperforming. 

Best Part #3: A/B Split Testing

Being able to a/b split test optin forms is a great bonus feature that comes with Thrive Leads which not many people take full advantage of.

What’s nice about it is that setting up a split test is straightforward and can be done in a matter of seconds.

If you do things right, you should always be running split tests for all the optin forms on your site in order to constantly be improving the conversion rate or each of your forms.  

What’s Not So Great About Thrive Leads

Bad Part #1: Working With Caching Plugins Can Be Tricky

One of the issues I ran into initially when using Thrive Leads was that it can be a little buggy when using a caching plugin.

I would create an optin form, save it, and then view my site only to find a distorted optin form that looked nothing like what I just designed.

At the time, I was using W3 Total Cache and unkowingly had some boxes checked that essentially broke the Thrive Leads plugin.  The good news is that I was easily able to submit a ticket to Thrive Leads support and they went in and quickly unchecked those boxes in my caching plugin to get things running smoothly again. 

Bad Part #2: High Learning Curve

There’s a lot of different optin forms to choose from with Thrive Leads.  Not only that, but figuring out how to use the Thrive Architect builder to edit your optin forms can be a little intimidating at first.

The nice thing though is that once you get a hang of it you’ll have nearly unlimited possibilities in terms of what you can create with Thrive Leads.

Thrive Leads Pricing: What’s The Cost?

Let’s talk pricing for this Thrive Leads review.

Here are the different licensing options you can choose from: