Lead Generation for WordPress: A Beginner’s Guide Part Two
In part two of this guide, we’ll pick up where we left off—implementing a strategy for effective lead generation.
As noted in our first installment, generating leads from your website, or adding lead generation features to the sites you build for clients, is a great way to grow your business and turn site visitors into customers.
If you’re curious about building WordPress sites that attract more visitors, keep them engaged longer, and help you grow your business, this two-part guide explains exactly what a lead is, how you can generate a steady flow of them for yourself and/or your agency clients, as well as the tools you’ll need to do so.
If you haven’t read it yet, make sure to catch-up on part one first!
In part two, we’ll cover:
- The Best Lead Generation Plugins
- Contact Form and Popup Plugins
- Live Chat Plugins
- A/B testing plugins
- Email Marketing Plugins
- Landing Page Builders
- Lead Generation WordPress Themes
- Turning Everyday Visitors Into Loyal Leads
The Best Lead Generation Plugins
Now that you know what leads are and how to earn them, you’re ready to prime your site and the sites you build for lead generation. These plugins can take a lot of the work out of the process. You’ll still need to develop an effective strategy, but implementing it will be easier with the right plugins in tow.
Lead Generation Plugins
While all of the plugins we list in this article can help you gain more leads, the following plugins in particular are entirely focused on lead generation and provide a variety of tools to work with. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution, try out one of these:
MailOptin
MailOptin does a little bit of everything. Along with popups and calls to action, it also allows you to create emails and automatically send them to subscribers. Its form and newsletter template builder is easy to pick up and implement into your site.
HubSpot All-In-One Marketing
If you want a plugin that does it all, try HubSpot All-In-One Marketing. Live chat, forms, and popups, hello bars, and even email marketing — it’s all here.
OptinMonster
With its highly configurable opt-ins and settings, all the features you’ll need to target your leads, and a WordPress integration that makes it all easy, OptinMonster is a great choice for lead automation software.
OneSignal
Rather than gathering leads through forms, OneSignal sends push notifications to the ones you’ve already acquired. You can have them sent when you publish a blog post or on any other trigger that you set.
Thrive Leads
Thrive is all about designing themes optimized for conversions, and their list-building plugin makes that all the easier. There are form builders, A/B testing, analytics, and targeting tools built right in.
Convert Pro
Convert Pro helps you design beautiful, mobile-optimized forms and opt-in popups that appear on a variety of tweakable triggers. Ready-made templates help you kick off the design process with a professional look that’s easy to customize.
Contact Form and Popup Plugins
While the above plugins provide a comprehensive approach, the following plugins focus specifically on what is arguably the core of lead generation: contact forms and other opt-ins.
These plugins will help gather information from visitors and build beautiful form widgets right in your WordPress dashboard. Place them anywhere throughout your site and you’ll have a solid lead generation tool in place.
Icegram
Create calls to action and other opt-ins including popups, top and bottom bars, slide-ins, and even more with the fully customizable opt-in editor. Various targeting options allow you to narrow down exactly where to show your forms.
WPForms
WPForms is one of the top form-building plugins for WordPress due to its ease of use, deep customization, and smart conditional logic. It also comes with several functional addons like file uploads and PayPal payments.
Optin Forms
A big draw of Optin Forms is that it works out of the box with eight different email marketing platforms. It’s super simple to customize your forms and add them to your site with just one click.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a professional, premium form builder that’s more than worth the money. One subscription gets you access to unlimited forms, conditional logic, file uploads, anti-spam, and much more.
Holler Box
Holler Box brings popups, notifications, and banner opt-ins to WordPress stores, along with a host of other features. Fake live chat, recent sales notifications, lightbox popups, and detailed configuration lets you choose where and when each element appears.
Live Chat Plugins
While live chat may not be suited for your own website, it’s an excellent feature to offer your clients as it can effectively engage interested users who may have otherwise left a site with their questions unanswered.
With live chat, they can reach out and get support for any issue instantly, which is a huge draw in the fast-paced online world. Check out these live chat plugins for more:
LiveChat
LiveChat does exactly what its name implies, bringing the power of chat as well as issue ticketing to your website. It integrates perfectly with Zendesk, Freshdesk, and other third-party CRM tools.
WP-Live Chat by 3CX
Unlike other plugins, WP-Live Chat is 100% free, with no hidden costs or premium plans. You get a full suite of advanced features, including transferring chats to another agent, a customizable interface with animations, surveys, and polls in the chatbox, and conditional display logic.
Tidio
Tidio adds both live chat and chatbots to your website. Speak to any customer who needs assistance, set up an autoresponder for 24/7 service, and add chatbots to completely automate the process.
Tawk.To Live Chat
Tawk.To is another fully free live chat plugin with plenty of features to go around. Speak to and monitor your visitors in real-time, chat with multiple agents at once, customize the appearance of the chatbox, and change what pages it appears on.
A/B Testing Plugins
A/B testing is another highly effective lead generation tactic. It allows you to try out small changes between elements like the wording of text or the color of your call to action, and see which version gets the most clicks.
Little things like this can make a big difference! Of course, you can also switch up the entire page layout or even compare two entirely different pages. These plugins do a good job of facilitating the process:
Nelio AB Testing
Nelio A/B Testing helps you launch and manage A/B tests on your website, WooCommerce store pages, and elements on popular form plugins – all without ever leaving the WordPress dashboard.
Google Optimize
Google Optimize is an A/B testing tool built right into Google Analytics. While it’s not a WordPress plugin, plugins like Google Analytics Dashboard can help you get everything set up. The downside: It can be hard to get the hang of, but the plethora of features it offers may just be worth it.
Split Hero
This plugin makes A/B testing finally easy. Setting up a campaign is effortless, and the plugin handles user tracking and analytics entirely for you. No headaches, just a simple split testing tool.
Thrive Optimize
An add-on for Thrive Architect, this plugin was made to help non-programmers do effective A/B testing. Split testing plugins can be super complicated and insanely difficult to get working. Thrive Optimize makes it all easy and gives you only the data you need to succeed.
Email Marketing Plugins
Falling into the lead nurture bucket, newsletters and other types of email communication are great ways to keep leads interested. It’s important to have a good email marketing tool to help you draft better newsletters and get more email signups.
A contact form is just the first step—you need something engaging to follow up with. Try these plugins for an added email marketing boost:
MC4WP
As one of the most popular, go-to email marketing platforms for small businesses, this plugin brings MailChimp integration to your WordPress dashboard. Create forms or integrate with other form plugins, extend with code, and use add-ons to gain even more functionality.
Newsletter
Newsletter just works. Build email drafts with the drag-and-drop editor, create subscriber lists, and use dozens of add-ons to bring autoresponders, form integration, and more to your campaign.
Email Subscribers & Newsletters
It’s hard to find an email marketing tool that handles everything in one place. Email Subscribers allows you to add forms, collect leads, send automated emails, and create broadcasts in the HTML editor—all within WordPress.
MailPoet
Build your mailing list, create subscription forms, and send automated emails right from your admin dashboard. If you’re a small startup with less than 1,000 subscribers, this plugin is perfect; you get all the premium features for free.
Landing Page Builders
Last but not least, landing pages are an important ingredient in an overall lead generation strategy. Here’s where you put all your knowledge of lead generation to the test, using it to secure prospects and guide them through the sales funnel. A good landing page builder is essential for any WordPress site.
Beaver Builder
A powerful, yet easy-to-learn page builder, Beaver Builder gives you the tools you need to create effective landing pages as well as design the rest of your website in style.
OptimizePress
This isn’t just any old page builder. OptimizePress was built for marketers and creators who need a targeted solution for creating landing and sales pages that actually convert. Templates are fully customizable, and they’re not just pretty; they’re optimized just for lead generation.
Leadpages
Leadpages is a landing page and website builder that comes packed with several other conversion-focused features. It also comes with forms, popups, and alert bars, with insights and analytics to help you optimize everything. Leadpages uses a WordPress plugin to help you add all these features to your website.
Elementor
Elementor isn’t focused solely on landing pages, but the widgets it provides make it easy to create them from scratch or while using their beautiful templates. Forms, videos, CTA buttons, and testimonials can all be added to your landing page with a simple drag and drop interface.
Lead Generation WordPress Themes
While plugins can be a great help for generating leads, there are also themes specifically designed around generating leads and sign-ups. Some of these even come with form builders and other helpful widgets built-in. Here are a few you should definitely try.
Thrive Themes
Thrive Themes is all about conversions. Along with their helpful A/B testing and list-building plugins noted above, they also make themes that are specifically optimized to create leads.
Digital Pro Theme Package
This theme package is a little on the pricey side, but it comes packaged with the Genesis Framework that makes tweaking any theme a breeze. Digital Pro features a beautifully elegant design perfect for showing off products and services.
Landkit
Landkit is is a landing page theme built-in Hybrid Composer, a page builder included that makes editing easy. Seventeen demos of various business types are included to get you started.
GrowthPress
GrowthPress offers a professional theme bundled with a sales and landing page to help you nail those conversions. With several widgets included, you can easily build a business website that attracts plenty of attention.
Turning Everyday Visitors Into Loyal Leads
The hardest part of growing a website is watching all those visitors come and go, never to return again. With effective lead generation techniques and a few tools to help you get started, you can retain a portion of that audience and keep them coming back for more.
Additionally, you can start adding lead generation tools and features to your portfolio of services, assisting clients with lead generation on their own sites, and helping them grow customers and revenue.
Even if you’re a small agency or a freelancer just starting out, you can and should use leads to grow your business.
Tactics like content and email marketing, landing page promotion, and engaging potential customers directly can all fuel interest in your services or products and boost our clients’ bottom line!
With a good sales funnel and marketing strategy, and a few plugins to help you start generating leads, you’ll be well on your way to keeping visitors around for good.
