Thrive Leads Review Best WordPress List Building Plugin

Looking for the best WordPress List building plugin?

I’ve decided to make a Thrive Leads review because it is my favorite plugin for collecting leads on all WordPress-built websites. However, not many people know and use it.

What is Thrive Leads?

Thrive Leads is a plugin for WordPress, which helps to collect leads to build up your email marketing audience. It has all possible opt-in form types available on the market plus unique features and functionality. 

Thrive Leads pricing

PlanPrice
Yearly$99
Websites1 license

P.S. You have no limits on how many leads you can collect or how many times visitors can see forms compared to other popular services.

Thrive Leads is a part of Thrive Suite, and it is better option to get whole bundle. If you do so, then you will be able to use all plugins and themes on 5 sites.

How to install Thrive Leads

Once you purchase the product you will have to download Thrive product manager.

Install and activate it, then you will be prompted to connect to Thrive Themes. 

Now you can tick Thrive leads and install.  

Thrive leads opt-in types

As mentioned before the plugin got all possible opt-in types:

In content– can appear immediately after the page loads or when a user scrolls to the right section. Automatic placement after the number of paragraphs (you adjust).

Lightbox– overlay or popup (in other words) over the content, very intrusive, but works well for a purpose. Variety of rules of when to display like smart exit intent, specific period of time, usage scrolls percentage of the page or clicks element. Display frequency helps a lot to optimize the user experience.

Post footer– appears at the very bottom of the post/page you set.

Ribbon– a form that appears at the top or bottom of the page/post and remains visible all the time while the visitor is surfing on your blog/website.

Screen filler lightbox– works similar to lightbox, however, it fills out all the screen compared to overlay in a lightbox.

Scroll mat– Always appear on the page load and push content down from the top.

Slide in– less intrusive for a visitor as it is not blocking all the views. Might appear from any corner you set after a specific period of time or specific percentage you set.

Widget– appears in the widget area (sidebar).

You can also use Lead shortcodes to insert forms in content. Thrive boxes, which is 2 steps opt-in form and on click sign up links- sign up segue (best fit for webinar registrations).

Thrive leads integrations

The plugin integrates with many common email autoresponders via API and the list fills up every year: 

  • Active Campaign
  • Aweber
  • Campaign monitor
  • Constant Contact
  • Convertkit / Seva
  • Drip
  • FluentCRM
  • GetResponse
  • HubSpot
  • Icontact
  • Keap (Infusionsoft)
  • KlickTipp
  • MadMimi
  • MailChimp
  • MailerLite
  • MailPoet
  • MailRelay
  • Mautic
  • Ontraport
  • Sendreach
  • SendGrid
  • Brevo
  • Sendy
  • SG Autorespondeur
  • Mailster
  • Sendfox
  • Zoho
  • SendLane
  • Zapier

Interesting enough as not many WordPress list-building plugins integrate with nearly self-hosted email autoresponders, which are Mailpoet, Mautic, and Sendy. 

You are not restricted and can have as many integrations as you want all together in your Thrive Suite dashboard. However, one form will be connected with one service. 

BTW if you can’t find your email marketing service integration you can request new integration to be added. 

A/B testing & Analytics

What I like about the plugin is you can split test forms between each other. 

E.g. You build a completely separated experience for visitors by creating different types of forms like scroll mat vs ribbon vs lightbox to see the best conversion rate. 

Once traffic starts flowing you will see data in your thrive leads analytics dashboard. There is an option to set an automatic winner or do it manually. 

ab test automatic winner thrive leads

Documentation & support

Every single step you do in the plugin itself has a video clip to it so anyone can understand how to use specific features with ease. If that’s not enough or there is a specific issue you can directly have a conversation with the support via thrive themes website. On top of that, you can ask the community,- there is a big Facebook group. 

Free unlimited support and updates mean a lot as you will be able to overcome every problem in your way.

Unique and useful features

Thrive smart links– is a smart opt-in display. Imagine a situation when you send a newsletter with a link to a new blog post and there is a popup. However, the visitor has already opted in and there is no need to show intrusive distraction. 

As you can understand if you use smart links new visitors and people already on your list can see different content. New people will see all the opt-ins and subscribers will see a clean content page/post. You could also set something different according to your audience funnel strategy.  

Frequency– most of the forms have an option to limit how many times the same visitor will see the form. e.g. every 7 days. This will prevent the sign-up form to load every single time visitor opens a new page (surfing the website).

Device targeting– all opt-in forms got the function to be previewed on different devices (while in the editor mode) and can be enabled/disabled for those before activated. This means your website can load completely different sign-up forms for different devices.

Events after opt-in

There are 3 events that can happen after a visitor enters information: 

  1. Thrive asset delivery- you can deliver a lead magnet after registration (usually a file).
  2. Redirection to a specific page after visitors sign up.
  3. Success message/notification.

In my opinion, these options are really handy as you can design prospect email marketing funnel steps.

GDPR compliant– all thrive suite products as well as thrive leads are compliant with general data processing act regulations. 

The only thing I’m missing in Thrive Leads dashboard is a feature to download all your leads. Which was available till 2018. For a time being it is not compliant with regulations. The Thrive Suite team is working on it and I hope this feature will come back soon. It is handy to have an option to export a file as an additional email list backup as well as all other valuable data altogether.

How to backup email list

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About Mantas J

Blogger, marketer, coffee lover,- currently now developing several online projects. I know a thing or two about digital marketing :) Follow me on Twitter or YouTube.