Do you want to build a successful WordPress-Based website, online store, or a personal blog? If yes, then growing your email list should be top on your list of priorities. It’s something that is often overlooked or “put on the back-burner” in pursuit of other activities but it really shouldn’t be. Growing a mailing list from day one allows you to start building relationships with your website visitors and customers and allows you to reach them any time you choose. Social media messages and other forms of communication are easily overlooked or will not even be shown to your customers unless you pay, with email you can put your message in front of the customer in a more personal way.
To get started, an email optin form plugin presents the best way to start building your list. If you are a WordPress user, you will are spoilt for choice when picking your email optin form plugin. The market has a plethora of products ranging from basic free products to premium options. As a result, it can be a daunting task to identify the most suitable. But here’s the kicker: Elegant Themes has a ground-breaking email optin form plugin called the Bloom plugin.
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We have rigorously scrutinized the Bloom plugin, and have compiled this extensive review to help you make an informed decision. We’ll discuss its features and help you find out whether this plugin is worth your investment.
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What is the Bloom Plugin?
Bloom is an innovative email optin and lead generation plugin designed by Elegant Themes for WordPress users. If you have any familiarity with the WordPress theme and plugin space, you need no introduction to who Elegant Themes are.
Elegant Themes is a renowned developer of fantastic WordPress plugins and themes. Every time they create a product, it turns out to be high quality and well designed. Just look at how they disrupted the page builder space with Divi Builder Plugin and the social sharing space with the outstanding Monarch plugin.
Elegant Themes has remained true to the game with the Bloom plugin, it’s a testament to the developer’s unique identity and unmatched reputation for quality in the WordPress Themes and plugin world.
Having been in the space for over 10 years, Elegant Themes has developed 87 premium themes and 5 highly innovative plugins. And with over half a million customers, this company is one of the largest in WordPress.
The Bloom plugin is designed with the goal of helping WordPress website owners gain more email subscribers. It helps you turn your visitors into loyal customers and enables you to send highly targeted content.
To put it simply: Bloom Plugin is built to help encourage your website’s visitors to join your mailing list, which then allows you to keep in contact with them more easily and convert them to paying customers or just broadcast your updates and news.
Why Use Bloom Plugin?
Email remains of the oldest and best methods of digital communication. The channel grew out of the early internet wave, and today is still one of the most effective ways to keep in touch with people.
Email marketers are building incredible business cases using this medium thanks to its ease of use and high ROI. Email marketing is considered one of the most effective marketing techniques by approximately 64% of companies. It’s reported that email marketing has an average Return on Investment (ROI) of $38 for every dollar spent. This translates to return on investment (ROI) of 3800% which is extraordinary.
To tap into the full potential of email marketing, you will need to grow your mailing list. Collecting the emails of your target audience or potential customers is important as it enables you to directly reach out to your audience any time you choose. The simplest way to collect emails is displaying an email optin box on your website, online store, or personal blog.
The purpose of the Bloom plugin is to offer targeted display settings, great design options, and other important functionality. The plugin enables you to create and display nice looking email optin forms on your website. When website visitors enter their email address & relevant contact information, the details are sent to your marketing service or email newsletter.
Once the visitor joins the list you can quickly send them personalized messages at will to promote new products, motivate them to visit your website regularly or notify them about exclusive deals and sales. This streamlines email marketing and makes it easy to turn first-time visitors into loyal customers to boost your website’s conversions.
Bloom Plugin Features
The power of having a big email list cannot be underestimated. However, the entire process of building the list is easier said than done. The trick to its success lies in how your email optin form works.
In the modern world, implementing annoying popups on your website can be precarious and can cause more harm then good. This is because visitors these days are tired of being bombarded with marketing material, optins, GDPR notifications and so on. Bloom offers a range of different options so you can pick the one that will suit your audience the best.
This plugin comes with an impressive suite of features that give you complete control over the placement and behaviour of your optin form.
Optin Form Display Types
Different websites, blogs, posts, and pages may require different types of optin form display and location. Bloom plugin offers six form display types which are designed to fit your choice of targeting for your audience.
Once you activate the plugin, and visit it’s “Settings” page you will see the choices so you can get started building your first optin.
The display types not only enhance the visitor’s exposure but also increase chances of the visitor signing up. The display types include:
- PopUp – This display option allows you to create optin popups that are activated by time delays, after purchase or customer comment, or when a visitor reaches the end of a post or a page.
- Fly-In – This option is similar to the automatic optin popups. It offers 10 fly-in animations, 6 automatic triggers, and can be located on the lower right or left of the screen.
- Inline – Inline optin forms is an excellent option for well-versed WordPress users. This display type allows for shortcodes placement anywhere within the content. It can also be customized to display an optin form below every page and post. The best thing is that there is no limitation to the number of optin forms you can create using this option.
- Below Content – This optin form presents the best way to attract the attention of the most engaged readers. As its name suggests, the optin form is displayed below the page content. This makes it an ideal option for blog posts and content-rich pages.
- Widget Area – This option allows you to display an optin box in the footers and sidebars. You can create as many optin forms as you want and add them to all the widget areas on your site.
- Locked Content – This display option offers the best way to confine premium content. It allows you to create shortcodes to lock content and ensures it’s only accessible to loyal customers. Better still, it enables content to conform to SEO best practices, making it visible to search engines.
Once you choose your optin type, you will then have to give it a name and choose a Form Integration which is your mailing list provider, such as Mailchimp, SendinBlue etc.
Multiple Form Templates
Bloom offers 115 pre-made optin form templates. The plugin offers a wide selection of form templates that allow you to create great looking optin forms in seconds. The comprehensive suite of templates delivers options with numerous designs and styles, ensuring that there is a design of choice for everyone. If you don’t find a design of your liking, also have the option of using custom CSS to tailor an existing design to suit your style.
At this point, you should choose a suitable template as a starting point for your optin.
Design Your Optin Form
Once you have chosen a template as a starting point, you can begin editing the settings to suit your needs. On this page you can set the title, message, upload an image, choose fonts and colors and other design choices.
Customization Options
The plugin offers endless possibilities for modifying built-in settings to create unique optin forms. Elements such as background color, text color, op-tin form title, animation effects, fonts, image & form description, border style, and more can be manipulated with ease.
Let’s look at some of the customization options:
In addition, Bloom gives you complete control over the colors of the most critical elements of your form. It provides unlimited color options allowing you to choose any color to compliments your design and theme color. Every aspect of the form such as form filed, edge, border, and text content options can be defined using a color of choice.
Bloom plugin allows you to add an image to your subscription form. The image can be set to appear to the right, left, above or below the content in your optin form.
Bloom Display Settings
Once you have made your design choices, the next stage is to set the “Display Options” which governs the behavior of your optin form. For this demo we created a popup optin so you will see options for when it should load. You can control whether it is animated, a loading delay and other options such as should it display after scrolling, commenting, on click and so on.
You can also select the optin form to display on homepage, archives, blog page, post, page, tags, and/or specific categories:
Better still, the optin form can be set to display or not to show on individual pages and posts:
That’s not all: Bloom allows you to create optin forms and modify them to display on specific pages and posts to suit your target audience. By targeting specific visitors, it becomes easy to send personalized messages that are geared toward increasing the conversion rates.
Automatic Triggers
This arguably the most critical feature of any email optin plugin. Triggers determine when the optin form will popup or fly-in. No single trigger is a one-size-fits-all, simply because different websites, pages, and even posts serve different purposes. Bloom is designed with this in mind, and it delivers a number of triggers that are activated by a specific visitor’s action. Bloom triggers include:
- Time Delay – The optin form is displayed after a visitor spends a stipulated number of seconds or minutes on a page or post. This option helps you desist from displaying the optin form immediately after the visitor lands on your website. The trigger time should be long enough such that only the customers who find your content useful will get the opportunity to subscribe.
- Bottom of the post – This option is popular with well-versed bloggers. As the name suggests, the optin form is displayed when the visitor reaches the end of the post.
- After scrolling – Nowadays, it’s easy to determine the percentage of a page scrolled by a visitor. This enables you to identify if the visitor finds your content useful and interesting. The After scrolling trigger, allows you to display the optin form to a visitor who deems your content helpful.
- After commenting – A visitor can only comment on a post only if he/she is engaged. That means, if you set the optin form to display every time a visitors comments on the post, you will get customers who can easily convert.
- After purchase – This an ideal option for e-commerce entrepreneurs. If you own an online shop, this trigger can be tremendously useful. The trigger allows you to set the optin form to display immediately after the customer checks out. This offers you an excellent opportunity to market other relevant products to increase your revenue.
The Bloom Dashboard
Once you have created your first optin, you can make it “Active” and it will appear in your settings dashboard where you can view statistics such as Impressions, Conversion & Conversion rate.
With a click of a button you can:
- Access all Bloom settings
- Enable automatic updates
- View optin statistics (such as conversion rates)
- Manage your accounts
- Import/export Bloom settings
- View active and inactive optins
If you visit your website now, you will see your optin is in place.
A/B testing
It’s nice to remember that you are installing Bloom plugin to increase your conversion rate. The best way to enhance your conversion rate is to test, fine-tune, and refine your optin campaigns persistently. Implementing a test system is a great way of keeping track of the progress of your optin forms’ performance. Luckily, Bloom plugin comes with built-in A/B split testing which is very easy to setup.
A/B testing enables you to perform a side-by-side comparison of different variations of optin form to pinpoint the most effective version. Starting an A/B test is easy. Navigate to your WP dashboard, click Plugins and select Bloom> Options > optin Forms, then click A/B testing. This creates a new version of the current optin form that you can easily tweak. Make one change at a time to avoid complicating things.
Once you have made the necessary changes, click Start test. Bloom will automatically display the two variations of the optin form to your visitors. Once the set time has elapsed and you feel the information gathered is enough to make a decision, click End & Pick Winner. This will give you an analysis that will help you determine which of the optin form is effective. The whole process is very intuitive and easy and is something you can do quite often to improve performance.
Detailed Statistics
You cannot improve what you don’t measure! But it turns out measuring is not a walk in the park, especially if the right data is unavailable.
Bloom plugin offers useful performance statistics for all the active optin forms. It consolidates the data on a robust stats dashboard, providing real-time updates to keep you informed. The statistics dashboard presents data in an easy to read and understand manner. It displays the impression data, conversion data, and conversion rate for all the active email optin forms.
In addition, you can view the overall growth statistics, best-performing pages, and a graph for new signup in the last 12 months. These statistics enable you to derive soft, intuitive insights that aid your decision-making.
What is even more interesting is that you can import and export Bloom data. The plugin permits you to export or import critical data from a site to the other. This feature aids site migration and presents an effective way to backup Bloom data frequently.
Email Marketing Integrations
Integration with different mailing list platforms is essential as that is where you will be storing your list and sending out different campaigns. We won’t be going into detail here about the different platforms as that’s outside the scope of this article.
Bloom has integrations with most of the top providers, 16 in total :
- AWeber
- MailChimp
- Campaign Monitor
- Constant Contact
- Mad Mimi
- Infusionsoft
- iContact
- Get Response
- Mail Poet
- Feedblitz
- Sendinblue
- Ontraport
- Emma
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Active campaign
Another bonus is being able to use different mailing list providers within the same site, so you can use different ones for different optins, popups and so on. All you need to do to add a provider is enter their API details when creating a new optin. You can then view your providers under the “Mail Accounts” link the Bloom menu where you can see the different lists at that provider and view number of subscribers and your growth rate for each list.
What Makes Bloom Plugin Unique?
Bloom is an awesome email optin plugin. It’s an essential tool that can help you entice more visitors to sign up to your newsletter or email list. Bloom is unique, and this attribute is amplified by the following aspects:
- Prebuilt templates design – Compared to other superb optin plugins such as OptinMonster, Bloom’s prebuilt templates design is excellent. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and our position is influenced by the designs we prefer. That said, Bloom templates’ designs are clean and colorful and look more professional than those of OptinMonster. Let’s be specific: the prebuilt templates for OptinMonster are not terrible. However, they are a bit dated compared to those for Bloom. For that reason, you have to give the award to Elegant Themes for providing elegant templates.
- Intuitive Dashboard – If you are an admirer of Elegant Themes’ products, you may have noticed they feature well designed dashboards. The Bloom plugin is no exception. This optin plugin features a unified dashboard that offers easy access to vital statistics, email provider accounts, and optin forms. Unlike OptinMonster, Bloom dashboard provides detailed statistics that include data obtained from your email marketing service. You don’t have to separately check details such as subscriber’s data, conversion rate, and subscriber growth.
- Straightforward Pricing – Moreover, Bloom plugin offers an all-inclusive pricing plan. It allows you to get all the features in one-off price plan. This is a significant benefit since, with other Plugins like OptinMonster, you will have to incur extra cost to access certain features.
- Highly targeted display setting – Another good attribute of Bloom is its highly targeted display settings. The plugin allows you to select or exclude individual pages and post for form display. It also provides options to display personalized optin forms with unique offers based on visitor interaction and location.
Factors to consider before installing Bloom Plugin
Although Bloom offers a near perfect suite of features, it falls short in some areas. Therefore, if you have decided to install Bloom plugin, consider how these drawbacks will impact its performance on your website. Some of the factors to consider include:
Bloom Has No WYSIWYG Editor
Bloom offers a host of form customization options. It provides numerous ways to edit the font, font color, Background color, corners, align content, borders, and more. Even though these options are sufficient for most of the editing tasks, the lack of a WYSIWYG editor something we feel is missing.
It’s competitors such as OptinMonster provides an intuitive WYSIWYG editor that delivers more formatting options. Besides, with the editor, you don’t have to press the preview button to see the changes made. Every modification made, happens in real-time, which makes it easy to know when the desired results are achieved. Unfortunately, this cannot be accomplished with Bloom, and we hope they will introduce this powerful features in the near future.
No Exit Intent Trigger
Also, unlike other popular optin plugins like OptinMonster, Bloom doesn’t implement exit intent technology. For this reason, you cannot set your email optin forms to popup or fly-in based upon visitor’s exit intent. This is a drawback, but Bloom offers a trigger option that can be customized to imitate exit intent. However, the option cannot deliver the same effect as the exit intent technology used in OptinMonster.
Bloom Plugin Pricing ( With Our Deal )
Elegant Themes offers an interesting pricing structure. None of their products, including Bloom Plugin, are sold individually. To access the optin plugin, you must subscribe to Elegant Themes’ membership plan. There are two membership plans:
- Yearly Access @ $89/year
- Lifetime Access @ $249/one time
This seems to be fair pricing for what you get with an Elegant Themes membership, access to top quality themes including their flagship Divi theme plus their plugins, Bloom, Monarch and the Divi builder.
Luckily, AlienWP also has access to a special deal which will save you 20% off the purchase price of a membership, simply follow this link or visit our Elegant Themes Coupon code page to access the deal.
With our deal discount you can get the yearly access for $70.
Conclusion
Bloom plugin is an excellent plugin which we have come to expect from ElegantThemes, it’s super easy to setup and you should be able to create your first optin in no time at all. The plugin is in competition with other systems like OptinMonster and Thrive Leads and holds up very well. It doesn’t have quite as many options as those two, but we feel it represents better value for money.
Its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use dashboard should be familar to most users, even complete beginners who haven’t used an optin plugin before.
The amount of premade templates is impressive, beating that of their competitors and they are all nicely designed so you should be able to tweak them to suit your website’s theme and color scheme quite easily.
The A/B Testing option is also simple to setup and you should start seeing results right away. We recommend this is an area you spend some time on and study the results as even simple things like a color change or different font choice can affect your signup rates.
It’s let down slightly by lack of a WYSIWYG editor that is present in other plugins like this, but with a little trial and error you should be able to get great results anyway.
If you are in the market for an easy to use and effective optin plugin for your site, then we highly recommend you check out Bloom.