Thrive Leads Review: Is it the Best Lead Generation Plugin?

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Being a professional blogger, I know one should not depend on any single source of traffic to his website.

• One may lose organic traffic from search engines
• One may lose social media followers and traffic

But email list is an asset that will always remain with you.

That is why since the beginning of this blog, Technicalwall.com, I have invested my resources in creating email lists that can drive consistent traffic to my site and also monetize them.

Thrive Leads have really helped me to build a sizeable list that I can be proud of. With precise targeting, I can create different optin forms and display them only to my target audience.

If you're looking to grow your email list for your online business, then I would recommend you to try Thrive Leads.

In this review, I will tell you - What is Thrive Leads? Is it worth it? Can it help you achieve explosive list growth and grow your audience? Is it better than its competitors?

I’ll answer all these questions and more in my Thrive Leads review below.

Thrive Leads Review: Overview

Thrive Leads is a product of Thrive Themes. It is one of the most popular list building plugins for WordPress.

Instead of relying on only one way to generate leads, Thrive Leads actually allows you to create multiple type of optin forms to target different set of audience (see the image given below).

Here are the optin forms you can create with Thrive Leads:

Pop Ups

Ribbon

Slide In

Widget

Scroll Mat

Screen Filler Overlay

In Content

2-Step Opt-in Form

Content Lock

From the features mentioned above, you can see that you can create different types of opt-in forms to convert your visitor into leads and customers with Thrive Leads.

Do You Even Need Thrive Leads?

Buying an email list for a business is one of the most terrible ideas one can get. You don't want to have random people on your list. You want only those people in the list who are really interested in your products or service.

That is why plugins like Thrive Leads are so much popular among bloggers and online businesses. They can easily offer the following lead magnets to have interested people in your mailing list:

1. Free eBooks: Website owners/bloggers can create valuable content in the form of free eBooks and offer it to their visitors in exchange of their email addresses. The offered eBook can be an in-depth guide, checklist, cheat sheet, resource list, free email course, planner, infographics and more. There are many free eBook creator software that you can use to create your eBooks.
2. Videos: Educators, coaches and content creators can easily offer tutorial videos and how-to videos on the opt-in form and ask the site visitors to subscribe before they can watch the free video content.
3. Free Trials: SaaS companies can use opt-in forms to offer free trial to their users. Free trials are wonderful opportunity to allow prospects to try the product before upgrading to the paid plans.

There are many popular lead magnet software tools that can help you create professional-looking lead magnets for your blogs or online business.

Thrive Leads is an important tool to build an email list for anyone who is an online coach, content creator, course creator, or has an online business.

• Online Coach. You can use Thrive Leads to offer a free coaching program as a lead magnet to your visitors in return for their email address. Once they are inside your email list, you can pitch your paid program to them.
• Course Creators. Course creators can also offer a free course as a PDF or a video and ask your visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. Thereafter, you can offer them your paid course.
• Content Creators. If you write content for your blog, you can repurpose your existing content in the form of an eBook. Your popular articles can be combined to create a super useful eBook for your visitors. A tool like Designrr can help you achieve this quite quickly. You can offer them your eBook to your visitors and grow your email list.
• Online Business. Email lists are a valuable asset for any business. If you’re an online business, make use of every opportunity to convert your visitors into subscribers. Once they are inside your email list, you can always pitch them with product offers, free trials, and services.

If you are any of the above, start using Thrive Leads to save your valuable time and money and start seeing your email list grow quickly.

The Thrive Leads plugin allows you to use from a vast variety of optin forms that can be targeted to show only to a specific set of audience.

This is important because you would want to send relevant and highly targeted offers to only those people in your list who are interested in your content, programs or products.

And Thrive Leads is the one that can help you achieve this. If you want to build a healthy audience for your business, give a try to Thrive Leads today.

Why I Recommend Thrive Leads?

Here are the top reasons why I recommend Thrive Leads to my readers.

Reason 1: Different types of optin forms and ready-made customizable templates

One size doesn’t fit all. Because of this reason, Thrive Leads has come up with different optin forms to suit almost all kinds of demands - pop ups, slide in, scroll mat, post footers, content locker, and others.

Plus, you get ready-made templates that can be easily customized with its built-in editor - Thrive Architect. You can either use the template as it is or edit it to make your custom design.

The forms connect with almost all popular marketing tools like Convertkit, Zapier, Aweber, Mailchimp and others.

Reason 2: Smart targeting options

One of the killer features of Thrive Leads is its smart targeting options that allow you to:

• Display your forms on a single page or on multiple pages or even globally.
• Choose to display the optin form on scroll or after a certain period of time
• SmartExit option to display forms when your set triggers are not fired

Reason 3: Advanced A/B testing to grow your list faster

With Thrive Leads you can create multiple optin forms and A/B test them to find the winner that brings you the most conversions.

For example, you can create two or more optin forms inside the same lead groups and run A/B test on them. After you run it for a couple of weeks, the A/B test will let you choose the one that has got you most number of subscribers.

Once you're satisfied with the A/B test results, you can stop other forms, let the winner form run to bring you more subscribers.

You can also set the option to choose the winner automatically.

Reason 4: Smartlinks feature to show targeted offers to your existing subscribers

When your subscribers visit your website, it is certainly odd to ask them again to subscribe to your email list with the same set of optin forms to which they have already subscribed.

One of the most important features of Thrive Leads is Smartlinks.

It allows you to hide or display a completely unique set of optin forms. Instead of asking your subscribers to subscribe again, you can offer them discounts/offers on your paid products or a introduce them to your newly launched product.

Smartlink is a special link that you use inside your email content. When your subscribers click on the link inside your email to visit your website, different optin offers would be displayed to him.

Reason 5: Mobile responsive optin forms

Thrive Leads gives you complete control to show a full screen opt-in form to desktop visitors and a more optimized sleek form type to your mobile visitors.

You also have control over which element to show or hide in an opt-in form. For example, you can show an image on your opt-in form to your desktop users and hide it completely from your mobile users.

Responsive editing allows you to change font type, font color, font size, padding, margins, button color, etc. for any type of devices - desktop, tablet and mobile.

How Thrive Leads Works?

As discussed in the beginning of the Thrive Leads review, I told you that Thrive Leads comes as a part of Thrive Suite subscription. On purchase of the subscription, they would provide you with a zip file of Thrive Product Manager plugin that you need to install and activate in your WordPress Dashboard.

To install the plugin, go to Plugins >> Add New >> Upload Plugin >> Choose File. Select your zip file and click on Install Now.

After activating the Product Manager plugin, you can now install the Thrive Leads plugin.

From the WordPress Dashboard, go to Product Manager >> Thrive Leads >> Install the Product.

Under the Product Manager, you can also install popular products of Thrive Themes like Thrive Architect, Thrive Apprentice, Thrive Comments and others. Also read - Thrive Themes vs ClickFunnels.

After installing Thrive Leads, it will give you a message that it has been activated successfully. Select Go to Thrive Themes Dashboard. Here you can see all the Thrive Themes products that you have installed and activated (see the image).

Thrive Leads Dashboard Overview

Here is a small tutorial that will walk you through the steps to create an optin form.

Let’s get started.

To create any forms, log in to your WordPress Dashboard, and select Thrive Dashboard >> Thrive Leads.

Let me give you a quick overview of the Thrive Leads Dashboard.

Lead Groups

This option allows you to create your optin forms - in content, lightbox, post footer, ribbon, screen filler, scroll mat, slide in, widgets and others.

You have full control on the display of these optin forms. You can choose to display your optin form on a particular page, post, categories or on the entire website.

It also gives you the ability to not display an optin form (Exclusion) on a particular page, post or categories.

Further, if you like to reuse an optin form later, you can save the form design as templates under the Lead Groups option.

Lead Shortcodes

Here you can create optin forms from the ready-made templates offered by the Thrive Leads Library.

Each template is easily customizable. If you have also installed Thrive Architect, you can edit each section of the template like background color, font, font size, buttons, and others.

Unlike Lead Groups, here you get a PHP code (shortcode) that you need to insert manually inside your content to display the optin form.

Thrive Boxes

These are used to create 2-step optin forms. When your site visitors will click a link or button, it will display the optin form.

Signup Segue

Under this option, you can create one-click instant signup links that can be sent to your email subscribers. Through a Signup Segue link click, you can add an existing subscriber instantly to a new service, without having to ask them to subscribe again.

For example, you can let your email subscribers sign up to your webinar with just one click.

How to Create Opt-in Forms in Thrive Leads?

In this short tutorial, I will show you how to create a lightbox opt-in form and display it on your website.

Step 1: Create a Lead Group

To create an optin form, select Add New under Lead Groups.

Under the Lead Groups, you would create a single or multiple type of optin forms that can be displayed on specific content of your site. You can choose to display the optin forms site wide or display them by post, category, logged in status and others.

Give your Lead Group a name. Then Thrive Leads will ask you to add a new opt-in form.

Now choose one from the available list of form types (see the image).

For this tutorial, I will create a pop up form. To create it, I will choose the Lightbox option.

Step 2: Design your Opt-in Form

After selecting the Lightbox form, you will be directed by Thrive Leads to Add a Form. One of the remarkable features of Thrive Leads is that they have laid out a step-by-step guide to help you out if you’re creating the form for the first time. In the image, you can see that it is asking to move to the next step to add a form.

Click on Add to create your form. Now select Create Form.

Enter the form name.

Now select the pencil icon to edit the design of your optin form.

This will take you to the Thrive Architect editor where you can create an optin form from scratch or you can choose from ready-made optin forms offered by the Thrive Leads Library.

On selecting the optin form of your choice, it will launch the Thrive Architect interface where you can edit the form elements.

For example, you can edit the headline text, change its color, font and font size. You can also change the image, button color, button width, size of the form and more.

All these customization are done under the Thrive Architect interface which is one of the best WYSIWYG editors. Please note that on purchase of Thrive Leads as a part of Thrive Suite subscription you also get Thrive Architect and other plugins.

1. You can edit or remove the design elements
2. Drag and drop any additional elements inside the optin form to create your custom design
3. Add countdown timers, video, guarantee box, images, and others
4. Save your optin form design as a template to be used later
5. Create separate designs for desktop, tablet and mobile

Once you’re ready with the design of the form, Save it but don’t close it, since we have to connect our optin form with our email marketing tool.

Before we do that, one important step needs to be completed here. Check out Step 3.

Step 3: Set up your API Connection

In this step, you will set up an API Connection to your favorite email marketing tool like Aweber, ConvertKit, MailPoet, GetResponse, Mailchimp and others.

Once the API Connection is successfully set up, you can easily connect your optin form with your email marketing tool.

Follow the below steps to complete the API Connection.

From WordPress Dashboard, go to Thrive Dashboard and select Thrive Dashboard >> API Connections.

Select Add New Connection.

Thrive Leads supports integration with almost all popular marketing tools. Under Add new Connection, select your preferred tool and complete the integration process.

After completing the integration process, move on to the next step.

Step 4: Connect your Optin Form with an Email Marketing Tool

In this step, I assume that you already have an account with an email marketing tool and created an email list.

If you haven’t already, you can create a free account at Aweber or ConvertKit and create an email list. You need this list to properly connect your optin form with your email service.

To set up the connection, click anywhere inside the red rectangle I have highlighted in the image.

As you click it, on the right side of the screen, you will see the following option - Add Connection.

Add Connection will display all the API integration you had created inside the Thrive Dashboard.

From here, select your email tool. For example, I have selected MailPoet as my email tool.

I have already created my email list under my account at MailPoet. Select your email list and click on the Apply button.

Select Save Work to complete the integration process and save your optin form.

That’s it, your first email optin work is successfully designed and integrated with your email marketing tool.

In the next step, we will set up triggers that will decide to whom the optin form will be displayed and at what time.

Step 5: Setup Triggers

Triggers in Thrive Leads allow you to set when to display an optin form. By default, it is set as - Displays immediately on page load. This means that as soon as a web page loads, the lightbox optin form will get displayed.

Here you have complete control on when to display an optin form. To see what are the trigger options available, click on Displays immediately on page load (see image).

Thrive Leads offers the following triggers, this lets you select when to display pop-ups to your visitors.

1. Show on page load: Display the form immediately
2. Show after a certain period of time: This is my favorite trigger option. It lets you display the optin form after 10, 20, 30 or 100 seconds (max).
3. Show when the user scrolls to a specific part of the content: Here you can specify the class id of your element. When a user scrolls down to that specific element, then the pop-up appears.
4. Show when the user scrolls to a percentage of the way down the content: Just like time interval, here, you can set a specific percentage a visitor scrolls down the page. For example, you can set 50% as the trigger. So when a user scrolls down half the page, the optin form is displayed.
5. Show when the user clicks an element: It is similar to sl. No. 3 above. However, here the form doesn’t appear on scroll but on click.
6. Show when the user is about to exit the page (exit intent): This trigger is self-explanatory. When a user moves his mouse to close the web page, it automatically displays the optin form. This is a great way to drive your visitor's attention to your subscription form or offers.
7. Show when a user reaches the bottom of the page: This option needs no explanation. As soon as a user scrolls down to the bottom of a web page, optin form is displayed.

Most of the above triggers also have an extra trigger option - SmartExit, that works wonderfully well to boost your conversions. I will show you an example to see how it works.

Let’s say you have set the trigger - Show when the user scrolls to a percentage of the way down the content, to 50% percent.

If a user scroll down to 50% then he will see the optin form. But if he tries to leave the page without scrolling down to 50% then no form will be displayed. It means we are missing some conversions here.

Here comes the role of SmartExit.

When SmartExit is enabled, the optin form is displayed automatically even when a visitor doesn’t scroll down to 50% of the content and tries to close the page.

Step 6: Setup Targeting for Lead Group

Targeting option lets you choose to display your opt-in form on desktop or mobile or both. To activate the display form, just toggle the button to on or off as seen in the image.

Above we have set the targeting for devices. In addition to this, you can set up precise rules that let you display your optin form to specific content on your site.

You can choose to display your optin form on:

1. Front Page, All Pages, All Posts
2. Categories
3. Individual Posts and Pages
4. Page Templates, Post Types & Archive pages
5. 404 Error Page, Search Pages, Blog Index
6. As per Logged In or Logged Out Status

You’re not limited by creating only a single form for your website. If you have different categories for your website, you can create different forms for each of these categories.

Understand this with an example.

Let’s say you have a fitness blog where you have categories like workout, nutrition, diet and others.

You can create different optin forms for workout, nutrition and diet to target a distinct set of audience. This way you can build a targeted set of audience to which you can send precise offers which can significantly boost your conversions and sales.

Thus, if your online business or blog attracts a different set of audience, Thrive Leads can help you create a healthy email list to bring your more conversions and increase your revenue.

Thrive Leads Alternatives

Thrive Leads is one of the most popular lead generation plugins. However, there are also some popular alternatives that you may also want to consider.

Here are some of the top alternatives of Thrive Leads:

OptinMonster

It is one of the most popular list building tools and offers optin forms like lightbox popup, full screen welcome mat, slide-in scroll box, floating bar and others. It has the following pricing plans:

Basic Plan: It would cost $9/month and the plugin can be used on a single website. The plugin doesn't have important features like A/B testing, Content Locking, Exit Intent and others.

Plus Plan: It is priced at $19/month and can be used on 2 websites. It offers important features like A/B testing, Content Locking but lacks Exit Intent and other key features that are present in the Pro plan.

Pro Plan: It is the most popular plan by OptinMonster as it contains some of the most advanced features like Exit Intent, Smart Tags, Cart & Form Abandonment, Multi Steps Campaign, Webhooks and others. However, the price at $29/month ($348/year) may be unaffordable to some.

ConvertPro

ConvertPro has only one plan which is quite affordable at only $79/month. It allows you to use the plugin on an unlimited number of websites.

Some of the key features offered by ConvertPro are:

1. Drag and drop editor
2. Multi-step call to action
3. Ready to use templates
4. Integration with email marketing tools
5. Exit intent pop-ups, on-click pop-ups, slide in form, full screen CTA and others
6. A/B testing, page level targeting, AdBlock detection
7. 14 day money-back guarantee

If you’re looking to buy an affordable lead generation plugin with unlimited site usage, then I would recommend you to go with ConvertPro. 

Try ConvertPro

My Verdict: Is Thrive Leads Worth It?

As discussed earlier, if you’re going to use Thrive Leads in combination with other Thrive Themes products as highlighted below then I would recommend it 100% of the time.

Thrive Theme Builder: A visual theme builder to create any type of websites

Thrive Architect: To create conversion-focused content

Thrive Apprentice: To create and sell online-courses

Thrive Ultimatum: To create scarcity campaigns with countdown timers to boost conversion

Thrive Comments: It is a feature-rich comment plugin that replaces the default WordPress comment section

Thrive Optimize: To run A/B test on your pages to find the one that brings you the most conversions

Thrive Ovation: To collect testimonials from customers/users

Thrive Quiz Builder: To create conversion-focused quizzes/surveys

At just 19/month, you get all the products mentioned above including Thrive Leads which makes it a complete value for money product.

A 30-day money-back guarantee gives you a perfect opportunity to try Thrive Leads and see whether it can help you collect more leads and customers for your business.

Update 2022: Now Thrive Leads is also available as a standalone WordPress plugin at only $97/year which makes it a value for money product.

Thanks for reading my Thrive Leads review. I hope now you can better understand whether Thrive Leads is the right lead generation tool for you or not.