WPSubscribers Review – Great Optin Plugin But …

As a blogger, we all want to build a consistent reader base to improve traffic and earnings but the mission is not easy. At the time Google is making many changes with its Animal Kingdom (like Panda or Penguin ranking algorithm updates), we can’t rely too much on organic traffic like before. It is very difficult to catch up with Google and I believe there will be more bad news for webmasters in the upcoming time.

That is the reason why I have to find more traffic sources for my blog and email marketing is one of them. Many people said email marketing is dead in 2012 but that is ridiculous thought. It is still the top priority in marketing strategies of small businesses to big companies. Even when the mobile technology is exploding, email is still the most popular way to communicate for people around the world, not Facebook or any other social network.

In the last 2 months, I started building my email list. Mailchimp service and WPSubscribers plugin were my choices. I read many reviews of different optin plugins for WordPress and it seems like WPSubscribers is the most suitable plugin for TechWalls. Its price is very affordable ($47 for 3 WordPress sites installations) and moreover, it has more features than I expected.

Awesome WPSubscribers Features

There is nothing to complain about features of WPSubscribers, it includes all you’ve ever needed in an optin plugin. In fact, I used just 3 features of the plugin, which are popup subscription form, footer bar optin form and Subscribe on commenting. If you want to know more, here are all features being offered:

• Work with any email marketing service like Aweber, Mailchimp, iContact, GetResponse, Prosender, Emailaces, Turbo Autoresponders or Google FeedBurner.
• Compatible with all web browsers.
• Popup Optin Form with a lightbox: This is the most effective way to boost your email subscribers. The background will be darkened and the subscription form will be shown up on top of your pages. The form looks beautifully and you can choose from many pre-designed ones.

• Footer Bar or Header Bar Opt-In Form: You can display a subscription form or any message with this form.
• Add custom opt-in forms anywhere.
• Control when and where your Subscribe Box appears.
• Display hidden content: The hidden content will be shown after your visitors opt in.
• Subscribe on commenting: A checkbox below commenting form.
• Subscribe on registration.
• Create multiple Exit Popups: popups appear when visitors close a page or go to another website.
• Facebook Connectivity: A Facebook connect button could be added to anywhere that allows subscribing to your mailing list.
• Analytics: simple statistics to see how well your subscribe forms is doing.
• Automatically fill in visitors’ name and email.
• Subscription Referral System.

But why I removed it from this blog?

I used WPSubscribers for 2 months but then I had to remove it yesterday due to an issue. I figured out that MaxCDN, the CDN service I am using on this blog, is not working anymore. All images are served directly from my hosting, not from CDN servers.

I contacted support teams of both MaxCDN and WPSubsribers. This is actually the conflict between W3 Total Cache plugin and WPSubscribers. Fabrice from WPSubscribers Team responded “Wpsubscribers isn’t compatible with cache system because it couldn’t record if the popup needs to be displayed or not, so we have unactivated the cache for the pages where there are popup“. That means the cache functionality is not working on all pages that popup forms appear.

If this is true, I think the conflict will happen with any other popup optin plugin. Therefore, I temporarily disable this plugin on TechWalls and waiting for their upcoming fixes. The plugin is replaced with a simple form created from MailChimp.

Despite the issue, I still keep WPSubscribers on my another site at PagerankUpdates.com because this is really an awesome plugin. I still give it 4.5 out of 5 stars at the moment. It helped me increase my email list from ZERO to nearly 200 people in just 2 months, which is out of my expectation.

If you are finding a popup optin plugin, I still recommend WPSubsribers to you. I am pretty sure it won’t disappoint any user.

Give me your thoughts and the optin plugin you are using.