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In this Thrive Leads review, I'll walk you through the overview of the list building plugin and help you to decide whether it is right for you or not.

The fact is that the WordPress market has no shortage for good list building plugins. But it's really hard to find the plugin, that best suits your needs. Once of such plugin is Thrive Leads. Read this review fully to determine whether Thrive Leads suits your needs or not.

Above are all the things I'm going to cover in this review post.​

Why you should trust me on Thrive Leads Plugin?

As you may have already noticed, I'm using the FocusBlog theme and also Thrive Content Builder on my site. In addition to those, I also have a license of Thrive Leads.

I have the Thrive Leads for a single site, that is this site.

I was previously using free SumoMe plugin for lead generation. But at some point, I thought I need more customization, design options, and also ability to build list via content upgrades. I started hunting for some plugins. Later I decided to give Thrive Leads a try, as their plugins seem promising.

Let's dive in.

As you can see, I've been using the Thrive Leads from June 2016. I've played and experimented a lot with the plugin. Now, I made my mind to finally review the Thrive product.

Key Features Explained

Thrive Leads plugin comes loaded with many of the features. It's the most feature-rich plugin in the market. Let us look at what are all the main features that this plugin offers you.

Lead groups

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At first by just looking at the number of different lead generation forms available, I was simply astonished. There are options for you to design in content form, lightbox, post footer form, ribbon (sticky), screen filler (I use it), scroll mat, slide in, widget form and you can also code your custom PHP form and insert it. Wow! That's overwhelming!

You can further design and customise every type of form, once you select it. You can also choose from dozens of templates, that Thrive Leads that come built-in with.

Let me show you an example.

Either you can select a template from the list or you can even design a form from scratch.

As you can see in the above screenshot, you can drag and drop the elements that you want to add. You can also customize or delete the elements as you want. With the drag and drop builder that has around 40 elements, you virtually have control over every aspect of the design. You can change the color of the elements, width, height, everything, without touching any code.

You can also carry out A/B Split testing among the different types of forms withing a lead group.

When I bought this plugin, I first conducted a split test between the lightbox and the screen filler lead generation forms. Guess what? The screen-filler lightbox got a great conversion rate than that of the lightbox.

Gone are the days during which you offer generic offer for all the visitors on your site. Thrive Leads offer you advanced targeting options, so that you can have relevant offers to the audience according to the content they may be interested in, and thus speed up your list building efforts.

Lead shortcodes

With Shortcodes, you can create forms and design it according to your wish and copy the shortcode and paste it inside the content to show up the form there. It basically adds some freedom to the place where you can insert your form on a per-post basis.

As usual, there are over 40+ templates you can choose from. You can also choose to design your form by yourself by using the drag and drop builder.

You can of course! The A/B testing among the different forms, headlines, triggers, and content. This is such a powerful option, as the conversion rate optimisation and growth-hacking, are entirely based on experimenting the stuff.

They also have added content locker feature to the Thrive Leads. Rather than releasing a separate plugin for this, the Thrive Team is generous enough and made it as a free upgrade to the existing Thrive Leads customers. Basically what this feature does is that it locks in the premium content under the form, and only when the visitor fills in their email address, the content gets unlocked. It's similar to content upgrade option that Thrive Leads come with.

While editing or updating any blog post or page content, all you need is just place in the premium content between the shortcode opening and closing tags. There are various content locker templates for you to choose while designing it.

ThriveBoxes

ThriveBoxes are nothing but the light boxes that you can trigger whenever a link or image is clicked within your content.This is the same feature that implements content upgrades feature in your content. Although there are separate premium plugins for content upgrades, in Thrive leads it's one of the dozens of features.

As usual, you can design the boxes according to your wish with the help of drag and drop builder and also there are templates of ThriveBoxes.

Once the box is designed, you can copy the shortcode that is generated.

Later you need to paste that in the desired location in your text and wrap the CTA button or an image within the shortcode.

Once the visitor clicks on the content upgrade text or image, the lightbox will be popped up!

Like this, you can offer context-specific goodies to your readers, and boost your list building efforts. The goal of Thrive Leads is not to just build a list, but to build it faster.

Personally, I recently implemented Content Upgrades on some of my high-traffic posts and getting great results.

Sign up segues

This feature enables you to subscribe a person to your email list just by clicking on a link. Whenever you want the existing subscriber in your list to sign up for an event, another mailing list or course, you typically want them to fill out another form. Most of them won't bother to fill out another form which they already did when signing up for your email list.

This is where email segue comes into play.

With this feature, you need to create a new Segue link. Whenever your subscriber clicks on that link, he'll be automatically signed up for the event or the free course without him filling the form again. As you have his email details already, why won't you use his already existing information without making him fill up yet another form?

You just need to integrate the form with any of your services and Segue link is generated. You can use that link with parameters that pass the name and email address of a respective subscriber in your email campaigns. So, whenever your subscriber opens the email you sent and just clicks on the link he'll be registered to the event or the course.

So in short, this feature allows your subscribers to sign up for additional lists, courses and webinars with just a single link click (no strings attached).

If you take a simple example of using Signup Segues for inviting your subscribers to a webinar, you'll boost your attendee conversions at least by 300%.  If you get $5 per every webinar attendee without Signup Segue, guess what! ​

Integration with wide range of email marketing software

Refer the below image to get to know about the different email marketing softwares Thrive Leads integrates with.

I'm personally using Sendy a self-hosted email marketing software for my needs. Thrive Leads does a great job of integrating with it.

Read: Sendy Review: A MailChimp Clone I Use To Save $25 Per Month

For adding a connection, first off you need to integrate Thrive Leads with your email marketing software's API. Here as an example I'll be using the lightbox form. Click on the button, and "Connect to service". In the step 1, you need to select the connection type as API and then choose the software and email list and save it. Refer the below screenshot.

Once the user fills in the sign-up form you can direct him to to the subscription confirmation page, reminding them to confirm the subscription by clicking the link in their inbox. This feature also enables you to track the sign up via Google Analytics.

Smartlinks Feature

Caution, this feature may blow your mind!​

This is one of the most unique features, that no other plugin offers except Thrive Leads.

Thrive Leads Smartlinks feature allows you to detect already existing subscribers, and prevents you from bombarding same offers to the subscribers that they already opted for. 

It also gives you control over what existing subscribers see over the new visitors on your site. With this, you can take your marketing to the next level by targeting your loyal readers differently on your blog.

It's that powerful!

Below is the video showing you how the smart links feature works!

There are various competitors for Thrive Leads such as OptinMonster and SumoMe. Let us look how Thrive Leads compare with them.

Thrive Leads vs. OptinMonster

Where OptinMonster excels over Thrive Leads?

Where OptinMonster falls short to Thrive Leads?

I'm using Thrive Leads, as I've said earlier. Being a relatively new plugin, Thrive Leads offer more features and the swift updates are being carried out regularly adding dozens of features.

Winner: Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads vs. SumoMe

I used SumoMe plugin earlier to Thrive Leads, here at GBT. Basically, SumoMe is a suite of apps that is available for WordPress.

There is no particular area in which SumoMe excels over Thrive Leads. Thrive Leads offers heck a lot of features for the one-time fee of only $67. Whereas, with SumoMe you receive very limited features and flexibility when compared to Thrive Leads.

One advantage of using SumoMe over using Thrive Leads is that it is a freemium plugin. You can install the free version of SumoMe. I used it before when my blog traffic is below 400 visits a day and it offers only one template and the SumoMe attribution is present in the footer of the popups.

The free version just acts like a bait for their pro version.

Below is the table comparing Thrive Leads with basic and pro version of SumoMe.​

SumoMe is severely limited in the features and is not available for a one-time fee.

Winner: Thrive Leads

You probably have already noticed that the pricing model of Thrive Leads is simple and affordable.

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I personally have a single-site license of the plugin, as I'm doing serious list building for only this blog. If you are doing list building on your other sites, you may consider to get a 5 license pack. You are free to upgrade from the single site to 5 site license pack at any time.

With all the plans, you get 1 year of support and also unlimited lifetime updates. This is a great thing, as the price is one-time and there are no restrictions on the updates.

The support offered by Thrive Team is awesome. You can contact them via email or even create a support ticket. I opened a ticket in the month of September and I got their replies within an average of 4 hours. Not at all bad!

Apart from this, they also have got an awesome forum where Thrive users interact and help each other in troubleshooting problems and solving doubts. It's very active.