Optimonk as a cheap Bounce Exchange alternative

I was so glad I found Optimonk, I even wakened up my sleeping girlfriend in the middle of the night! 2 min of installation (just paste a few lines of code) and we weren’t ever to pay again 150$ for a glitchy popup service. We’ve been using Picreel exit intent popup at that time and were definitely not satisfied with it. Here’s my experience with this Picreel and Bounce Exchange alternative.

If you are something like me, you probably already use some kind of popup email collector. If you are still reluctant, stop reading now and go to Derek Halpern’s post on popups. I’m really glad I changed my mind after watching it.

I think exit intent popups are a great choice if you don’t want to annoy your customers. They are shown only once and when a user already lost his interest with that particular page. I hate when someone shows me a popup when I just arrived on a site and didn’t have a chance to decide is it worth my attention.

There are lots of services that offer this technology now. You can easily find tons of links on Quora (along with some interesting discussions how good was Bounce Exchange at making this simple technology look very sophisticated and make huge money out of this. Bravo, Bounce Exchange!)

I’ve already tested/reviewed some of those services and for now Optimonk works best for me. Let’s see what’s under the hood.

Setting up Optimonk campaign

After putting their piece of code inside my ‘body’ tag, I have to choose a type of my future campaign. There are 6 templates available now:

Then you have a rather basic set of customization options for your popup. You can choose color theme, change texting and set up popup behavior. You can customize it with your own css, which is great taking into account that you don’t have a full feature WYSIWYG editor as Picreel offers.

Then you have to configure to whom your popup is going to be shown:

Those settings are very handy as you don’t want to show the popup twice and you probably would like to offer discount coupon if a user has already spent some time on your site.

Connect your email marketing platform

Don’t forget to connect your email marketing service if you use the popup for email list building or lead generation. Mailchimp, Active Campaign, aWeber and other main providers are supported. There’s a webhook ability which can be helpful if there’s no direct integration with your email marketing platform. You can generate a webhook listener in Zapier and connect Optimonk to lots of other services. If someone needs guidance with this, please leave a comment under this post. I’ll be glad to help.

Popup A/B testing

THIS is a feature most of the exit intent apps lack. You should test your popups if you want to see high conversion rates. Here’s a definite last word for a/b testing. If this doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what else would:

I was using just one popup at first and as you can see it had very low conversion rate — 1.32%. Then I added more variants and now #7 gets me 2.5 times more leads. What have I changed? Just wording. Added a short explanation what happens next when a user leaves his email to us and promised not to spam them. I’ll go on with new popup designs and hope to increase conversion even more.

Optimonk pros and cons and its alternatives

To sum up. Optimonk has a few types of campaigns, quite old school popup templates (which can be facelifted a bit with css), very simple configuration of a popup. And I mean it – really very simple. Basically, it works and works fine.

I’ve tested other tools which are more expensive and saw their annoying limitations. I was receiving tons of double entries because visitors were shown popups on every browser tab they opened our site on. The app reports excellent conversion rates, why would I bother? Oh, there are at least 30% of duplicates? Sorry, guys, we didn’t mean that.
Some of them are just buggy. For example, a button on a popup sometimes doesn’t respond to users click. It sends him to our list, but nothing happens on his side. Again we see a huge conversion rate and 50% of double entries. I just can’t imagine what words were on our visitor’s mind when he was writing his email for the fifth time hoping that now he gets that bloody coupon.

Optimonk Pros:

• price
• simplicity
• instantly sends new subscribers to Mailchimp. You can set up an automation series and send a coupon via email instead of giving it right away. I was seeing a 15 min to 5 hours delay in Picreel, for example.
• Google Analytics integration (you can see how many times popup was shown, how much revenue those users generated etc.)
• no serious bugs

Cons:

• popup templates designs are a bit outdated
• very basic template editor
• no support for tablet/mobile yet (support says it’s in development)

There are other Bounce Exchange alternatives out there. And I will definitely try some of them. For example, Zoomanalytics.co intrigues with their offer of using BI to determine who is worth talking to. Optkit.com looks promising with their mobile/tablet functionality and advanced popup configuration. And Exitmist.com is in its infancy now and worth checking out considering they still didn’t come up with a pricing policy and you may free ride for a couple of months.

Also, there’s even cheaper alternative to Picreel et al. Open source project called ouibounce by Carl Sednaoui which is free. I’ve never tested it, but the fact that it requires coding and apparently doesn’t feature A/B testing left it no chances in my eyes. But who knows, maybe you are not completely sold out on my a/b testing example and that’s exactly what you were looking for.

Hope you will find this post useful. If you have questions, please ask me in the comments. I’ll gladly share my experience with you.

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