In short, Thrive Leads is nothing short of a beautifully designed, conversion-focused list-building plugin for any bloggers and online business owners serious about growing their email list.
If you’re a frequent reader or subscriber of my blog, you may recall that I wrote an in-depth article about growing your email list. If you missed that post, you can read it here.
I wrote a similar article demonstrating how I was able to boost my email subscribers' conversions by a whopping 400% using Thrive Leads. You can check out the post here.
As you might have guessed by now, I love Thrive Leads. Why hide the fact that I'm biased? It's one of my all-time favorite plugins for WordPress.
I guess I could end this Thrive Leads Review right here and just say it's amazing. But, let's not do that.
I started using Thrive Leads almost 7 years ago. Over time, it has evolved to become one of the most powerful list-building plugins out there for WordPress.
If you have never heard of Thrive Leads, then I urge you to continue reading this review. Or you can go directly to the Thrive Themes website here to learn more.
Important: If you're new to my blog and this is your first time reading this post, I published reviews on my blog for several reasons. Reason one: to be 100% transparent about the trustworthy tools I'm using to grow my online business. Reason two: My reviews contain affiliate links that help me to monetize my blog. I want you to know that I never recommend anything that I don't trust or have not used in my business. You can read my full disclaimer below.
Thrive Leads is an all-in-one email opt-in form builder and list-building plugin for WordPress.
This is a premium plugin that is only available as part of the Thrive Suite membership package. I'll cover pricing later on in this review.
Thrive Leads comes with a host of options and features that are beneficial to digital marketers serious about growing an email list. It's easily one of the best tools on the market for this.
As with all of Thrive Themes products, Thrive Leads focuses on conversion rate optimization. The company pitches a lot of emphasis on the fact they are conversion optimization orientated.
We'll dive deeper into the features later on in this Thrive Themes review.
Compare Thrive Leads with OptinMonster: If you're shopping around and comparing Thrive Leads with OptinMonster, you can check out my comparison post of the two plugins here.
OK, so what's so great about using Thrive Leads? What are the benefits? From a user of Thrive Leads for over seven years.
I installed Thrive Leads into Magnet4Blogging way back in 2015, and it's one of the very few plugins that have never been deactivated or uninstalled.
So, when it comes to saving time, money, and resources, and perhaps your sanity too - Thrive Leads ticks all of the boxes.
As bloggers and marketers, we're busy folks that don't have the time to spend learning how to set up complicated plugins and then go through endless settings on our websites to generate leads.
From installing, activating, selecting, and using a pre-designed opt-in form template - to configuring your email marketing service provider with Thrive Leads, and tracking your conversions - it's all super fast and simple with Thrive Leads.
Since 2015, using Thrive Leads has helped me grow my blog subscribers, as well as the subscribers for all of my other online businesses twofold!
Thrive Leads is one of the very few tools to have made an impact on the growth of my online businesses.
Have you ever tried adding an HTML opt-in form code to your WordPress website manually?
They're a complete nightmare is what they are. They're fiddly, you can never really put them where you want them to be displayed, and they look like absolute crap on the front-end.
Thrive Leads was designed to make it super-easy to create, customize, brand, and deploy professional-looking, conversion-focused email opt-in forms into your WordPress websites, quickly. And that’s just the start of it really.
Like I said at the start, there are plenty of other tools, plugins for you to use other than Thrive Leads, but you'll soon discover after reading this review, that you will not want to use any of them. Or perhaps you might.
I've outlined just one-way Thrive Leads will save you time, let's look at another.
Thrive Leads comes with a nice library of pre-designed, conversion-optimized forms that you can instantly drop into your site.
Moreover, these pre-crafted templates can be customized further to match the look and feel of your website.
You see, you're not having to waste valuable time designing your forms from complete scratch if you don't want to. Thrive Leads features the same awesome drag-and-drop element-based editor that is found in Thrive Architect.
In other words, it combines the new technology with the customizability power of the awesome Thrive Architect plugin.
The result is a powerful opt-in form list-building tool like nothing else, complete with built-in canvas, metrics, AB split-testing tools, conversion and content marketing reporting tools, and a whole lot more.
So, if you're struggling to decide whether Thrive Leads is right for you or not, you have to ask yourself a few questions -
If you answered yes to all of the above, then keep reading. Or click the button below to grab your copy of Thrive Leads.
I originally wrote this review way back in 2015. At the time of updating this review (1st January 2022), a lot has changed.
Today, Thrive Leads is used by over 100,000 individuals and businesses around the world.
One of the things I love about Thrive Themes, as a company is that they’re always working towards improving their product range. At least it would seem like that.
Seriously, it does feel as if they legitimately care about their customers in a way very few other tech companies do.
As a Thrive Themes subscriber, the updates, new features, and upgrades I've seen particularly in Thrive Leads have been phenomenal, and that is one of the reasons I enjoy using this plugin.
Right then, let's dive into those cool features
Thrive Leads includes all the opt-in form templates you could ever need to get started with your list-building campaigns.
In addition, these templates can be fully customized using the same point, drag-and-drop editing technology found in the Thrive Architect plugin.
You can also design professional, branded opt-in forms with absolutely no limitation and place them almost anywhere on your WordPress site.
We'll talk more about opt-in form placement later on.
By the way, just in case you were wondering. No coding experience is required to build or customize any of the forms!
This is indeed a powerful feature within Thrive Leads and one that makes this plugin very different from the competition.
If you're a blogger, you can boost your email opt-in conversions quite dramatically, simply by showing targeted opt-in offers for your readers.
This can be based on the type of blog posts, pages, categories, tags, and more.
So, for my own blog, for instance, I have targeted opt-in forms created for several specific cornerstone articles.
Take a look at my conversion report for the last 3 months. This is for just 5 blog posts where I have advanced targeted forms mobilized -
No list-building plugin is complete without AB testing tools.
Thrive Leads enables you to create lead groups. In addition to this, you can also create multiple versions of a form within a group so that you can perform simple A/B split testing.
This is hugely significant and beneficial for optimizing forms and thus increasing your conversion rates.
And, if you’re obsessed with doing split testing like I am, you’re going to love using this feature, so much. See the images below.
Images above: Performance overview for one of my conversion forms. You can create as many forms as you want and perform A/B testing to see which form converts the best for you. Additionally, you can edit, clone, reset stats and archive your forms.
Thrive Leads comes with multi-step and multiple-choice form features. This means you can create a pop-up form that presents a Yes/No choice, with each choice leading to a different offer or call-to-action.
SmartLinks allows you to create multi-states for none-subscribers and already subscribed users.
This simply means you don't have to keep showing the same opt-in forms to those who have already subscribed to your website. Instead, you can create custom content for existing subscribers to see. Awesome stuff, right?
You can learn more about his feature here.
The built-in asset delivery feature allows you to send download links to new subscribers.
This feature is super useful for bloggers and businesses wanting to create targeted content upgrades for their readers.
It really takes away the hassle and work-around chores of having to create new lists inside of your email marketing service provider. See the image below.
The metrics tools give you an overview of how your opt-in forms are performing for each lead group.
This is my favorite feature in Thrive Leads. Because over time, you can actually use this information to fine-tune your list-building strategies by seeing exactly where your most valuable traffic is coming from.
Image above: Create groups of forms and test the types of forms against each other, you can further edit these forms using the content editor, and use advanced targeting tools.
Above: Generate accurate reports for specific time periods, view detailed graph intervals for a day, week or month.
How versatile is Thrive Leads?
If you're using multiple plugins on your site to help you create more leads, here's what you need to do -
Delete them all and use ONLY Thrive Leads.
Everything you'll ever need is built right in so why bother with other plugins?
Here are the types of lead forms you can create using Thrive Leads. And just to remind you, again, that these forms can be fully customized and branded with your preferences.
Each form within Thrive Leads come with their own unique settings, giving you complete control over how each form behaves on your website, including privacy settings.
For instance, you might want to adjust the trigger setting, display frequency, or animation on your screen-filler light-box form.
Or, you might want to turn on SmartExit+ (an exit-intent feature that triggers your opt-in form to appear whenever a visitor attempts to exit your site, page or blog post, or close the tab entirely). See images below.
Now for the important pieces of information, you need to get set up, email integration!
I use and have always used MailChimp, so for me personally, configuring Thrive Leads with MailChimp is so simple to do.
Recommended tutorial: Click here to learn how to integrate and configure API connection with your MailChimp account.
That said, it doesn't matter who you are using for your email marketing because Thrive Leads can be integrated with most of the popular ones today, using either HTML code or direct API.
I would strongly recommend integrating using API connection as it gives you better control and more options for your forms.
I do miss the good old days when you could just purchase something and pay a one-time fee and own the product outright. Nowadays, every software company is shifting to the membership system. It's a way for these companies to make more money, I guess.
With that said, Thrive Leads is only available through the Thrive Suite membership. The monthly price starts at $19 per month, paid annually. Or $30 per month paid quarterly.
Each license pack gives you access to all of the Thrive Leads features including, unlimited updates, and a full year of support.
But it doesn't stop there.
Not only do you get access to Thrive Leads, but you also get access to everything Thrive has to offer in Thrive Suite.
You can check out my Thrive Themes Membership review post here.
So, what pros and cons come with using Thrive Leads?
Pros
And now for the...
Cons
So, what is my conclusion about Thrive Leads?
Well, I think you know.
Thrive Themes never fails when it comes to providing us with great products backed with amazing customer service and content.
Thrive Leads is one of those plugins you'll purchase now and look back in a few years time and think -
"Wow, that was one of the best decisions I've ever made. That Fabrizio guy was right all along" 🙂
Well, I hope so. Because that's exactly how I feel about Thrive Leads today, almost 7 years after investing in the plugin, which is why I highly recommend it.
Whichever tool you decide to use, I want to wish you the best of luck with your email list-building efforts.
I hope you enjoyed reading through this review, if you did, please consider sharing it with your friends and followers on social media. I appreciate you.
Affiliate Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links to products or services that I use in my business and therefore recommend. This means if you click on an affiliate link and make a purchase of a product or service, I may earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your continued support.
