Postmatic 1.4 has shaped up to be a huge release. It feels like we’ve hit our stride in tapping into great ideas from our users. This release is for you. Thanks, everyone.
There is so much packed into 1.4 that we’re going to trickle out a series of posts this week to talk about it all.
Today we’ll start with the crown jewel.. which puts a heavy focus on offering better ways to invite new users to subscribe to your site:
Introducing Postmatic Optins – A lightweight, simple, and powerful way to convert visitors into subscribers
Being a bit more aggressive about asking users to subscribe leads to huge gains in the size of subscriber lists. And, in the world of Postmatic this can lead to even better conversations.
We’ve worked with a few of the free opt-in plugins available in the WordPress repo to build in support for Postmatic but the uptake among the premium offerings has been slow. So we put our nose to the grindstone just a tiny bit more.
Version 1.4 of Postmatic is all about creating awesome optins like you would with SumoMe, Bloom, or OptinMonster. Except it is free.
Starting later this week all Postmatic users will have a responsive, lightweight, and beautiful opt-ins package at their fingertips. Here’s how it works:
First you choose what kind of opt-in. There are four to choose from:
A traditional popup which displays over the page content using an animated modal window. This popup can be triggered depending how long a user has been on the page, when the user scrolls to the bottom of the post, or after the user leaves a comment. See what we did there?
A 50px tall bar that spans across the top of your site. Much like Hello Bar. The bar is a persistent (meaning it does no scroll with the rest of your content) and unobtrusive reminder to subscribe.
A subtle slider that pops up from the bottom of the browser window. A lot like Drip. This popup can be triggered depending how long a user has been on the page, when the user scrolls to the bottom of the post, or after the user leaves a comment.
A nicely styled form that automatically displays at the bottom of each post on your site and invites users to subscribe. Classy, simple, and effective. A lot like early integration partner Magic Action Box.
Smart triggers to catch your visitors at just the right time
After customizing the text of your optin you can choose what should trigger it. Welcome Bar and After the Post are static and always present.
Popup and Bottom Slider let you choose between four different triggers:
- Time-based – Show the opt-in after X seconds. Set the time that works for you.
- Scroll-based – Show the opt-in when the user has scrolled to the bottom of the page.
- Comment-based – Show the optin after the user has left a comment on your site. This has the added advantage of having the subscribe form pre-populated with the visitors name and email address (which we snagged when they left the comment). A tricky and convenient plan!
- Exit-intent (not quite ready but coming soon) – Show the optin when the user moves their mouse in such a way that we detect they are about to close the browser window or change tabs.
Five themes to choose from
We’ve baked in 5 different optin styles so hopefully there will be one that matches your site. If not, things are easily customizable if you don’t mind getting your feet wet in a little bit of css. For now our focus is on simplicity.
Choose from our library of images or add your own
The Popup, Bottom Slider, and After the Post optins can accommodate an image to spice things up. We’ve bundled a dozen or so that you can choose from, most of which have been licensed from the Noun Project. If you don’t find something you like you can upload your own. It will be automatically resized and placed for you.
The available opt-in types and themes give you almost 30 different ways to invite users to subscribe to your site. We think that is a pretty great start. Further down the line we’ll offer up more customization options for colors.
Take a look
Here’s a gallery of a few of the variations. Any of these forms can be created in seconds.
Postmatic 1.4 with the free Postmatic Optins will be available later this week. We’re proud to offer up a simple yet beautiful and lightweight approach to helping you gain more subscribers.