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Sneak peek at Postmatic 2.0: Support for OptinMonster and 500+ other apps

* Optin fans: you can go nuts now.

This one has been a long time coming. Postmatic 2.0 will work out of the box with OptinMonster.

We will still be including our own Postmatic Optins but OptinMonster brings even more to the table such as a/b testing, exit-intent, segmentation, and welcome gates. Really it's a whole other world and we're elated that the integration is in place. Check it out.

* Postmatic now talks to.... everything.

Our second big integration announcement is that you can now send Postmatic subscribers to 500+ other applications and services. Things like Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Infusionsoft, Salesforce and Drip.

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A fantastic new plugin for cropping featured images

Do your Postmatic emails suffer from decapitation issues?

What we're referring to is when your featured image falls victim to wonky cropping - heads go missing, mountaintops vanish - you get the picture (well, you really don't). Automatic cropping of featured images can be less than intelligent in WordPress. This especially affects the letterbox-proportion images used in Postmatic templates.

We found a nifty little plugin that takes care of this problem - it's called My Eyes Are Up Here. You can find it in the WordPress repo (and it's free!).

Install the plugin as described in the Codex and you can get right to work.

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Sneak peek at Postmatic 2: Smart Templates

When we released our Disqus-alternative Epoch earlier this year we received lots of positive feedback about one simple feature: how it automatically adapts to take on your brand and theme.

Unlike other commenting plugins, Epoch fits right in. It'll use the same fonts, colors, and form styles as the rest of your site. The effect is a comment area which looks like it belongs to you. Which in turn gives your users confidence that their data is not being sold down the river.

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How Simply Lise leverages Caldera Forms and Popups to create beautiful optins

Every now and then we’re introduced to a new way of using Postmatic with other plugins. We love seeing how our users adapt our technology to suit the needs of their sites.

Our recent discovery came to us by way of Lise Galipeau, designer at Gali Designs.

On her own website, Lise has created a series of two optins using some interesting techniques that allowed for her to completely customize the look and feel of each.

A customized exit intent popup

First Lise created a very elegant exit intent popup form using a combination of the Caldera Forms and Popups – WordPress Popup plugins.

Popup form using the Caldera Forms and Popups – WordPress Popup plugins.

How she did it

You need to install the following plugins to make this work (this assumes you already have Postmatic installed):

1. Create the form using Caldera Forms

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Caldera Forms > Forms. Click on the New Form button. Complete the Form Name field and leave the Form Template set to no template – blank form. Click on the Create Form button.

Create Caldera Form screen

We’ll start by adding a Name field to the form. Drag the blue Add Element button to the white rectangle.

Screenshot of Caldera Forms

An Elements screen will appear. Click on the Set Element button next to Single Line Text.

Elements list in Caldera Forms

Fill out the Name field as show below and check the box next to Required. When you’re done, click on the blue Update Form button.

Screenshot of Caldera Forms

Next, we’ll add an Email address field to the form. Once again, drag the blue Add Element button to the white rectangle.

When the Elements screen appears, click on the Set Element button next to Email Address.

Elements list in Caldera Forms

Fill out the Name field as shown below and check the box next to Required. When you’re done, click on the blue Update Form button.

Screenshot of Caldera Forms

Next, we’ll add a checkbox to the form. Once again, drag the blue Add Element button to the white rectangle.

When the Elements screen appears, click on the Set Element button next to Checkbox.

Elements list in Caldera Forms

Fill out the Name field with the text you’d like to appear above your checkbox. Click on the Add Option button.

Screenshot of Caldera Forms

Fill out the new field with the text you’d like to appear next to your checkbox. When you’re done, click on the blue Update Form button.

Screenshot of Caldera Forms

Lastly, we’ll add a Submit button to the form. Once again, drag the blue Add Element button to the white rectangle.

When the Elements screen appears, click on the Set Element button next to Button.

Elements list in Caldera Forms

Fill out the Name field as shown below. Click on the blue Update Form button and you’re done!

Screenshot of Caldera Forms

2. Connect Postmatic and Caldera Forms

Follow the directions in this document to connect Postmatic and Caldera Forms.

3. Create the popup

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Popups > Add New. The popup editor will open up and a blank box will appear. To add your text to the popup, click inside the box.

Blank popup box screenshot

To replicate when Lise did, type the following text inside the box, center it, and then follow the directions in parentheses:

  • Like what you’re reading? (highlight this text and select Heading 2 from the style drop-down menu)
  • Get updates in your inbox and even comment directly from there. (highlight this text and select paragraph from the style drop-down menu)

Filled popup box screenshot

With your cursor still in the popup box, click on the Enter key (start a new line of text).

Click on the Caldera Form button. Select your newly-created form and click on the Insert Form button.

Insert Caldera Form into popup

The shortcode for your form should now show up in your editor.

Configured popup box with Caldera Form shortcode

Click on the Publish button.

That’s it – you’re done!

By the way, you could do this with a combination of Gravity Forms and Postmatic for Gravity Forms as well. The process would be nearly the same.

A customized after-the-post optin

As if that weren’t slick enough, Lise also has a nifty sign up form that appears at the end of each of her blog posts.

After blog post sign up form using the Caldera Forms and Add Widget After Content plugins

How she did it

You need to install the following plugins to make this work (this assumes you already have Postmatic installed):

1. Create the form

Follow the same directions as shown above (or you can use the same form you already created).

2. Connect Postmatic and Caldera Forms

Follow the directions in this document to connect Postmatic and Caldera Forms.

3. Add and configure the after content widget

After you have installed the Add Widget After Content plugin, a new After Content box will appear when you go to Appearance > Widgets. Drag the Caldera Form widget into the box.

Complete the Title field and select your Form from the drop-down menu. In this example, we are using the same form that we used in the popup example above. Click on the Save button.

Caldera Form widget

That’s it – you’re done!

The new optin will show at the bottom of all posts.

Lise has hit onto a nice idea with these optins: with the Caldera Forms and Gravity Forms integrations in place it’s possible to put optins just about anywhere on your site. Widgets. Posts. Pages. Footers, or headers. It’s a nice coming together of a lot of WordPress technology. Many thanks to her for showing us how it was done.

If you have an interesting way to gather Postmatic subscribers on your site please let us know. Use the comments….

paint strips banner

Offer subscription incentives in Postmatic 1.4.12

Offering an incentive for people to subscribe to your blog is a nice way to accelerate the growth of your list. It could be something as simple as an ebook or how-to guide. The psychology is in your favor: people are much more likely to subscribe to your list if you offer them a reward. Even if it is something they could get for free.

It looks something like this:

Blog subscription box with incentive

We’ve had this request from quite a few users in the last few weeks so we decided well, why not?

How to offer subscriber incentives in Postmatic

  1. Upgrade Postmatic to the latest version (1.4.12) and visit Settings > Postmatic in your WordPress dashboard.
  2. Set up your widget, form, or optin with a nice teaser. Here are some ideas.
  3. Visit the Options screen.
  4. There you will find a new box named Subscription Confirmation Message.
  5. Insert any html you want. When a user successfully subscribes to your blog (not to comments) we’ll shoot them a confirmation email and include your html. Use it to offer a download or link to your incentive content. Done.

Some ideas for incentives

If you’re not sure what we’re getting at or how to put it to work for yourself check out this post.

Here’s the full list of what else is comes in 1.4.12

  • With the above we’ve also changed the subscription confirmation message to no longer show your previous post. It wasn’t a real winning feature anyway.
  • We’ve added support for Add Widget After the Content. That is to say widgets which are set by it will not show up in your Postmatic email. So we support it by not supporting it. Which is to say its safe to use. Blog post on why coming later this week.
  • Even more improvements to stripping out signatures on incoming replies. We’ve moved all of that up to our servers so we can now tweak things in realtime.
  • We’ve got a Russian translation! Many thanks to Dmitry Kornyukhov. He is seriously the Best Russian Translator.

What else is coming this week?

There are updates to both Epoch as well as Postmatic Social Commenting in the works right now. Highlights include:

Epoch

  • Instant comment posting. Comments now post to the comment stream the instant you hit the submit button. Even on slow-like-molasses hosts.

Postmatic Social Commenting

  • Full support for social profile images. We’ll be pulling in profile images from the social network used, and falling back to Gravatars if need be.