Today we welcome Phil, the owner of Capital Web Design, a Canadian web services agency based in Ottawa.

WPMU DEV: Congrats on your professional success, Phil. Please tell us straight away, how did you grow your business so fast?

Phil: I wouldn’t say the business itself grew that fast. I’ve been building websites in some way or another since the early 2000s. Either static sites coded by hand (HTML + CSS + Javascript), using frameworks (VueJS), or with WordPress.

I started my freelance web design company in 2014, after being approached to do a replacement build for what was a costly, difficult to maintain website – and that became my first client. From there I found small and medium businesses in my hometown that had old, unsupported and unmaintained websites, or who had no website at all.

As I continued my efforts, my business ethos emerged: help companies, nonprofits and individuals in my city build a web presence they can be proud of. I focused on creating bespoke WordPress web design based on well-supported multipurpose themes, WPMU DEV and other dependable plugins, and fully managed white-glove web hosting.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of working with 20+ clients, and have built 60 websites targeting a multitude of industries and commercial sectors.

WPMU DEV: That’s awesome. Did you know about WPMU DEV at that time?

Phil: I had known about WPMU DEV since around 2016-18, back when you offered dozens of plugins for all sorts of functionality. I couldn’t justify the cost of a membership then, but I popped in every so often to check and see what progress was being made.

In 2019, Hosting was added as a WPMU DEV service – and this really caught my attention. During the Black Friday promotion that November (lifetime reduced membership cost!), I joined as a member, and I can’t see myself ever leaving.

It was a perfect storm: high-quality plugins + managed hosting + 24/7 support + highly reduced cost.

WPMU DEV: So as you were building your clientele, you were putting together your professional tool box. Can you give us a peek inside?

Phil: The tools and services from WPMU DEV have been invaluable to me.

Plugins have provided me with consistency and reliability for all of the most important aspects of WordPress websites.

Knowing that I can count on Hummingbird and Smush for performance optimization allowed me to stop using other freemium plugins such as W3 Total Cache, Autoptimize, WP Super Cache and EWWW Image Optimization. I found these plugins were all good at some things, but had a lot of paywalled features that Hummingbird and Smush offered out of the box, for free.

Defender has been a great peace-of-mind addition to my repertoire, as the one-click recommended fixes are super straightforward and quite effective.

Forminator forms may be difficult at times to style with CSS, but that’s more than made up for in functionality. The drag-and-drop UI makes it much easier to build forms compared to Contact Form 7, and the amount of extras that are baked in (calculation, email routing, etc) blow other (often paid) form builders out of the water.

WPMU DEV: Aside from plugins, you mentioned our services have made a huge impact as well. Can you expand on that?

Phil: When it comes to services, it’s hard to put into words just how much The Hub and the associated Hosting have helped me throughout the last few years.

I have worked with hosting providers like 1and1, DreamHost, Media Temple, Digital Ocean VPS, and Bluehost. Each had their advantages, but in the end it always became a chore to use their services. It was clear that the quality of their offerings reflected the low cost they positioned themselves at. They were in a perpetual fight to undercut their competitors on price, at the cost of quality of service and support.

WPMU DEV Hosting came in late in the game, but out of the gate addressed two of the major concerns I experienced at other hosts: lack of support, and lack of trust in the infrastructure.

By having dedicated resources (versus shared), the web servers were consistently fast, reliable, and offered premium features such as staging, backups and WAF.

WPMU DEV: Walk us through a typical work day; what you reach for the most, and your usual workflow.

Phil: I keep The Hub open in a tab at all times, refreshing it every once in a while to keep track of ongoing community discussions, website maintenance statuses, and plugin updates.

I subscribe to key email notifications to receive alerts of technical issues on my managed sites, as well as member discussions in the WPMU DEV member forums, blogs and newsletter.

When a technical issue occurs, I’m able to troubleshoot it quickly. If I’m unable to resolve it on my own, the LiveChat support is always there to help me right away.

WPMU DEV has allowed me to optimize my workflows across the board, in areas like:

• Faster site creation with one-click managed WordPress server provisioning from The Hub.
• Easier client invoicing using Client Billing.
• More efficient website monitoring and maintenance through The Hub.
• Lower maintenance effort required with WPMU DEV plugins.
• Faster technical troubleshooting with the LiveChat support.

WPMU DEV: Outside of your own talent and determination, what would you say has contributed most significantly to your growth?

Phil: WPMU DEV has reduced my server build-out time from 30 minutes to 3 minutes (90% reduction). Over the past few years I’ve stood up well over 75 servers, so this has saved me many hours of effort.

At the time of joining, The Hub allowed me to manage about a dozen sites from a central location as opposed to manually logging in to each separate site. This was a reduction of biweekly maintenance effort from approximately 60 minutes to 2 minutes.

Client billing and streamlined invoice creation allowed me to save approximately 20-30 minutes per invoice creation, which throughout the past few years I estimate has saved me over 30 hours of work.

All of these time and effort savings have allowed me to comfortably take on more projects and clients.

Since joining WPMU DEV, my completed projects count has grown approximately 416% – with each project being more efficient to produce than the last.

WPMU DEV: As a self-proclaimed diehard fan, you know we’re constantly upping our game and adding new features and services to our offerings. What’s a newer release that you’re really getting into?

Phil: Reseller focus. I look forward to adding WPMU DEV automated site provisioning via the reseller offerings, as well as domains and email reselling.

WPMU DEV: One last question; let’s close it out with a fun one. If you could talk to yourself at the start of your career, what would you say?

Phil: At the start of my career, I often looked up to senior staff who seemed wise beyond their years. I was afraid of making mistakes or breaking something, for fear that those-who-never-broke-anything would look down on me.

I would try to explain to a younger me that wisdom comes with experience, and experience comes from doing things, failing, and working through the failure.

The more things you work on, the more you get exposed to what works and what doesn’t. Failing or breaking something isn’t strictly negative, because every failure is a learning opportunity: troubleshoot what went wrong, understand how to fix it, and implement a solution.

Do this cycle enough times and you start to pre-emptively detect patterns, plan for success, and you get faster at fixing problems. Don’t be afraid of failure because the more you fail, the more you learn and the wiser you will become.

That wraps up this premiere episode of our Member Success Stories. Thanks to Phil for his candid, insightful answers in our interview.

Phil is one of WPMU DEV’s Agency Partners, and uses his 20 years of web design experience to achieve one goal: give back to his hometown by building modern websites for businesses and nonprofits in the Canadian capital.

You can reach Phil via his agency partner listing or visit Capital Web Design.

Looking to expand your services beyond general web development work? Or maybe you’re learning new web design skills and looking for a profitable way to put them to use?

In this article we’re showing you how to offer specialized web design services to your clients, even if you have ZERO design skills or experience.

FYI, we surveyed our 50,000+ members and researched dozens of professional websites to come to the recommendations and suggestions mentioned in this article.

“The money I’ve made from this side business has paid for vacations and new toys I wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.” – Phil (WPMU DEV Member)

By the time you’re done reading you’ll have ideas for…

• The best types of web design services to offer to your clients.
• How to implement or outsource the services.
• How much you can charge for design services.

Skip ahead to any section of this article:

• Top Design Services To Offer Your Web Development Clients
  1. Branding
  2. Visual Identity
  3. Landing Pages and Lead Generation
  4. Redesigns
• Displaying Your Design Services Menu
• Get Started Offering Web Design Services To Your Clients

What Are Design Services and Which Services Should You Offer?

As mentioned above, our definition of design services are services that go above and beyond your normal theme, template, or page-builder approach.

Branding, rebranding, logo design, landing page design. These are the kind of things a lot of web developers might pass on doing, and that’s fine.

But if you’re up for earning extra income, providing more value for your clients, and making your overall web development service standout from the rest, we’re showing you how to do it.

Also don’t worry if you’re not a designer, or don’t think you have the necessary skills or experience to offer these services.

We’ll provide you with various outsourcing options that still allow you to apply a markup and make a profit.

As we touch on each service, you’ll also see we give you a number of tools and resources to use if you want to do the job yourself.

The Top 4 Web Design Services You Can Offer (As Voted By Our Members)

Once you’ve decided on offering these additional web design services, the next question is what type of services you’re actually going to offer.

Rather than taking a stab in the dark, or copying what the top Google result said, we thought we’d ask a group of people who know better than anyone, because they actually do this for a living…

Our 50,000+ web developer members!

Here are the design services that came out on top when we asked them in a recent members discussion:

1. Branding
2. Visual Identity
3. Landing Pages and Lead Generation
4. Redesign

Now let’s look at each of these design services in detail. You’ll learn what’s involved with each service, resources, tools, and outsourcing options for each, as well as what you can possibly charge your clients.

Web Design Service 1: Branding

Branding is how a business differentiates itself from other entities, and what customers will identify and associate it with.

You don’t have to go beyond the basics to get a brand up and running, especially if it’s not a massive corporation.

Additional branding components can also be supplemented, if or as they become relevant.

“Start with only what’s required and add more if necessary.”  – Databoy (WPMU DEV Member)

What’s Involved With Branding Services?

The branding we’re focusing on – based on member community input – is simply creating a brand by incorporating a color palette, selecting fonts, and strategically placing a logo or wordmark (we’ll talk about logo creation separately; see Visual Identity below).

Creating a color palette for your clients brand

Adopting a color palette is integral to the synergy of a client website.

There are some great online tools you use if you need help putting shades together for your clients.

Here are just a few we like, all of which are free.

Color palette tools:

Coolors

With Coolors, you can quickly generate palettes randomly, or more precisely using their color inspector (RGB bars), or by uploading an image – for both solids and gradients.

If you prefer ready-made options, they have a huge library.

This tool is available via iOS and Android apps, a Figma plugin, and a Chrome extension.

They also offer a Contrast Checker, and an Artwork Recolor tool (see my test case in the image above).

Adobe Color

Adobe Color provides their professional color wheel tool, with three modes available: RGB, HSB, & LAB.

You can extract a theme from an image to save as a color palette or gradient.

Accessibility tools are another plus; use their Contrast Checker and Color Blind Safe modes to see either, respectively.

Eggradients

Eggradients lets you select from a number of ready-made gradients. These are simple, two-color blends, but can be helpful or spark creativity if you’re looking for basic palette approaches.

Their color palette generator lets you choose from a list of varying shade gradients.

They also have a “50 Shades of Color” section, which will pull random tones in that color family, each with corresponding hex codes.

Choosing Website Fonts

Typography and strong font choice play a crucial role in the success of a new design.

There are several decent tools for comparing and testing fonts, as well as sites that offer access to a robust assortment of the fonts themselves.

Again, these are all free options.

Web Font Tools

Fontpair

Fontpair has a collection of pre-paired fonts on their site gathered from around the web.

They have a suggestions/submissions page, with new pairings added weekly.

Pair & Compare

Pair & Compare makes experimenting with font pairings easy.

You can use Google or local fonts (shared from your device) and have up to three comparatives simultaneously on the screen.

There are lots of editing options: size, weight, color, line height, and more.

You can also change any of the sample text, and bookmark fonts for testing later.

Google Fonts

Google Fonts is an excellent resource for finding and using fonts, with nearly 1500 families – including variable fonts and material symbols.

These are all free to use, even commercially or within a product that is sold commercially (example: a logo or wordmark).

Downloads are available for families, or individual styles, and can be shared with others via links.

Additional sites that offer free fonts:

• FontBase (this is a font management system)
• Font Squirrel
• Dafont.com
• FontSpace
• 1001FreeFonts
• Urbanfonts

And a selection of premium/paid font sites:

• Adobe Fonts
• MyFonts
• EnvatoElements Fonts
• FontBundles

How Much Can You Charge For Branding Services?

To get an idea of how to price your branding services, a useful exercise is to check out what the competition is offering and charging for creation of the same or similar content.

We did this ourselves and here are some relevant examples to draw pricing inspiration from:

TechCrunch had a great article on the cost of startup branding & visual identity, from a designer with a decade of experience (including Fortune 500s).

Here’s a breakdown of what they charged:

Pricing estimates are broken into two categories, based on the stage of the business, which as you can see, greatly affects the approximate costs.

The Branded Agency is a full-service digital agency that offers services and advice encompassing all elements and levels of branding.

They have an informative article in which they provide specs to help with planning & calculating branding costs.

There is variance in these prices too, but they’re still helpful to get an idea of what the typical range is for design services.

Knowing this can help prevent you from massively over or under charging, taking your skill and knowledge level (and the scope of a given project) into account.

Of course, you can and should price higher the more you’re including in your branding packages.

Average price range for branding services: $1,000-$30,000+

Web Design Service 2: Visual Identity

A visual identity could be a graphic only (logo), artistic text only (wordmark), a combination of both, or the full complement of all.

It could be as basic as a circle with an initial in it, or the business name in a specific font, weight, and color.

Case in point >> WPMU DEV!:

What’s Involved With Providing a Visual Identity Service

Deciding on a logo for a client has varying degrees of difficulty.

It boils down to how particular they are, and what their budget is.

The more complicated or specific a client-envisioned design is, the more likely their needs will be met by going with a custom one.

The other distinct advantage to a custom design is it will be unique. The prefab stuff is available to anyone, so multiple companies could purchase and use the same design.

Just as we checked out some sites that can help with the core elements of branding, we next set out to find resources that offer nice choices for visual identities (logos, wordmarks, etc).

Tools and Outsourcing Options For Creating Custom Logos

Logo.com

All of the logos on Logo.com are free.

These are very basic, premade cookie cutter offerings, but there are a lot of them.

They also allow great variation in color (there’s a Hex field) if you need a very specific shade.

Playing with free logo customization on Logo.com.

Considering these are completely free, it’s a decent option if you don’t need anything intricate or unique.

Creative Market

Creative Market has 150,000+ logo templates for use in corporate branding, e-commerce, and entrepreneurship.

The logo template sets include badges, icons, and other elements for creating unique and modern logos.

These are all pre-made designs, so keep in mind that any number of people can purchase/use the artwork in addition to you. If your client wants a unique logo, this option won’t work.

Fiverr

Fiverr is a highly popular seller marketplace, where you hire an individual artist for any number of design elements offered as Gigs.

Because this is fully dependent on what designer you happen to pick, your mileage may vary. But in general, reviewers seem pleased on the whole, and feel they got a good deal for what they paid.

The prices range from $5 to $995, depending on the skill level of the artist and the components included.

Logoglo

Logoglo is a premium logo site. Anything you get here would be a unique, one-off design, professionally made from scratch, based on your brief.

Packages include more content as you go up in tiers – such as number of initial concepts, turnaround time, & revision allowances.

This is a great option if you have a client who has a slightly bigger budget and wants artwork that people won’t come across elsewhere.

99designs

99designs is a subsidiary of VistaPrint, the highly successful online print house.

Offerings include the level of designers, and whether you get a dedicated manager and prioritized support.

The number of presented design concepts starts at 30 and goes up to 90. All designs come with a money-back guarantee, and full copyright ownership.

How Much Can You Charge For Visual Identity Services?

Jacob Cass is a brand designer, strategist, and the founder of JUST Creative, an award-winning branding & design consultancy.

JC.com has an article on design cost, with a helpful chart on logo design pricing. Additionally, they provided a list that breaks out the costs in greater detail.

Full Branding for global identities is priced extremely high, tapping out at over a million dollars.

This of course is the elite upper echelon, well above average.

For the level we are focused on, you can see the variance goes from $0 for DIY/free logo makers, to upwards of $5K for an experienced designer.

Average price range for visual identity services: $500-$5,000

Web Design Service 3: Landing Pages and Lead Generation

The primary goal of most websites (aside from education and entertainment) is to turn incoming traffic into leads.

Offering landing page or similar conversion-based services to your clients is well worth it.

After all, they’re not likely to turn down the potential of gaining more customers and leads.

“Each page has one purpose, to convert. Make sure you have a clear path on how the client wants to convert, what is the goal that the client wants out of every visitor. Keep your design focused on getting that convert click.” – Chris (WPMU DEV Member)

What’s Involved and The Tools to Help You Provide Landing Page and Lead Generation Services

Landing Pages

You may already have a template you use for client landing pages – either self-created, purchased, or acquired for free.

If you are looking for something fresh, or don’t already have a go-to, here are some options for Landing Page websites.

Tools and Outsourcing Options

Nicepage

Nicepage offers 10,000+ pre-designed Landing pages, or you can make your own.

You can edit any of the pre-made templates, using their own website builder – which allows for drag-and-drop, no coding customizations like content editing, layout changing (blocks), modifying colors and fonts, and making adjustments for different responsive modes.

Nicepage is available for Windows or Mac OS as a WordPress Plugin.

Fiverr

Fiverr’s experienced landing page designers can create the right layout and branding identity for your page.

Expect premium quality images, responsive design suitable for mobile devices and desktop, content upload (of content provided by you) and more.

The prices vary greatly, depending on what you want, how fast you want it, and the self-ascribed skills & experience of the artist you choose. For reference, we found prices ranged from $5 to $1500.

Landingfolio

Landingfolio features a beautiful and diverse collection of landing pages, curated from around the web.

Their offerings include:

• Tailwind CSS Site Templates – Figma included on all designs
• Logos – a collection by designer Jord Riekwel, donated to the community (they’re free)
• Mockup Generator – quickly create device mockups for your app or web design; enter your website URL, and they’ll generate the mockups for you

Tailwind is a CSS framework like Bootstrap, that speeds up your development time. It uses classes to style elements, so you don’t have to write any CSS.

Popular Page Builders Like Elementor and Divi

Of course, you can always turn to page builders and themes if needed, most of which will help you create quality custom landing pages for clients.

Divi only offers a paid version of their builder, which provides a nice-looking end-product when it comes to landing pages and conversion elements. Elementor also has the capability to create landing pages in both their free and Pro versions.

Create Lead Generations Modules With Hustle

Every good landing page needs effective lead generation elements.

You can put together some great lead generating modules with our free Hustle plugin.

Opt-ins, pop-ups, slide-ins, social shares, and embeds – Hustle helps you create them all, designed to drive results and convert visitors.

It’s easy to build great looking modules in minutes with Hustle’s professionally designed templates (18 and counting).

All of which are mobile responsive and come with a choice of email opt-in forms and informational designs (i.e., users click a button and are sent to another page).

Hustle comes in both free and pro versions. Both give you all of the same great settings and options.

The only difference is the Pro version comes with unlimited Opt-ins, Custom Content, and Social Sharing.

Want more Hustle? Check out these info-packed articles on the blog:

• How to Get The Most Out of Hustle
• How to Use Visibility Conditions in Hustle
• How to Get The Most Email Subscribers Using Hustle

How Much Can You Charge For Landing Page and Lead Generation Services?

F5 Studio, a successful web development outfit that has been in business since 2013, has a great article breaking down the elements of design, and what goes into its landing page pricing.

They say digital agencies charge from about $600 to $3,000 to create a static landing page, and from $2,000 to $5,000 for a dynamic landing page.

Brimar, an award-winning, full-service marketing agency, shared these insights on landing page cost, claiming an agency can charge anywhere from $300 to $3,000 per landing page, depending on the project’s complexity and the clients business goals.

Overall, the cost of creating a landing page varies depending on the complete scope of the job, and how much work will be involved.

Average price range for landing page and conversion services: $300-$5,000

Web Design Service 4: Redesign/Rebrand projects

There are several reasons why a client might benefit from or want a website redesign. The most common are:

• The overall look and feel is outdated or unappealing.
• The business identity isn’t well-reflected in the design, or soon won’t be due to a planned rebranding.
• The usability is poor, making navigation difficult and limiting conversions.

“It is especially important for a complete overhaul (the UI might require a complete rethink) if trying to appeal to a completely different audience—e.g. if a website changes from b2c to b2b.” – Marianna (WPMU DEV Member)

What’s Involved and The Tools to Help You Provide a Redesign Service

Understanding the user experience is key. If a site’s interaction/conversion rates are a lot less than their site traffic, it would behoove you to look into behavior analytics.

Hotjar and Crazy Egg for UX insights

Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg can provide great insight on a site’s UX design/usability.

By observing recorded screen behavior, you can pinpoint any weak areas, and make upgrades based on real-use data.

Hotjar offers their service for free, up to a thousand dollars (per month) based on what features you need, and for how many sessions (“Observe”) or responses (“Ask”).

Crazy Egg pricing includes 5 different packages, from less than thirty dollars a month, to priced by quote. Each tier allows greater quantities of services (like tracked page views, snapshots, & recordings).

Learning where customers move their mouses and where they click, what they focus on vs what they ignore, removes any doubt and guesswork, allowing you to focus on the areas specifically highlighted as ripe for improvement.

How Much Can You Charge For Redesign Services?

Redesigns are very similar to new designs in terms of the overall effort required. They involve many of the same elements, tools, and time requirements.

The only price differential with a redesign would be the additional cost of UX insight tools, as explained above.

As for overall web redesign costs, participants in a recent global redesign survey revealed some key stats:

1. Average cost to design a website (with basic features): $3,200
2. Average time to design a website (with basic features): 2 months
3. The foremost reason people hire a professional web designer (rather than using site building software): the ability to completely customize.

Regardless of the reason behind a redesign, it’s important to establishing what the expectations are for scope and cost in advance.

We’re seeing an average of $3+K and a timeframe of about two months for full web designs/redesigns. Factor that into what your average build time is and what services you will include to help set your prices.

Average price range for website redesigns: $2,000-$4,000

Putting All of Your Web Design Components Together

Having gathered information and given it due consideration, you can now construct a menu uniquely tailored to your web design services, providing easy access (and value proposition) to interested clients.

An Example of a Complete Design Services Menu:

Here’s an example we came up with, which includes variations on elemental prices, depending on the components included and expected work involved.

Get Started Offering Web Design Services To Your Clients

We hope you took away some valuable insights from this detailed look at offering web design services.

If you need any more advice or clarification about anything discussed in the article, feel free to ask us in the comments below.

There are a lot of balls to keep in the air as a Web Developer. At WPMU DEV, our goal is to assist in making that process as easy as possible.

If you’re interested in giving our platform a try, our free plan is the best place to start. It includes unlimited site management, built-in billing, plugins, and more.

Once your high quality logo is designed and ready to go, it should appear on all your branded material, including your WordPress website. Typically, there are three schools of thought as to where logos can go: in the top-left, top-middle, or top-right corners of a page. So this begs the question: which position is right for your logo?

If we’re going strictly based on UX logic, then your logo belongs in the top-left corner of your website. No questions asked. There are two reasons for this:

1. For those of us with a native language that reads from left to right, our eyes naturally look to the left first.
2. In the earlier years of web design, logos were always on the left, and that’s where most people assume they are located now.

Despite what logic says, there are some websites that have eschewed the norm for logo placements in the center or right corner of a website. Would a unique placement of your logo fit better with your brand identity?

Let’s take a closer look at what the studies show, and see if left really is right for your site.

Experts Weigh In: Where to Place Your Logo?

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, there are three purposes that logos serve on modern websites:

• They remind visitors where they are. In other words, whose website am I on?
• They allow for easy navigation to the home page since most websites no longer include a “Home” button in the navigation.
• They aid in brand recognition as the logo always remains there at the top of the site, and sometimes even follows visitors as they scroll down a page.

The NNGroup performed two studies to find the ideal logo location. Here is what they found:

• Left vs. Right
• Left vs. Center
• The Winner Is…

Left vs. Right

In the left-versus-right study, the NNGroup tested and observed the response of 128 users. Similar to an A/B test, each user was shown only one version of a website: either the original with the logo on the left or the one the NNGroup manipulated in order to place the logo and navigation on the right.

They gave the users a minute’s time to review their version of the website. They were then asked a series of questions and shown photos of 10 hotel websites. This test aimed to establish what sort of effect logo placement had on brand recall.

These were the results:

• Left-aligned logos lead to greater brand recall. Specifically, the average brand recall for left-aligned logos was 39% as opposed to 21% for the right-aligned version.
• Left-aligned logos are more likely to be labeled “unique.” Despite the traditional placement of a left-aligned logo, respondents were still more likely to label a left-aligned logo as “unique” and “stylish” than one that appeared on the right.

Left vs. Center

The Nielsen Norman Group conducted an additional study to discover what happens when users were exposed to a center-aligned logo. They conducted two different tests to determine the viability of a centered logo.

Unlike the A/B test conducted between left- and right-aligned logos, this first survey provided 50 users each with one retail website to interact with. Eight of those websites had a centered logo whereas six had a left-aligned logo. They were then asked to complete different tasks that would test their ease in using the navigation and return to the home page.

This was the result:

• Left-aligned logos are better for navigation. In the study, only 4% of users failed to navigate home in a single click when the logo appeared on the left. When the logo was centered, however, 24% of users failed to get there in one click.

In the second of these tests, the NNGroup presented 128 users with five different hotel websites. Four of the logos showed variations of a logo on either the left or in the center, while the fifth site included a right-aligned logo. Users were then asked a series of questions to determine brand recall.

This was the result:

• Brand recall is unaffected by the difference between left or centered logos. Despite presenting users with variations of the same logo in different spots, brand recall was inconsistent in this comparison between left-aligned and centered logos.

The Winner Is…

After reviewing the results from the logo placement studies, it appears that logic does prevail:

Left is best.

Here’s why:

• Many people don’t think about looking in the right-hand corner of a website for a logo, and so brand recall can be severely compromised as a result.
• Many people are conditioned to look for a navigation in one of the top corners of a site, so placing a logo and/or navigation in the center confuses the process of getting around a website.

In summary, left-aligned logos are ideal as they are located exactly where the eye is naturally drawn.

Just remember that web design’s primary concern should always be with the user experience. While a centered logo may look sleek, it probably isn’t ideal if you have more than one page on your website (and you expect people to visit those other pages). The same goes for a right-aligned logo. It may seem like you’re giving your site a unique edge, but you may hurt your brand’s recall in the process.

It’s also important to keep in mind that it’s not just logo placement that matters. Logos should be exported in a high-quality file format, created using a legible font face, and positioned on top of white space so that background imagery, shadows, and colors can’t distract from it.

Wrapping Up

If you’re trying to get creative with your WordPress site’s design, there are other ways to go about doing it. You could create a killer landing page, add push notifications, or revamp your CTA buttons.

If this study has shown us anything, it’s that you shouldn’t mess around with the placement of your logo. Left is always best.

Have you ever heard of the Seahawks’ 12th Man?

Those who follow football know that only 11 players from each team are allowed on the field at any given time.

However, Seattle’s fans have been branded as the “12th Man” ( or “the 12s” for legal reasons) because of the profound effect their vocal presence and support has had on the Seahawks’ games.

That’s how we feel about websites.

They might not be a living, breathing team member who can call leads and attend company meetings –  but they are still an incredibly important part of a business’s sales, marketing, and customer relationship efforts.

When executed well, a WordPress website will help businesses achieve a number of those goals.

While the goals may vary based on the type of business or services offered, there is one universal goal that every website strives for:

Lead generation.

And to generate leads, you need to offer a way for customers to engage with you – whether that be through a phone call, email, live chat, social media inquiry, or by filling out a form.

It’s the latter that we’re going to focus on today.

More specifically, we’ll be diving into the benefits of using contact forms on your WordPress site, and what type of form is the best for various occasions.

First let’s start with some contact form basics…

The Logic Behind Using Contact Forms

Today’s consumer prefers a multi-channel communication approach.

What does this mean exactly?

Well, consumers want options. Gone are the days of phone book searches in order to find a business’s contact info.

There are now more options available –and consumers expect to have access to them.

That’s why a website is an essential contact point for every business – from the independent blogger to the multi-chain retailer.

When someone Googles the type of service or information they’re looking for and finds your website, that’s the first step in their customer journey.

It’s then your job to guide them through the rest of that journey and to the end-goal: contacting you.

Regardless of which method of communication visitors to your WordPress site prefer, it’s important to have contact forms at the ready.

It’s even more important to make sure your contact forms are engaging. After all, research shows that 81% of people abandon a form after beginning to fill it out.

The good news is, once you’ve planned out your contact form strategy properly, landing those conversions should be a piece of cake.

7 Reasons You Need Contact Forms On Your WordPress Website

Every business and, consequently, every website, wants to achieve the same thing.

They want to reach the right audience—the audience who needs their services, information, or products and are willing to contact you to learn more.

There is a lot of work that goes into driving the right traffic to your site, but once they’re there, it’s your job to call them to action.

Contact forms are a very popular form of CTA as their inherent nature is to help businesses and customers (or prospects) more easily engage with one another.

And because of this, there are a number of advantages you can expect from using contact forms on your WordPress website:

The Little-Known Benefits Of Using Contact Forms

1.Increase Your Site UX / Audience Satisfaction:

By including simple forms that require minimal contact info in exchange for what visitors want, you’re giving them a no-fuss solution to reach you. It also puts the onus on you to make that phone call or send that email, which many customers will find an attractive option.

2.Protect Yourself:

Spammers and spambots are known for sweeping websites in search of mailto: tags, so publishing your email address information on your website may be opening you up to a number of vulnerabilities. To save yourself the hassle (and possible security threats), contact forms are a great alternative for the visitors who want to message you online.

3.Save Time:

There are many ways contact forms help businesses save time: 1) Less of a need for cold calling. 2) Less data entry when contact forms are linked to a CMS. 3) Less need for back-and-forth when FAQs and next steps can be shared during or after the contact form submission process.

4.Collect Consistent Information:

Whatever information is needed from a visitor (general contact info or perhaps more comprehensive answers regarding their needs), contact forms ensure that businesses are collecting the same info from everyone, every time.

5.Stay Organized:

Contact forms are a great way to help businesses keep their customer and lead information organized with electronic records from every submission.

6.Generate Leads:

Even if you’re using forms for content giveaways, surveys, or some other more creative purpose, contact forms still provide you with a way to collect new lead information for future use. (e.g. If they signed up for a white paper in the past, they may be interested in hearing about your services when you contact them in the future).

7.Increase Engagement:

If there’s anything social media has taught us, it’s that consumers want to engage with brands.

A contact form offers them an easy way to do that and demonstrates to your visitors that you’ll be there when they’re ready to take that next step.

Remember: when used correctly, contact forms can be a very powerful sales and marketing tool; i.e. your 12th Man.

Now it’s time to figure out what type of form will work best for your site.

How To Choose The Right Type Of Contact Form

Many websites will use a mix of contact forms in order to convert visitors through different means.

What you end up choosing for your website will depend on what you have to offer.

Consider the following WordPress form options:

The Basic Contact Form

This is the generic form you’ll find on every website. It usually appears on the Contact page, but will also be present after blog posts and at the bottom of special landing pages that want visitors to take a specific action.

If your purpose is to entice visitors to contact you, this is the form to use.

The Giveaway Form

The giveaway form is for businesses or marketers who can give something away for free and get visitors’ contact info in exchange for it. So for marketers, you usually see this in the form of a “Free White Paper” that requests an email address in exchange for the free collateral piece.

For other businesses, the perfect example of this is when a website offers up a chance to win a free trip [gift, assessment, etc.] in exchange for the contestant’s email address as an “entry fee.”

The Purchase Form

Any website dealing in the selling of goods or services online will have an order form.

Depending on how extensive the ordering process is, these types of forms can become quite lengthy and this is usually where you’ll find multi-page forms put to use.

The Calculator Form

When sales people talk to customers about how their product will help them save X amount of dollars every month, they will almost always have a tried-and-true formula in place to back that up.

So for websites hoping to land sales (or just get the conversation started), having a calculator form on the site is a great way to get those prospects interacting, discovering what they can gain from those services (or lose without them), and ultimately reaching out for more info.

The Login Form

For websites that offer memberships or special access to parts of their website to partners, customers, suppliers, etc., a sign-up and login form is a necessary piece of that process.

The Survey Form

Survey forms can serve a number of purposes. They can serve as a way to get visitors engaged with an interesting or informative topic.

They can serve as a way to help you collect information for building case studies and reports.

And they can serve as a way to learn more about what your audience wants and help you adjust your business model accordingly.

The Subscription Form

Websites that produce regular updates to their content will usually offer short subscription forms.

So for someone who produces a lot of blog posts or a regular newsletter, this form is a great way to stay top-of-mind with visitors as new updates are pushed out while collecting information for future use.

The Google Form

Chances are you’ve seen a Google form recently. They’re very easy to set up and very flexible in terms of the type of information you want to collect (job applications, surveys, service requests, etc).

Stored in the cloud with all your other Google documentation, these forms provide websites with a free way to collect information from customers (as opposed to a CMS) and keep it all in one place.

The Pop-Up Form

For those trying to maintain a minimal site design or for those simply wanting to put a form in a hard-to-miss location, pop-ups are a great alternative.

The Multi-Page Form

Many of the form types above could potentially take up multiple pages (especially anything having to do with the ordering process).

The ultimate purpose is spreading a form submission out across many pages is to make the process of filling out so many fields a little less daunting for customers.

It also helps to ease them through different (but logical) phases in order to reach the end-goal.

The Easiest Way To Create Your Own Contact Forms in WordPress

Contact forms should always be reflective of what your business does and what sort of information you need from visitors in order to take the appropriate next steps in building a relationship with them.

Regardless of how extensive your needs are, the following three step guide and suggested tools will set you well on your way to getting the most out of the contact forms on your site.

Step 1: Select a Contact Form Plugin

If you want to create a contact form, the easiest way to do it, is to use a plugin.

You’ll want to first identify what sort of form you need from the list of form types we talked about earlier. It will also of course depend on the context of how the form fits in with your website.

To help you choose the right plugin, here are 5 of the best contact form plugins as chosen by us to get you started. Also, here’s another list of some great pop-up plugins we put together if you’re wanting to go that route.

Put off by the thought of using a pop-up on your website? Don’t worry you’re not alone. But we think you should really give them a chance!

Check out this fantastic article we put together about how to create pop-ups that don’t scare off your visitors.

Step 2: Install The Contact Form Plugin On Your Website

Once you’ve selected which plugin to use, the next step is of course setting it up on your website.

Here’s a great step by step tutorial on how you can easily build your own contact form in WordPress using our own Forminator plugin.

Even better, you can check out this full video tutorial breakdown if you’re a more visual type of guy or gal.

Step 3: Close The Contact Form Loop

The last step in the setup of any form is to make sure you’ve provided a quality experience for your site’s visitors from start-to-finish.

So that doesn’t just mean having a fully functioning form that provides them with the product, service, or phone call which they had sought out.

That means that once they submit that form, they’re redirected to another well-thought-out page.

Does the contact form leave visitors wondering what’s next? Send them to a landing page that explains next steps or contains a comprehensive FAQ.

Does the form complete a purchase? Send them to a confirmation page.

Or is the form just a subscription to your blog? Then direct them to a Thank You page or to a blog post that may be of interest.

You’ve spent so much time designing a great website. There’s no reason to lose your visitors’ interest once you’ve got their info.

Well Executed Forms Are Your Express Ticket To More Leads And a Better UX

Ultimately, the purpose of a WordPress contact form is to give visitors a chance to reach out to you when they’re ready.

Regardless of the type of form (or forms) you use, keep in mind the following before you begin to build any of these out:

• Try to only have one form on any given page. Too many competing CTAs can create a confusing and negative experience for visitors.
• Keep the number of form fields to a minimum. The less work visitors have to do, the more receptive they’ll be to give you their information.
• Create strong, but simple messaging within the form. You want to draw in their attention and hold it until they submit their information.
• Part of the reason you’re using forms is to cut down on the amount of data entry required of you, so make sure to link your forms to a CMS or payment process for easy data collection and processing.
• For some of these forms (like the Contact page form), you’ll want to include alternate contact info alongside it so your visitors are still presented with a variety of contact options.
• In terms of where to place your form, you really won’t know what works best until it’s been on your site. While above-the-fold forms do seem to perform better, that’s not always the case. Consider using A/B testing to find the optimum spot.
• If you’re ever collecting customer information (in this case, you definitely are), make sure you have a privacy statement set up and that you have provided proof of it near the form.
• Always, always, always make sure it’s responsive. If your contact form doesn’t properly work on mobile devices, you’ll be missing out on a huge opportunity to convert.

Follow most of the tips above and you’ll be well on your way to collecting new leads with ease.

As an added bonus, you’ll improve UX and potential customers will already be impressed by your brand before they officially reach your doors.

Visitors to your site want to have their questions answered instantly. They want to be able to see what your products cost without having to speak with a salesperson or request a quote. They want to be able to click a button and speak with a customer service representative if they need additional help. And, the list goes on…

While your customers are demanding a better experience, you may be asking yourself, “How do I make my prospects and customers happy while not breaking the bank, having dozens of different software plans, and hiring more employees?”

Well, we have some good news to share with you – with HubSpot’s completely free all-in-one CRM, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service WordPress plugin (not sure what a CRM is, find out more here) you can better attract, engage, and (who knows, maybe) delight your prospects and customers effectively all in one platform without spending a single penny.

In this article, we’ll go over how to engage your visitors & customers more generally and how you can go about doing that with the HubSpot WordPress plugin.

Convert your website visitors by adding value with Forms

Forms vary in many ways – length, format, content type, appearance and purpose. However, they should fit your business’s needs, collect the information you want from your visitors, and ultimately provide value to your prospects and customers.

If you already have forms on your website, that’s great! Submissions should automatically sync with your HubSpot contact database when you have the HubSpot WordPress plugin installed. HubSpot can monitor any submission on your website and pull in the details that the user inputted.

If you don’t have forms on your website yet, that’s okay! HubSpot has a free form builder in the plugin, or you can use another forms plugin, such as Forminator (which is pretty amazing, just fyi), and have them automatically connect with your HubSpot account. Forminator’s extended HubSpot integration allows for setting up a free WordPress support ticketing system too.

Engage & help your visitors with Live Chat

Sometimes, your visitors don’t want to fill out forms. There are many reasons for this… maybe your call-to-action is too generic or even too invasive by asking for a lot of information.

Have you recently been to a website and engaged with someone in sales, customer support, or even a bot? It’s best to give your visitors different options to engage with your business.

In a recent study asking, “when you have a question or problem you need help with, how do you like to connect with a company’s customer service group?” 48% of the respondents answered with live chat, and 57% of the respondents said they are interested in getting information from bots when browsing a business’s website.

With the big shift in how customers are shopping and researching online, live chat and bots are an easy way to help your customers and save you massive amounts of time and energy. And, it’s very simple to add live chat and bots to your website. In the quick walkthrough below, you will see how easy it is to create a step by step bot that asks questions to qualify your visitors and learn more about their interests.

With HubSpot’s WordPress plugin, you can add live chat to your website in less than a minute and build chatbots to engage with your visitors while you’re away from your computer or even sleeping! If you care to chat with your visitors, you can use HubSpot’s free mobile application or the web app.

Organize, enrich, and track each visitor in a tidy timeline with Contacts

Typically, when someone submits a form on your website, you would receive a simple kickback email with the details they entered and most likely a record saved in your WordPress form editor.

What you may not know is that you’re missing out on a lot of additional information that would help you better engage with your prospect. These additional insights include what pages they viewed, how many times they’ve visited your website, how they found you, and so much more.

Here’s a gif showing a contact’s timeline with all the valuable details:

Imagine being able to know everything about what people are doing on your website, when, and who exactly they are. You can use these details to notify your sales team, trigger an email, and much more.

You can manage up to 1 million contacts in your HubSpot account for free, forever.

Create segmented contact groups with Lists

So you want to know which contacts are visiting your pricing page? Which customers are looking to upgrade or even cancel? You can use Lists in the HubSpot WordPress plugin to create filtered groups of your contacts based on their specific interactions, behaviors, and other metadata that you’ve gathered.

For example, if a lead visits your pricing page, it’s a good inkling that they might be evaluating your products. You can use this valuable insight (and others like it) to reach out and help them, create a tailored chatbot, or even send them an automated email to move them closer to purchasing.

You can use these segmented lists to power more personalized content in email, ads, and in your content.

Follow-up with automated personalized messaging with Email

Educating your contacts and customers through targeted, personalized email is a great way to drive engagement. If you’re sending blanket emails today and hoping they work, you may be getting large amounts of people to unsubscribe from your communication due to its spammy nature. People’s inboxes are overly cluttered, and one of the easiest ways to cut through the noise is to personalize your messaging with things like their name or company name in the subject line and copy.

Think about this: You now know every page each contact is looking at on your website, if they are customers or not, and other information that you’ve gathered when they fill out forms or engage with your chatbot. You can create segmented lists to group very similar contacts together. And, now you can send beautiful, responsive emails to them that feel personalized and helpful!

The goal of any business is to help its customers! Understand your customer’s needs, be helpful and personalized, and always be timely. Now you can do it more easily.

Measure business performance with Dashboard

Now that you’re starting to get the hang of engaging and delighting your contacts and customers, you must be wondering how you can see how your business is performing.

With HubSpot’s Dashboard built into the WordPress plugin, you can view your growth and highlight the areas you need to improve upon.

You can view basic reports and even build custom reports to analyze any part of your business. Since all of your valuable contact data is stored in your HubSpot account, you can build dashboards showing each part of your business’s success.

There has to be an alternative to Google AdSense – and lucky for you, we’ve found 12 of them.

But First…

When did the Google AdSense platform start, and why/how did it get so popular?

Because let’s face it, before you can choose a solid alternative to AdSense, you need to study the originator first.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:

• What Is Google AdSense and How Does It Work?
  • How Does AdSense Work?
  • Straight From AdSense’s Mouth
• 12 Adsense Alternatives To Monetize Your WordPress Website:
  • Media.net
  • Infolinks
  • Amazon Native Shopping Ads
  • Propeller Ads
  • Revcontent
  • Evadav
  • Adsterra
  • PopAds
  • ylliX
  • BuySellAds
  • PopCash
  • Bidvertiser

What Is Google AdSense and How Does It Work?

But that’s where the trouble ended.

And in the years since, it has become the go-to advertising platform for bloggers and website owners looking to monetize their websites.

Google does the rest, and automatically shows relevant ads on your website or blog.

From this point on, visitors to your website will see ads, and every time someone takes action (click, conversion, etc) you get a cut of the advertising revenue.

Straight From AdSense’s Mouth

I don’t think we could explain it any better than this:

*For more information on inserting ads into WordPress do check out our article: “11 Quick Ways to Insert Ads into WordPress… and Increase Your Income This Year.”

Phew!

Now all the (bori..) informative stuff’s out-of-the-way, I think we’re ready to get into some AdSense Alternatives.

Here Are 12 Adsense Alternatives You Can Use To Monetize Your Website Or Blog Today:

1. Media.net

First on our list is one of Adsense’s biggest direct competitors.

Media.net lets you to ride the wave of the Yahoo! Bing Network – one of the largest marketplaces for keyword-targeted advertisers.

The company boasts one of the most advanced portfolios of advertising technology. Offering users a number of on-site ad solutions including search, display, native, video, and more.

Implementation is easy. All you have to do is drop a short snippet of code on your website or blog. Activating and running contextual, video, and native ads can also be done without extra code or integration work.

Because Media.net is a contextual ad network, the advertisements displayed on your website or blog are always relevant to your content.

So if your blog is all about cats… yep, your visitors are getting slapped with more cat ads than they can handle.

Without it feeling spammy of course.

Their customer support is also top-notch. For example, once approved you’re immediately given a customer representative to help optimize your site’s ads.

 

2. Infolinks

Infolinks is the third-largest publisher marketplace in the world, generating income for over 100,000 website and blog publishers across 128 countries.

The company also works with several big-name brands including Nike, Virgin Airlines, Target, and Netflix.

Infolinks lets you monetize your site without having to overhaul its look and style. Their ads blend in perfectly with your content, including customization to increase engagement.

The ad types you can choose from include: InFold, InText, InArticle, and more. These ads and who they’re shown to are also supported by an intelligent algorithm. This keeps the ads displayed relevant.

Integrating Infolinks ads into your website is simple. Once approved you’ll receive a unique script you can add to your site’s HTML. Paste the code anywhere on your website and you’re ready to start earning dollars.

Also, if you use Google Analytics or other JavaScript tools, insert the Infolinks JavaScript right before their code.

 

3. Amazon Native Shopping Ads

Who wouldn’t want to leverage the behemoth that is Amazon?

After all, more than 197 million people from all around the world visit the eCommerce store.

To put this into perspective, that’s more than the entire population of Russia!

Amazon’s native shopping ads give your users direct access to the eCommerce giant’s millions of products.

Even better, they fit seamlessly with your content, with highly relevant products.

The ad units Amazon offers fall into three different types:

1. Recommendation ads – These ads show recommended, relevant Amazon products at the bottom of your content. All of these units are also mobile responsive and will adapt based on the container.

2. Search ads – This ad unit allows your visitors to view search results from Amazon directly on your website. This includes recommended Amazon products based on search phrases and keywords.

3. Custom ads – Handpick specific Amazon products you’d like to promote to your visitors. These units are highly flexible, offering personalization to feel more natural. E.g. “My favorite headphones to use in 2019.”

 

4. Propeller Ads

More than 150,000 publishers use PropellerAds and the company has over eight years of market expertise and experience.

If you’re worried about your site showing annoying or spammy ads… the good news is, all they offer ad moderation 24/7.

This ensures no viruses or inappropriate content gets through, and you’re showing clean and relevant ads only.

The ad units can also bypass ad blocking software. Even though this might seem a tad sneaky, you can increase ad revenue up to 20% by getting past ad blockers.

I mean, it’s sneaky of the visitor to block ads in the first place, right?

To set up Propeller ads, simply register for an account, and then wait to hear back for approval.

Once finished, all you have to do is paste the shortcode of Propeller’s ad units on any page of your website.

The types of ad units you can display on your website include: push notifications, on-click ads, widgets, interstitials, and smart links.

The platform also offers decent payment terms. Giving users weekly payouts every Thursday, and a minimum withdrawal amount of $5.

(AdSense has a threshold of $100 for reference).

You can add a “plug n play” payment integration to your account to help you keep track of your earnings.

Propeller Ads also play well with other ad networks, so you can diversify and add more income streams if you wish.

 

5. Revcontent

Revcontent specializes in “native” editorial content, which means the ads shown on your website will be relevant articles and blogs – as opposed to product or service ads.

As the name suggests, the idea behind these kinds of ads is they naturally blend in with your content.

In most cases, this means higher engagement rates as native ads tend not to interrupt the UX as much as pop-ups.

Another thing that sets Revcontent apart is their specialized ad system – which uses highly responsive widgets, gallery implementations, infinite scroll, and unlimited API customizations.

You also have a nice range of ad types to choose from including media, technology, and entertainment widgets.

However, Revcontent has a minimum traffic requirement of 50,000 visits per month. So you fledgling WP site owners, mark it off for when you meet their criteria.

When it comes to payment, Revcontent pays on Net 30 terms (the full amount is payable within 30 days). Their minimum payout threshold is $50 and can be paid via PayPal, wire, or ACH transfer.

6. Evadav

Evadav is an advertising network that offers you a number of different ad units – including video sliders, banners, native content, and more.

However, their specialty is push notifications.

Yep, we’ve all seen them… the automatic notifications that appear as small pop-up windows on your device screen – whether it’s your PC, tablet, or mobile phone.

Netflix for example often uses push notifications to let users about newly released shows or films they might be interested in.

Visitors who agree to receive push notifications from your website will continually make you money every time they interact with an Evadav ad.

Another great thing about Evadav is it connects you with a global advertising exchange. Which means you can reach visitors all around the world.

The advertisements that appear on your site are also all verified and come from Evadav’s own domain.

In terms of payments, they pay weekly, with a $25 minimum payout. You can also choose between CPM, CPA, and RevShare models.

Set up easy and you’re provided with tutorials and documentation to help you get started.

7. Adsterra

Adsterra is a fast-growing advertising network for publishers that specializes in “popunder” ads.

After all, why be “okay” at everything when you can be awesome at one thing?

However, if you really need they do offer: video ads, direct links, push notifications, banners, pre-roll videos, and more. Ads can be run over both mobile and desktop devices.

You also don’t have to worry about showing your visitors spammy ads that send site visitors packing. Adsterra offer protection against malware and inappropriate ads through a third-party fraud detection system.

If you need assistance the team has your back ASAP. They have a ticket system and you’ll usually hear back from them within a day. If it’s urgent you can also get in touch with someone instantly through Skype.

In terms of how and when you’re paid…

You get a payout every two weeks (NET15), but they do require a $100 minimum to be eligible. The payment integration options include Bitcoin, PayPal, ePayments, and more.

As expected, the setup process is also super easy: Register – get approval – place code on-site – start monetizing.

 

8. PopAds

With a name like PopAds it wouldn’t be a wild guess to say the ad types they specialize in probably include the word “pop” in them.

And if you guessed this you’d be right!

PopAds are an advertising network that specializes in “popunder” ads for publishers and advertisers.

As well as their love for popunders, they also offer popups, tab ups, tab under, and more (yep, all the under and ups).

Something unique about PopAds (that you often don’t get from other platforms), is they can pay you daily providing you earn more than $5 each day. This means you don’t need a ton of traffic to meet their minimum payout limit.

Your ads can reach an audience spanning more than 50 countries using the PopAds network, and you can adjust their frequency if you want to give your visitors a break.

You can contact the support team anytime via email or instant messenger. If you’re not a fan of NET30, NET60 payment terms, you’ll also enjoy the fact you can request to withdraw your PopAds earnings at any time.

 

9. ylliX

ylliX advertising network serves up a hassle-free registration process and ultra-low payment thresholds for publishers looking to monetize their blogs or websites.

But first the all important ad unit selections… we’re talking: popunder ads, layer ads, full-page ads, and more.

And yes, they also run across both desktop and mobile devices.

If patience isn’t your strong point, you’ll be pleased to know that your account will be activated immediately after you register. No waiting days for your website to be approved.

Once you’re signed up and ready to go, ylliX gives you direct access to a self-serve platform you have 100% control over when running your campaigns.

Another great thing about this platform is they offer daily payments along with a super small $1 minimum payout threshold (remember AdSense’s is $100).

They also operate using a RevShare (revenue share) model. So the more you earn, the more they earn (everybody wins!).

 

10. BuySellAds

If you’re planning on spending a couple of hours a week monetizing your website or blog, BuySellAds probably isn’t the platform for you.

They focus exclusively on English-language ads for high-volume sites with 100,000+ engaged audiences.

(Yep, they ain’t messing around).

However, if you’re comfortably hitting that number, you may have found your AdSense alternative.

Also, since the (view) cost of entry is higher, you’ll also receive bigger payouts. Expect around 75 cents per every dollar earned by the ads on your site.

When it comes to actual product, BuySellAds offers everything you’d want from this type of platform – non-intrusive, relevant, and brand-safe ad placements. The ad units you can choose from include: display, native, emails, and sponsored content.

They also specialise in niche developer, designer, and tech audiences. So you’re in luck if your blog targets any of those niches.

Their native ads in particular are optimized for user experience and come in many different forms including: “Image + text,” “fancy bar,” “flex bar,” and “sticky box.”

 

11. PopCash

PopCash offers popunder advertising with a helpful UX twist.

The setup isn’t anything new… but it sure happens fast! Websites can be approved in just one hour on business days, and up to 12 hours on weekends.

Once your domain is approved, individual visitors are then shown a popunder ad once every 24 hours.

You might think limiting ad time limits revenue opportunities, but on the flip side, it provides a better user experience and ensures visitors don’t always have ads in their face.

If you want, you can use PopCash alongside other advertising platforms to diversify and bring in added income.

The platform also comes with a low minimum withdrawal limit ($10), and you can request to be paid through PayPal, Paxum, wire transfer, and more.

Transfers usually take around 24 to 48 hours. You also get to keep 80% of the revenue you earn from advertisers.

If you’re in need of assistance, staff are always on hand to offer fast support via email or Skype.

 

12. Bidvertiser

Bidvertiser offers website and blog owners an easy set up process, along with a unique payment model.

However, it does present users with a slight dilemma…

When you register for this platform you’ll be approved instantly so long as your website doesn’t breach any basic website standards (explicit, misleading, spammy content etc.).

There is some bad news sadly, another reason it’s so easy to get approved is because the ads shown on your website won’t necessarily be related to your content.

Buuut, hold on, all is not lost.

Although the ads shown might not be relevant, they will be some of the top performing ads the platform has access to. So it’ll be largely up to you to decide whether it’s worth showing high performing ads that aren’t related to your website.

If you do choose to stick with Bidvertiser… something unique about the platform is the fact they mix CPM and CPA payments, along with the traditional CPC model.

This basically means you have the opportunity to earn, not only the per click but per conversion as well.

The ad units you have access to include banners, pop-ups, sliders, and more.

You can also easily integrate with payment providers like PayPal and Bitcoin, and the platform’s withdrawal limit is a low $10.

The ads are also scanned 24/7 by a compliance team, as well as internal and third-party tools. So you know your website is safe from Malware and inappropriate content.

There’s Plenty Of Life Beyond AdSense

If you’ve been thinking about monetizing your blog or website, the best thing you can do is survey all of the options available to you.

Although AdSense is the top player in this department… any one of the platforms mentioned in this article would make a great alternative.

You could even argue that some may be better than AdSense depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

While the platform has been sitting at the top hill for some years, others have been quietly carving out their own niches and catering to specific customer needs.

For example, if you want to specifically run push notifications you might use a specialist platform like Evadav. Or if you want to only show native editorial content you might go with Revcontent.

What you choose will largely come down to the type of blog you’re trying to monetize and the content you’re publishing.

eCommerce sales will account for 10% of money spent by shoppers this year. If you run or manage an eCommerce store, it’ll help you a great deal knowing the latest trends in your industry. After all, knowing is half the battle won!

While you don’t have to follow all the trends listed here, the knowledge can help you identify areas in your online store where you can improve.

Let’s go!

Get Chatty

They’re almost everywhere now. The global takeover of chatbots is imminent. Over the last year, Chatbots recorded a massive 24.3% growth (CAGR). In a end-user survey, 45% of users preferred chatbots as their first choice for raising customer service requests.

In another study by Drift, 38% of consumers preferred engaging with a bot over a human.

2020 is going to be a big year for chatbots. Salesforce’s global “State of Service” survey (August 2019) found that 53% of service organizations are planning to use chatbots within the next 18 months.

With the rise of messenger apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, chatbots are slowly invading users’ mobiles too. And for a good reason.

Chatbots help you reach your customers in a fun and meaningful way. And it happens with the least friction possible. There’s nothing to download or install, no registration or login page. It’s right there for the users to jump into right away.

Think Inside The Box

Everyone uses email—to keep in touch with friends, family, and their favorite brands. There’s a new use for emails now: email checkouts. It’s a way for consumers to complete their purchase directly from an email.

Interactive emails were popularized by a startup named RebelMail (acquired by Salesforce recently). It has grown in usage tremendously since then.

Interactive emails allow subscribers to take quizzes, review products they’ve purchased, and even checkout abandoned carts, all within the body of the email itself.

For instance, Old Navy used it to let customers view photos of a product, choose its color & size, add it to their cart, and then finish the purchase.

Here’s a cool interactive email from Harry’s that suggests a product based on your choices (this ties into the personalization trend too).

Despite the rise of other communications channels, emails are still the most used medium. It makes sense then that brands will maximize its potential by letting customers buy directly from their inboxes. Its scope is so huge, that it just may give rise to a new eCommerce category—emailCommerce (can this be trademarked? I’m calling dibs!).

It’s Time To Get Personal

Delight your customers with how unique they are to get great marketing results. A study by Experian Marketing Services found that personalized emails achieve 6X higher transaction rates than those that aren’t.

To win at personalization, you need to cover your customer’s journey from start to finish. A majority of shoppers do research before committing to a purchase, so help them with that. Build personalized content and search features to attract your target audience.

Reward your customers for sharing their personal information. You can then use this data to personalize their shopping experience. And later, you can customize your customer loyalty schemes too.

Guide your customers throughout their online shopping journey.

For instance, Victoria’s Secret guides you with a sports bra selector interface. The North Face helps you find the perfect jacket. Bodybuilding.com helps you find the right supplement in just three easy steps. IKEA’s planner tool helps you plan your dream home.

Personalizing the consumers’ shopping experience helps simplify purchasing decisions by helping them find exactly what they’re looking for.

Brands that learn how to do this will have better chances of winning against their competition.

Keep Your Users Hooked

Instagram’s ad revenue more than doubled in 2018 and generated 11.3 billion dollars. This growth is mostly due to its new eCommerce push, and is expected to continue through 2019.

Currently, Instagram is the No.2 social media platform with 768 million monthly active users (MAU), right behind its parent company Facebook. By 2023, it’s expected to reach more than 1 billion MAU.

Yet another Insta-hit in the making. (Source: Instagram)

Instagram’s eCommerce-friendly features are growing by leaps and bounds. Their product tagging feature and shoppable Instagram Stories stickers have been a huge success with brands and marketers alike.

Early this year, they announced the Checkout on Instagram feature (still in beta, not be confused with Instagram Shopping), which allows shoppers to buy products they see on Instagram without leaving the app. Nike, Adidas, H&M, Prada, and Burberry are some of the top brands using it right now.

All Hail The Supreme Leader Of Marketing

If content is king (or queen), videos are the supreme leader.

55% of online users watch videos every day.

90% of consumers think product videos are helpful in making a buying decision.

Facebook generates more than 8 billion video views daily.

Having a video on your landing page increases conversion rates by 80%.

The math is simple. Invest in video marketing.

Have you subscribed to our superhero league yet?

Another area to pay attention to is Live Video Streaming. According to Social Media Today, live videos drive 300% more engagement than regular videos. It’s slated to be the next big trend in video marketing for driving engagement and conversions.

Create A Seamless Shopping Experience

Mobile is still on the rise. By 2021, 53.9 percent of all eCommerce sales are expected to happen on smartphones. A majority of consumers browse products or services on their mobiles, but finish their purchase on a desktop.

Hence, it’s important to have your eCommerce store present on all devices (aka being omni-device). This is called an omni-device eCommerce strategy. It helps customers switch shopping easily between their various devices.

Even inside a physical store, 80% of shoppers used a smartphone to look up product reviews or compare prices. They usually visit social media pages, YouTube, and review sites to feel confident about their intended purchase.

Thus, it becomes crucial for brands to have a presence on all platforms. Even if they’re majorly a retail brand. This is called a omni-channel strategy.

An omni-platform and omni-device strategy puts your customers at the center of your marketing efforts, rather than your brand. It aids them in their shopping journey, no matter which device or platform they’re on.

If you already have an eCommerce store, it’s worth checking out the benefits of Progress Web Apps (PWA). PWAs are websites that work pretty much like apps, but they’re platform independent. So, they work on almost all devices. They’re heralded to be the future of mobile apps.

Super Progressive Web Apps is a highly-rated WordPress plugin as is PWA for WP & AMP (which has been updated more recently) that you can use right now to convert your WordPress site into a PWA.

The Future Is Unreal

Virtual Reality gives customers an experience that’s equivalent to traditional shopping. Well, almost. Plus, there’s no hassle of traveling and being physically present at the store. If you’re wondering how, here’s a cool in-store VR demo by inVRsion.

According to a survey conducted by Frulix—a virtual reality startup that helps create VR videos right inside your browser, 72% respondents said they’d be interested in buying things through a VR experience. 58% thought that VR could be a game changer for retailers.

As per IDC, spending on virtual and augmented reality is predicted to surpass $20 billion in 2019. IKEA, Converse and Lego are some of the top brands who have invested heavily in VR and AR.

As the VR space picks up pace, eCommerce brands will need to create better experiences for their consumers. It’s definitely a trend to keep an eye on (pun intended).

Raise Your Voice

Voice-commerce accounted for $2 billion in sales last year, according to OC&C Strategy Consultants. This number is estimated to grow to $40 billion by 2022.

Voice assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa are growing popular day-by-day. They can be used hands free while doing other things, and also help you get answers and results faster.

Naturally, using them for purchasing things is just a matter of time. More than 62% of households that own smart speakers have used voice assistants to buy groceries. And 35% of them have used the same to buy retail items.

As the tech matures, eCommerce businesses are eager to leverage this new platform to create dynamic shopping experiences for their users.

EMarketer predicts that smart speakers market in the US will grow to 76.5 million by 2020. This combined with consumers’ preference for smart assistants would mean that voice-commerce will play a significant role in the growth of eCommerce industry.

Move Fast And Don’t Break Things

On the internet, slow speed kills. First, it kills businesses by damaging their conversion rates. And then, it kills them by damaging the site’s reputation.

According to a user study by Google, 53% of smartphone users abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. And 79% said that they won’t return to a site with poor performance.

That was a major reason behind Google’s Speed Update to their search algorithm last year. With all things being constant, the faster your site loads, the higher it’ll rank in Google’s search results.

Hence, if you’re running an eCommerce store, you need to go with a reliable hosting partner that delivers (hint: WPMU DEV Hosting is blazing fast).

Online shoppers are looking for speed and performance. Just make it happen!

Let’s Go (Social) Shopping

More people today shop online, buy items on social network platforms, become brand ambassadors and contribute to other users’ purchases through User-Generated Content (UGC) and buying recommendations.

Instagram, for example, let’s you set up a mobile shopfront, tag products in photos, videos, and stories, and turn posts into opportunities for millions of users to buy from your store. You can display your Instagram shop and products on other social platforms like Facebook and on your WordPress eCommerce store.

With a little creative thinking, you can launch UGC initiatives like competitions asking customers to share photos and stories of themselves consuming, wearing, or engaging with your products and services. Users can share products they want with their social network and get feedback and suggestions on purchases from their friends.

Did You Just Propose To Me?

How do you tell customers that both they and your business are special and deserve to be together? Successful eCommerce businesses are finding ways to do this by combining their Unique Selling Proposition (USP) with personalized user experiences.

Focusing on micro-markets, building a community, and holding in-depth conversations with potential and existing customers are just some of the ways businesses are accessing better user data to figure out what customers are looking for, deliver them a unique and special experience, and create the perfect match.

In a recent BazaarVoice survey, 70% of retailers listed personalization as a top priority [PDF]. With trends like dropshipping, vendors can craft a unique selling proposition, set up online stores focused on micro selling, and use personalization tools to improve customer engagement on their website.

Sell Once, Get Paid Forever

Frictionless shopping is all about making the buying process faster, simpler, less stressful, and more enjoyable to consumers. Subscription-based eCommerce is a perfect example of this.

According to global management firm McKinsey, subscription eCommerce has grown by more than 100 percent each year for the past five years. Online subscriptions alone generated more than $2.6 billion in sales in 2016 (up from $57.0 million in 2011).

Whether customers buy online to avoid running to the shops all the time or to save themselves the embarrassment of asking for personal products over the counter, more companies are offering auto-shipped products, allowing users to subscribe and get anything and everything home delivered.

If It Looks Like A Duck And Thinks Like A Duck…

New eCommerce experiences are combining artificial intelligence (AI) with augmented reality (AR), particularly in areas like mobile commerce.

AI and AR are separate but complementary technologies. AI-based predictive technologies can learn and identify users’ buying patterns and behaviors to tailor-make customized shopping experiences and generate timely offers, and 3D-based modeling with AR tools can be used to let users visualize, ‘test out’ and ‘try’ things like homeware products and clothing apparel or accessories before they buy.

By 2022, BusinessWire predicts that global retailer spending on AI will reach $7.3 billion per annum by 2022 (up from around $2B in 2018), and PR Newswire estimates that over 120,000 online stores will use AR to offer their customers a richer buying experience and that by 2020, 3% of all eCommerce revenue with be generated by AR experiences.

One eCommerce Channel To Rule Them All

How can you target your ideal customers online when there are so many places they can be found? Businesses today need to have an online presence everywhere and be able to deliver an exceptional level of personal service that will make customers feel special and want to return and buy again and again.

The key is to be very targeted in your marketing efforts and concentrate on building your business using a multichannel (omnichannel) approach that provides customers with a seamless, consistent, and personalized shopping experience no matter where they are located or how they interact with you.

So… if you want to get somewhere with them, be everywhere and be there for them!

Something Old And Something New

If you believe that the growth of eCommerce will lead to the demise of brick and mortar stores, think again. Retailers are embracing eCommerce and finding new ways to augment the online experience with physical stores.

Many brands are profiting from ‘brick and click’ stores that combine retail and eCommerce, require less physical footprint areas and employees to operate, and offer a more personalized and interactive in-store visit. Amazon’s “4-Star” stores, for example, let customers interact with top-selling devices and products in person.

Digital kiosks allow users to engage directly with the store. Pop-up shops, trade shows, and mobile field reps are embracing flexible technologies like POS-enabled tablets, mobile card readers, on-site/on-demand printing, and flexible space leasing arrangements.

Customers today can order meals in restaurants through interactive menus, and fashion retailers are placing tablets inside change rooms, so shoppers can request more clothing items to try on. Some retailers are even integrating virtual shopping experiences of their physical stores and showrooms using AR technologies.

We Know What You’re Searching For

Remember the good ole’ days when you spent hours online researching gaming laptops to find one that fits your budget and used keywords like “Alienware 13 Gaming Laptop PC i7–5500U GeForce 960M” to search for it in your favorite computer store website?

Well, you no longer have to. Typing long keywords to search for products is so 2018! Intelligent search algorithms and filters are getting better at learning what customers are looking for, even if they misspell the words or just search for things like “gaming laptop under 2000”.

Smart technologies like dynamic filters allow customers to quickly sort and find what they want on sites with huge product catalogs and many variations like prices, size, color, budget, brands, makes, models, and more.

We’re not quite at the “Think It – Found It” stage yet of product search, but we’re definitely getting closer…

eCommerce Security: No Blankie Solutions

With eCommerce, success ultimately depends on customers feeling confident, safe, and secure when buying online. It’s estimated that retailers will lose around $130 billion in digital CNP (Card-not-Present) fraud between 2018 and 2023.

There are no blanket solutions that can address all online security concerns, but eCommerce security methods and standards are evolving.

More businesses are now implementing multilayered fraud management strategies to reduce risk, improve data security, and increase consumer trust and confidence. This includes choosing eCommerce platforms with secure shopping cart software that meets PCI security standards, sensitive data encryption, multiple firewalls, and no credit card data being stored on sites.

Has eCommerce Lost Its Head?

eCommerce began as a way to order and buy products online through desktop computers and web browsers. When people began making digital purchases using mobile phones and wearable technologies to ‘tap and pay’ for purchases, companies realized they had to rethink their approach to eCommerce.

The solution? Headless eCommerce. This is where the frontend and backend of the eCommerce site/app use different services and platforms to handle distinct eCommerce processes. Customers interact with the frontend like a browsing a website, mobile app, or scanning a QR code label on the back of a wine bottle. And a separate platform handles backend areas like managing and tracking inventory, processing transactional data, payments, shipping and fulfillment, invoicing, and other functions using various web services and Application Programming Interface (API) calls.

The benefits of headless eCommerce for web developers means spending less time putting together an entire eCommerce solution for clients, focusing on creating a better experience for their users instead, and then easily joining the frontend and backend together to get projects done faster.

Next Steps… A Roadmap To eCommerce Success

The eCommerce trends listed above have a common thread. It’s all about making the customer’s online shopping experience safer, more convenient, and more personalized.

While the idea of using innovative technologies like chatbots, AI, AR, virtual reality, and voice search to engage customers in your online store may seem a little daunting, the basics of business haven’t changed. It’s still all about delivering on the promises you make.

If your eCommerce store runs on WordPress, we can help you. We are the all-in-one WordPress platform that can provide everything your business needs to run an online store on WordPress, from information on planning an eCommerce store with WordPress to services like super-powered hosting, technical support, site management, and award-winning plugins. Just ask some of the tens of thousands of members who choose our services for WordPress security, performance, SEO, marketing, and more!

We’re proud sponsors of this mega WordCamp and as such our super design team was pumped to break from digital design for a short moment to create physical goods. As a distributed team, it’s not often that we get our hands on tangible WPMU DEV swag or get to hug Devman.

But our team is showing up in force (+30 WPMU DEVians) including Devman himself. Needless to say, it’s been a massive organizational undertaking.

 

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So how does a software company put together physical products for promotional giveaways? How do you even print swag for international events when you don’t have an office nearby?

Whether you are an online company trying to find branded products for a social giveaway or prepping swag for your next meetup, this post is for you. We’re gonna share our favorite services and, for our WCEU attendees, tease at what to expect when you stop by our booth – swag, giveaways, and more.

Stickers, Stickers, and more Stickers

In the 80’s I had a sticker book jammed with Garbage Pail Kids, scratch’n’sniff fruit, and transformer dye cuts. Today my laptop is adorned with Devman’s face, the WordPress logo, a cactus designed specially for my local camp, and cuddly Wappu’s from around the globe.

In my wildest dreams, I’d never imaged the ease of churning out stickers. Thank you, Sticker Mule!

 

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Of course, we’re running off thousands of their custom vinyl stickers​, but early in January I did a small run of 30 for a family event and was surprised at how affordable it was. No crazy setup fees or ridiculous minimums.

For your event (large or small), a special gift for the office, or a creative ‘thank you’ note to your clients, stickers are a big hit.

Pro tip: Sign up for the Sticker Mule newsletter. They regularly run 10 for $1 promotions here​, and weekly deals here for customers worldwide.

Been There. Done That. Got the T-Shirt

True story. I was wearing a WPMU DEV Wapuu shirt at a coffee shop last week and my barista asked if I could get him one… so I took it off and gave it to him, right then and there. Ok I gave him one I had at home. But anyway, our swag is winning me points with my barista.

Everybody likes a t-shirt. Even if every other booth is giving out t-shirts, people want to rep your brand. It also helps that we have superhero mascots. Who doesn’t want a shirt with Hummingbird on it?

Depending on quantity, cut, and design t-shirts are very affordable. The trick is factoring in shipping. Most often the hurdle we’ve faced when printing new items for global events is in coordinating shipping. For this, we’ve ended up working with printers around the world to find a printer on the right side of the pond.

But what about a social media giveaway where swag is included? Set up a Printful account. It’s a bit more expensive, but they’ll print and ship quality one-off branded merch to our winners. It’s like having your own in-house screenprinter and distribution center. No storage unit or trips to the post office needed. We can give everyone on our marketing team access to a single account and can even set up a company store.

If t-shirts are too cliché, try a pillowcase, coffee mug, or beanbag chair. Printful has some fun and unique options on-hand to get your creative wheel spinning.

The Grand Prize!!!

We all want to be seen and heard. To get the attention of the masses, whether at a WordCamp or on social media, a charismatic spiel and the right grand prize will go a long way when it comes to growing your mailing list, social following, leads, and (fingers crossed) your member base.

No pressure!

Here are a couple of things to consider when putting the right package together:

• How will the winner get this home? Something BIG is always fun but could be a huge pain for people traveling to the event… or more than double your budget with shipping costs. Be mindful.
• Will it attract and convert the right audience? Drawing a big crowd doesn’t always mean more conversions.
• Would I want it? Ideally you are so in tune with your users, if you’d want to take it home, they would want to take it home. If you’d stop and drop your business card in the jar for a chance to win, chances are, other interested parties would too.
• What should I ask for in return? If you make it difficult for people to enter your giveaway you’ll likely get fewer entries… but the entries you get will probably be higher quality leads. If your goal is social proof and a huge following you can enter people with a simple like and share… for a more grandiose gift built to attract quality leads, don’t be afraid to raise the bar.
• Am I having fun yet? People love free stuff. We like to overthink everything so if planning a giveaway is stressing you out…relax. At the end of the day, people will remember your brand’s generosity, excellent service, awesome product, and amazing support.

Flaunt it Like You’ve got It

A great prize will only get you so far. I mean, how will people know about your epic grand giveaway without a little flare? For a social campaign a video goes a long way. It doesn’t even have to be overproduced. Your phones video recorder can produce Hollywood quality magic.

And here’s a production tip from an old video nerd. Put a second phone in your shirt pocket to capture audio when a lapel mic is not around. It doesn’t take much to make yourself look and sound like such a kween!

“Step one – make sure people see my giveaway… got it”

If you’re feeling a little extra and want to help the global economy you could outsource a flashy design for your giveaway on UpWork.

Of course, our super design team has been tasked with some neck turning designs for our physical WCEU event booth including this rad coloring book you can download and print off for yourself if you’re feeling frisky.

But the showstopper for us has always been photo ops with the actual Devman himself. If he’s not at the booth just look for his entourage, he’s always drawing a crowd.

 

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WCEU Prizes for All

We’ve run all kinds of promotions over the years but WordCamps are a rare joy where we want everyone to win – even if you’re an existing member.

Stop by, chat, and let us say “thank you”. Grab a sticker, get a t-shirt, and enter to win our grand prize package including world-class noise canceling headphones and 1-year of WPMU DEV absolutely free.

Can’t make the trip and dreaming of better times at WCEU? Win swag (delivered to your doorstep) and a 1-year membership. Here’s how:

• Follow our Facebook and/or Twitter accounts
• Post or tweet @wpmudev with a link to this post
• Use #idratherbeatwceu and #WCEU
• Tag a friend or two… or three or four…

Winner will be announced on June 22nd. Now you can win even if you can’t make it.

And if you’re like me, and feel like you never win anything, we’ll set you up with 30-days of WPMU DEV free. You don’t need to do anything and you’ve already won :) Just claim your 30-day trial and get our complete performance, security, 24/7 live support, reports, automated site manager, and dedicated hosting (3 sites included) all at no charge.

Need more, maybe a lifetime membership…for free!? Share WPMU DEV with your friends and if they join we’ll give you a lifetime membership. So. Many. Ways. To. Win.

Whether you’re a freelancer or small agency trying to grow your social media following, a WordPress maintenance service sponsoring your first meetup, or a large brand looking to give back to the community, giveaways are a great tool for connecting with a new audience and re-engaging your clients.

If you take nothing else away from this post, the most important idea is that if you don’t separate ‘sales’ from the rest of your business, it will suffer. Don’t be like us.

The best first step you can take to ensuring that you’re growing the sales side of your business is to leverage the power of a CRM.

Why Do You Need A CRM?

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, plugins are designed to help you balance the needs of past, present, and future customers.

They allow you to track customer interactions with your business and keep all of their information organized neatly in a dashboard.

CRM software can also automate parts of your sales, marketing, and customer service processes to take the pressure off of your teams.

Important Features

CRMs make it a lot easier to manage the leads and customers who come onto your WordPress site and give you the tools to interact with them in meaningful ways.

Here are the important features that you’ll find in most CRMs:

1. Customer/Contact Database – A good CRM will let you customize the fields and entries to tailor to your business. A better CRM will have an integration that will pre-populate data or pull it in from other services you may be using. Organize your contacts and all information about them.
2. Sales Funnel – Create the progression of leads to customers that makes sense to you. For example, with our Enterprise hosting service we use something like, “Lead > Demo > Quote Sent > Trial > Migration/Onboarding > Customer”. With the CRM, we get a visual view of where all leads are in the funnel at all times.
3. Lead Scoring – Once you have your database organized and your sales funnel in place, you will start to notice trends of who your ideal leads are. Many CRMs even help generate ‘lead scores’ to identify potential customers that are more likely to convert. You may have a different funnel or process for those, or choose to spend more time and resources on them to optimize results.
4. Reports and Stats – This is the feature that I obsess over most. At any time, we can run reports to help us forecast sales over the next quarter and year, identify where leads in the funnel fall away, and track how long it takes for the average new deal to close. For existing customers, we can identify trends over time of the verticals and niches that we serve. Without a CRM, we would spend ages trying to sort through all of this data.
5. Rules and Workflows – Be reminded when you have not heard from or updated a lead in a while. Don’t let contacts go cold because you are pulled in so many directions that you forgot about them.

Bottom line: CRMs are a game-changer for managing customer relationships, streamlining communication, and providing a positive customer experience.

But with literally hundreds to choose from, it can be difficult to know which one to pick. So, we’ve compiled a list of the best WordPress CRMs you can use to keep your leads from falling through the cracks.

The Best CRMs For WordPress

1. HubSpot CRM
2. Agile CRM
3. Capsule CRM
4. Zoho CRM
5. WP ERP
6. WP-CRM by Usability Dynamics
7. Zero BS CRM
8. vCita
9. Maximizer
10. Less Annoying CRM
11. Drip
12. Insightly

1. HubSpot

One CRM we can confidently recommend is the one we use: HubSpot.

HubSpot’s WordPress CRM plugin is an awesome solution for managing everything related to your customers. With it, you can track all of your customers’ interactions with your site including which pages they visit, form and popup entries and live chat conversations. All of that information will be automatically synced to robust customer profiles in HubSpot CRM.

My favorite, and almost hidden surprise, feature of HubSpot is the meeting calendar link, which you can send to leads and customers to eliminate all the awkward back and forth that typically goes into finding an agreeable date and time.

Best of all, for most of your needs, HubSpot is completely free. You can get started at the link above or by installing the HubSpot plugin. We do pay for the additional ‘Sales Hub’ features, as our team and needs have grown, but the cost is worth it.

2. Agile CRM

Built for the purpose of making enterprise CRM software accessible to small businesses, Agile CRM’s plugin offers a wide range of features for sales, marketing, and customer support teams.

At its core, Agile’s plugin is designed to work like a standard customer relationship management tool. It collects data on your site visitors and stores them in a dashboard as leads—providing you with stats to help you nurture and track them throughout their customer journey.

But Agile is also a great solution for interacting with customers. First of all, the plugin lets you share your calendar with your WordPress site visitors—giving them the ability to book meetings on-demand. This frees up your sales team to meet with leads and chat with repeat customers, as the scheduling is automated by Agile.

You can also leverage Agile’s dashboard to easily create landing pages, web forms, pop-ups and marketing campaigns that enhance your WordPress site. All you have to do is use Agile’s drag-and-drop interface to build campaign flows, select a template and customize the design. Yep! No coding on this one.

3. Capsule CRM

Capsule prides itself on being a simple, yet powerful CRM. And from contact management to reporting, Capsule’s WordPress plugin offers just that.

Capsule is not unlike other plugins, in terms of collecting customer data from your website. However, Capsule goes beyond the basics of this functionality, by synching customer profiles with their social media alter egos. This feature is great for sales and marketing teams, as it gives you a complete 360 view of your customers.

Once leads have been added to the dashboard, you can also populate their profiles with information, manually. Quickly add notes and other documents to keep everything together, add tags for faster searching, and divide your customers into groups for easier viewing.

Capsule is also designed to help teams work better together. You can tap into this functionality by color-coding tasks in Capsule’s calendar and assigning customers to specific teams and employees. You can also use its Kanban style board to organize leads in your pipeline and assign tasks to specific team members. You can even track your teams’ overall progress in a specialized dashboard to see what’s working and what isn’t.

4. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM Lead Magnet is a robust plugin made to support both big and small WordPress businesses alike. Using its intuitive interface, you can organize your leads and customers, design templates for different lead nurturing projects and customize your dashboard.

Being the first omnichannel CRM, Zoho is a proven solution for managing customer relationships across multiple platforms. The tool supports communication on almost every channel—including live chat, social media, email, and phone calls—and offers analytics, AI and filtering to help you track and forecast each interaction with your business. Using these features, you can streamline communication with your customers by managing all conversations in a single platform; and monitor the success of each interaction by using widgets to look at stats side-by-side.

With Zoho CRM, you can also automate many of your tasks to save time. You can add new leads to your CRM, update customer profiles and even send follow-up emails, without having to lift a finger. You can even build workflows to keep your team working effectively and efficiently.

5. WordPress ERP

Created specifically for WordPress businesses and websites, WordPress Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) offers a powerful CRM plugin for tracking leads and managing customers.

With this tool, you can keep tabs on your site visitors, subscribers and customers all in the same place. Tag customer profiles based on urgency and importance to make sure you’re taking advantage of the best sales opportunities. Add comments to customer profiles to keep everyone on your team in the loop. And set reminders to minimize the likelihood that customers will be lost in the shuffle. These functionalities are available to B2B companies too, as WordPress ERP allows you to save and modify company profiles like you would individual customer profiles.

WordPress ERP is also a great tool for communicating with customers, as it allows you to message them directly from their profiles. This eliminates the need to toggle back and forth between pages and minimizes the risk of email threads or messages being misplaced.

Best yet, WordPress ERP is compatible with a bunch of different extensions, making it easy to integrate it into your existing website.

6. WP-CRM by Usability Dynamics

The WordPress CRM plugin developed by Usability Dynamics is an all-around solid option for most businesses. It offers a clean UI, easy-to-modify forms, and a simple hierarchical setup.

With WP-CRM, you can import contacts, manually fill in attributes, and add notes to create clear profiles for each customer. Once everything has been imported, you can start charting data to track individual customers and find better ways to connect with them. You can also set up notifications so that you don’t miss out on opportunities to interact with a customer or nurture a lead.

The really cool thing about the WP-CRM plugin, though, is its ability to work with tons of different WordPress add-ons.

7. Zero BS CRM

With this one, the name says it all. Built specifically to support entrepreneurs, this CRM plugin is all about making convoluted processes and complex software as simple as possible. In fact, Zero BS actually lets you pick and choose the features you want, so you don’t get bogged down or overwhelmed by anything you don’t need.

You see this functionality right out of the gate too, as this plugin can be installed and set up in just a few minutes. And once it’s up and running, Zero BS helps you get up to speed quickly, by moving all of your site visitors, customers and contacts to your CRM, where you can view them in a minimalist dashboard.

However, your CRM doesn’t just store, organize and track your customers. It also allows you to interact with them via a branded customer portal where you can upload quotes, send invoices, schedule appointments, and log transactions. And all of this functionality is available on mobile, which means you can continue to manage and communicate with your customers while traveling.

Zero BS also prides itself on its dedication to regularly updating the plugin, which means you don’t have to worry about it being incompatible with future WordPress versions.

8. vCita

vCita is another CRM plugin that was created with the small business owner in mind. Like other CRM plugins, it automatically generates leads in your CRM by collecting data from live chat widgets. Once there, these leads can be organized, labeled and assigned to different members of your team to keep them moving down your pipeline.

However, vCita isn’t just accessible on your end. It also allows customers to access their data via an online portal that holds everything from their email address to their recent transactions and lifetime spending on your products and services. They can even make new purchases and book meetings directly from the CRM.

vCita isn’t a plugin you need to micromanage or be online to use, though. Not only is it mobile-friendly, but also allows your customers to connect with you via the self-service portal at any time of the day or night. This means your CRM will keep working, no matter where you are or how fast you’re moving.

9. Maximizer

Being the only plugin out there that offers both cloud and on-premise CRM options, Maximizer CRM is a great solution for businesses with all types of infrastructures. Its features allow you to turn site visitors into leads, track those leads through your sales funnel and nurture them toward final purchases.

Maximizer CRM is also completely customizable, which means you can make it as lightweight or heavy-duty as your business needs. Its list of features is extensive, so there’s little chance you’ll have a need Maximizer can’t meet.

In addition to its deployment flexibility, Maximizer is also accessible from any device, which means you can manage your leads just as effectively on business trips, in meetings and on vacation (not that we recommend you do that!). And you can integrate it with apps and tools from all over the web, keeping your business and WordPress site working seamlessly.

10. Less Annoying CRM

Less Annoying CRM is another tool that’s built on simplicity and minimalism. In fact, the entire point of their platform is to make CRM software accessible and editable by the average person. And you can see how that’s the case, just by looking at their dashboard. Everything from customer profiles to team calendars and reports is easy to understand and modify.

Using this tool, you can do standard customer relationship management work like importing leads and assigning them to specific team members. But Less Annoying CRM also offers some unique features like email reminders for teams and pipeline reports to keep everyone focused on the task at hand. The dashboard even includes tasks lists and appointment times, so you don’t accidentally miss opportunities to nurture leads.

Less Annoying is so dedicated to the idea of making their software usable and well…less annoying, that they even offer free phone and email support to help you figure out the platform or troubleshoot problems.

11. Drip

Drip is another great plugin option for modern eCommerce businesses. With a clean interface, it provides business owners with the data needed to make strategic design, inventory and marketing choices. It does this by gathering data from visitors on your site—like names and currencies—and organizing it neatly into customer profiles.

Drip doesn’t just gather data on customers based on live chat conversations and form submissions, though. With this plugin, you can actually see what your customers are viewing, clicking on and buying. This gives you a leg up on the competition, by helping you know exactly what your site visitors want, so you can build marketing strategies around it.

Using its drag-and-drop dashboard, you can also create marketing and sales workflows to guide leads through an ideal customer experience. You can then design beautiful social media and email campaigns on the platform, to match the style of your brand and the interests of your customers.

And here’s the best news: Drip integrates seamlessly with all types of WordPress eCommerce stores, including WooCommerce and Shopify.

12. Insightly

Insightly knows that the best way to drive sales is to build relationships with customers—and they built a CRM tool to help businesses do just that. With this plugin, you can not only collect and organize customer data, but you can also route entire customer profiles to people in your organization. This includes everything from general customer information to detailed reports on interactions like phone calls, meetings, and email threads.

This plugin also includes the option to create, manage and automate marketing campaigns that are tailored to the needs of your customers. It then tracks the success of each campaign in an analytics dashboard. This helps you make sure your campaigns are working, and if not, enables you to use data to modify it in the future.

Beyond that, Insightly integrates nicely with loads of different apps, so you can keep the rest of your business processes connected without much hassle.

Getting Started With Your CRM

No matter what CRM you choose, you’ll want to allow a good amount of time for configuring and setting up your customer fields and sales pipeline(s). You can always tweak these later, but the more time you spend upfront, the more useful your CRM will be.

You’ll also want to import and manually add all of your existing customers first off. This will help to ensure that you have all the fields you need and will allow you to get going with any of the analysis you want to do with reports right away.

Once you have the basics down, there’s so much you can do with your CRM.  We hope that if nothing else, this post has encouraged those of you that have yet to take the CRM plunge to bite the bullet and give it a go.

But first, fun-fact. The name podcast was coined way back in 2004, by BBC journalist Ben Hammersley when he combined the words iPod and broadcast to create the gem that is podcast.

Here we are 15 years later, and podcasts are taking over while iPods have gone the way of their Microsoft Zune brethren.

We’re definitely mid-trend. It seems like everyone and their mother is starting a podcast now. But somehow if feels like I still can’t get enough. #bingelisten

In this post, we bring you an up-to-date list of the best WordPress podcasts for 2019 so you can keep your iPod full ;)

• WP Gears

  

  Podcasts are great to listen to when you’re doing other things, like getting ready to go to work or commuting. But if you work from home, like I do, then you’re probably not spending a lot of time on either of those things. Also, some podcasts are too long when you have the attention of a goldfish.

  That’s where WP the Podcast comes in. It’s a daily WordPress podcast hosted by David Blackmon and Tim Strifler. And the best part? Even though it is a daily show (it even airs on weekends), most episodes are short. Super short. 5 minutes short. David and Tim talk about a variety of WordPress topics in a nice quick succinct format that feels more like a blog post.

  If you want to hear the story of how Hello WP came about, listen to the two part interview on WP the Podcast with Micah and Josh Dailey.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • Hello WP: A New WordPress Podcast You Need to Listen To
  • Can I use WordPress Multisite to Host Client Sites
  • The 5 Step Recipe for Fast Loading WordPress Websites

• WP Tavern WordPress Weekly

  

  WP Tavern is one of the most trusted WordPress publications on the web. Every Wednesday at 3PM Eastern Time, they air their live video podcast WordPress Weekly.

  While other podcasts are released a few weeks after they’re recorded so they can be edited, WordPress Weekly is LIVE. It’s a longer podcast as a result, episodes are over an hour, but you’ll get the latest WordPress news without delay.

  In addition to WordPress news, WordPress Weekly also has special interviews.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • Introduction to BigCommerce with Topher DeRosia
  • Truth, Misinformation and Good Ideas
  • Building a Sustainable Web

• BobWP WordPress eCommerce and Do the Woo

  

  There’s a move to “productize” popular WordPress services. If you’re ready to jump on the bandwagon, Bob Dunn has two podcasts devoted to eCommerce.

  Do the Woo is focused on WooCommerce while BobWP WordPress eCommerce covers everything else related to eCommerce, monetization and WordPress.

  Bob has discussions on monetization, but also dives into UX design and content strategy. That way you can design a store tailored to your customers’ journey.

  Our very own James Farmer, CEO of WPMU DEV, was asked about the future of eCommerce in 2019 for the WordCamp episode. His response:

  I think you’re going see two main developments, specifically about immediacy, you know? People are starting to accept the fact that an order should be delivered in an hour, or two hours, or three hours. It’s becoming a norm.

  The second one is custom. As in, I mean we’re over here next to a jet pack store, you know they’re making unique items that people want to have that reflects who they are and what they are, rather than necessarily just buying into some generic kind of chain.

  I couldn’t agree more.

• The Matt Report

  

  The Matt Report began in 2012 and is now wrapping up its 8th season. That’s over 200 episodes!

  Matt Medeiros focuses on providing actionable advice for those building a business with WordPress. We’re talking big name freelancers, agency owners, WP product creators.

  If you’re working on growing your client base or coming up with new ways to bring in revenue, this is the podcast you’re looking for.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • Why Exiting Solopreneurship is the Right Move
  • How WordPress Business Owners Measure Success in Life and Business
  • How Tom McFarlin Manages a Product and Services Business

• The Agency Trailblazer

  

  Running a web or design agency is a long-term commitment and it’s easy to fall into a miserable rut.

  The Agency Trailblazer, formerly WP Innovator, is a community and a podcast to give you the inspiration to fall in love with your agency again so you can make it for the long haul.

  With topics for agency leaders such as project management, lead generation and agency growth, you can work smarter not harder and scale back on those 18 hour days.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • How to Travel and Run an Agency
  • How to Deal with Growing Pains
  • How to Succeed Despite Your Past

• WP Watercooler

  

  In the wild, most WordPress professionals are solitary creatures, working away alone in their home offices. But what are they like in a pack? WPwatercooler is your chance to find out.

  WPwatercooler brings a diverse group of WordPress pros together to have a lively and lighthearted conversation. There is a lot going on, but the podcast is quick, just 30 minutes.

  Jason Tucker leads a changing group, with some regulars to discuss how WordPress is changing business and our lives.

  WPwatercooler is recorded Friday at 11:00 am Pacific on YouTube Live.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • Replacing Social Media with Your Own Website
  • WordCamp Leadership and Speaker Diversity
  • I Find This Episode Shallow and Pedantic

• How I Built It

  

  Fleshing out a whisper of an idea into a full-fledged product and then turning that product into a business is no easy feat. Every path is a little different.

  On How I Built It, Joe Casabona interviews product owners and developers to see how they built specific products.

  How I Built It is unique in that it examines how one person was able to bring their idea to life, from idea to execution. Hear the stories first hand from the people who built some incredible stuff and get in a making mood.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • Kim Gjerstad on building MailPoet
  • Anton Kraly on Building a Dropshipping Business
  • Chris Lema on Building WooCommerce Hosting

• LMScast

  

  Want to be the next Codecademy or Lynda? One way to get started is by to share your own classes on WordPress using an LMS or Learning Management System.

  LMScast is a podcast to help you grow your online course so you can make an impact on your students.

  Host Chris Badgett interviews special guests on topics ranging from how to build your learning community to how to create better courses.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • Navigating the Digital Ecosystem, Preselling, and the Problems with the Culture of Free with Robin Harris
  • Helping Women Get Their Groove Back by Building Communities and Strong Support Networks from Rural Areas with Rebecca Undem
  • Productizing SEO Services into a Course, Making Results Focused Courses, and the Need for Website Speed with Brendan Tully

• Turn up the Signal

  

  This one, I am just excited about. It’s brand new, but Tom McFarlin is no stranger in the WordPress development space.

  In his new podcast, Tom will answer listener questions and talk about the various aspects of being a self-employed developer working with WordPress.

  We’ll get to listen and see how it develops but it should be both insightful and educational.

  Episode one now available!

• WPMMR: WordPress Monthly Recurring Revenue

  

  Keeping your income stable as a freelance WP professional is tough. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a podcast dedicated to helping you grow your monthly recurring revenue?

  There is! And it’s called WPMRR for WordPress Monthly Recurring Revenue. Christie Chirinos of Caldera Forms and Joe Howard from WP Buffs come together to interview well-know WordPress personalities, but they focus specifically on improving the bottom line.

  There’s also more Star Wars references than you can shake a stick lightsaber at so that keeps things light and fun.

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • Background Ewok #5 on thriving as an independent designer (Michelle Schulp, Marktime Media)
  • Han Solo on being acquired (John Turner, SeedProd)
  • Should you use Facebook groups or Slack for community building?

• Women in WP

  

  What do you call a group of 2 or more men? A podcast! >_<

  All jokes aside, there aren’t a lot of podcasts with women hosts. In this list, only WPMRR has a female co-host. Lucky for us, Amy Masson, Tracy Apps and Angela Bowman decided to do something about it and created Women in WP.

  Women in WP is a bi-monthly podcast about women who blog, design, develop, and market in the WordPress community. Check out episode 4, with yours truly :)

  Some Recent Episodes:

  • 002: Talking Leadership with Tara Claeys
  • 003: Serverless Hosting and more with Miriam Schwab
  • Content Creation with Felicia Ceballos-Marroquin

Podcast Mic Drop

Interested in starting your own WordPress podcast? Give it a go! As you’ve seen from the list above, there’s so many podcast styles and WordPress niches. There’s really no wrong way to go about it, as long as you don’t try reading code out loud :)

And don’t forget to check out WPMU DEV’s Hello WP! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts or your favorite purveyor of fine podcasting.