If you’re running a website you want to grow your email list, and that means improving the conversion rate. For a blog or E-commerce store, a higher conversion rate means more leads and ultimately money in the bank. Unfortunately, the average conversion rate for a lightbox hovers around 2% – 4%. Gamified optin forms can increase that number by 400%.
In this guide, we’ll review the best eCommerce option forms to help you boost your sales. Let’s get started.
What are Gamified Optin Forms?
There are all different types of optin forms on the market. You have regular lightboxes, WordPress optin forms, video optin forms and more. However, none are quite as effective as generating leads for an eCommerce store as a gamified pop up.
Gamified optin forms are what you get if you cross a casino with an optin form. As you’d expect there are prizes. These can include money off coupons for an e-commerce store, content upgrades, and things like that. The first gamified optin forms used the roulette wheel.
The addictive formula of casino-style games and prizes works. Website owners often see an increase in conversion rate by 400% or more. That’s a big number and when combined with the right email sequences these opt-in forms can result in a big jump in profit margins.
If that sounds like your fix that will help take your business development to the next level then we’re here to help. We’ve shortlisted the best gamified opt-in forms currently on the market. We’ll start with the standalone gamified optin forms and then look at ones that come as part of a software toolkit. There’s a table below with the key findings.
Software | Starting From | Best Thing About It | Biggest Problem |
---|---|---|---|
Wheelio | $15 a month | Created for Shopify stores. | Expensive. |
WooHoo | $10 a month | Lots of different games. | None. |
WP Optin Wheel | $39 with one year support. | One time payment. | Just for WordPress. |
Knowband Spin and Win | $4 a month | Cheap version of Wheelio. | None. |
Privy | $24 a month | More than just gamified optin forms. | Expensive. |
Vyper | $25 a month. | More than just gamified optin forms. | Expensive. |
Sumo | $73 a month.* | Lots of different features. | Expensive. |
*Gamified optin only available on Sumo with the higher priced plans.
You can find our review of each of the gamified optin form platforms on this list below. Let’s get started with our favorite.
WooHoo
WooHoo is one of the latest gamified optin forms to be released. It’s taken a slightly different development roadmap to Wheelio. Instead of focusing on just one platform, WooHoo have opened their app to basically every platform. Customers can use WooHoo for Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace and the rest (users just have to insert tracking code into the website/ page header).
While opening up an app to other platforms is a good start, it’s not enough in itself. Luckily the developers behind WooHoo have put quite a bit of thought into how to add value to their platform. We’ll quickly cover some of the best features before looking at the pricing.
Top of the list is variety. WooHoo comes with three casino-style gamified optin forms – card dance, slotomania, and wheel of coupons – with more to come in the future. This gives you a bit of flexibility when choosing what to place on your site. The developers are planning to release additional funky features like the ability to embed the game into landing pages. They’ve got a simple pricing system as well; $10 a month for one site and $20 a month for three sites, which is significantly cheaper than Wheelio making it arguably one of the best gamified optin forms.
Wheelio
Wheelio was the first to create gamified optin forms for the eCommerce market. The app was created by Karlo Bradica from Conversion Pirate. They’ve got more than 6,000 users built around an engaged eCommerce community of pirates who love alcohol (well at least that’s the tagline).
Forgetting the pirates for a moment, Wheelio is a well developed gamified optin form. They’ve built on the simple concept of combining the Roulette Wheel with an optin form and added a bunch of eCommerce specific features. This includes a sticky bar with a countdown timer, integration with recart for picking up people who almost made a purchase.
Wheelio is primarily aimed at Shopify store owners, which is a huge market. The technology is solid, but the pricing is quite high. Store owners pay $14.99 a month for access to the regular version and $54.92 for the Pro version that includes features like email segmentation and advanced analytics. It’s quite a big jump in price for a limited number of features, but affordable if you’re running a large store.
WP Optin Wheel
WP Optin Wheel is just what it sounds like. The developers have taken the gamified optin formula and transferred it to WordPress as a standalone plugin. The developers have created a free and premium version of the plugin. We’ll start with the free version.
The free version of WP Optin Wheel comes with a few templates to choose from. You can add your own coupon codes, discounts, or links to free PDF and other content upgrades in exchange for an email address. It’s also integrated with Mailchimp. The downside is that the free version only works with Mailchimp, which is quite restrictive.
The premium version of WP Optin Wheel has a bunch more features copied over from Wheelio. These include seasonal themes, the option of selecting what pages to run your optin wheel on, exit intent, and more email integrations (make sure to check the list as you won’t be able to use it if it’s not compatible with your service). Pricing starts at $39 for one site with one year of updates and support.
Knowband Spin and Win
Knowband Spin and Win is the Chinese knockoff version of Wheelio (that doesn’t mean it’s a bad product). It’s developed exclusively for Shopify, with many of the same features as Wheelio, but priced at a far more affordable $4 a month. So what are the downsides…
First off, Knowband Spin and Win isn’t cutting edge. They’re the kind of developers that will copy the best features from other platforms and integrate them into their platform. Yet innovation isn’t everything! If you’re just starting out with your eCommerce store on Shopify then at $4 a month this gamified optin form creator is a no-brainer investment (you can always upgrade later if you need to).
Privy
So the first of the toolkits… Privy is one of the best optin form creators that you’ve probably never heard of. It’s a powerful and easy to use drag and drop optin form builder with autoresponder integration. Although you can create regular optin forms with Privy the software has an eCommerce focus.
In terms of gamified optin forms, Privy uses the same spin to win roulette wheel design as Wheelio. It’s well designed and can deliver coupon codes, discounts and other prizes to users in exchange for their email address. The autoresponder integration allows you to send newsletters or drip email campaigns. It’s a great marketing tool. The highlight of Privy though is the pricing…
Privy has a great free plan that allows you to use all of their features, plus you get 3,000 autoresponders a month. The catch is that the optin forms come with branding, but this is a fair compromise for a great tool. There are four paid plans starting at $24 a month offering progressively more features. If you’re just looking for a gamified optin form then Privy is expensive. However, if you have an established business and need a good software toolkit Privy is a great investment.
Vyper
The developers behind Vyper wanted to create a growth hacking toolkit. The mainstay of the toolkit are the two competition software offers; Viral Leaderboard and Viral Sweepstakes. These two tools enable you to run gamified online competitions to grow your email lists. They are two very powerful and very cool tools.
The next two tools in the Vyper toolkit are Viral Content Upgrades and Interactive Popups. The Viral Content Upgrades allows you to create scroll boxes and welcome mats (it comes with a membership area where you can deliver your content). The Interactive Popups tool is your run of the mill gamified optin form style roulette wheel.
The Vyper toolbox is a pretty cool growth hacking kit. The developers have created a three tier pricing plan. Pro pricing starts at $49 a month, Enterprise is $129 a month and Agency is $299 a month. It’s an expensive investment if you’re starting out, but a great deal if you’re looking for a fast way to grow your email list.
Sumo
Sumo is the big hitter on the list. One in eight people using the Internet visit a site with Sumo installed. They are an eight-figure company. A Sumo sized behemoth. The software toolkit they’ve developed was created for pretty much any website from an eCommerce store to a regular blog. There are three tools in the kit; Sumo Share Buttons, Welcome Mat, and the List Builder (the gamified optin form they’ve developed is like a slot machine). It’s a solid toolkit that helps you get more shares on social media while growing your email list.
Sumo is free for up to 200 subscribers. It jumps up to $30 a month for up to 750 subscribers, increases to $73 a month for the Small Business Plan and tops out at $248 for the Ecommerce offer. Unfortunately, the gamified optin forms are only available with the List Builder for the Small Business Plan and up, which makes the gamified optin forms expensive to access. Overall great kit, but a bad investment if you’re looking for the best gamified optin form creator.
Few Final Thoughts
There are a lot of great software platforms on this list. My favorite is WooHoo. It’s reasonably cheap and you get a nice range of different types of gamified optin forms. If you’re looking for a great optin form creator I recommend Privy. They’ve got a great freemium plan to get started on, though the premium plan is a bit expensive.
For more useful tools for online business owners, check out our guide to the best online form builders, and web hosting sites. You might also want to check out our roundup of the best app design tools.
Hope you like our content. If you feel you have a solution that should be on this list, shoot us an email. We want to make our articles as comprehensive as possible.