10 Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugins to Grow Your Subscribers in 2024

WordPress lead generation plugins offer a cost-effective, fast solution for capturing leads through your business website.

We all know that people are spending more time on the internet than ever before. As a result, both B2B and B2C business transactions are increasingly taking place online too. Therefore, having a website that can capture as many business leads as possible is essential.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is the process of capturing and maintaining the interest of people that show interest in a company’s product or service. Generally, it revolves around gathering potential customers’ contact information (known as ‘list building’). You can achieve this in several ways, for example, by encouraging visitors to sign up for your email newsletter or allowing them to contact you directly through the website. Added value can be given by offering a chat service (live or using an automated chatbot) where potential customers can easily ask questions about the products or services.

So What Do WordPress Leads Plugins Do?

Digital lead generation often begins with a form of some kind, the aim being to capture the contact details of prospective customers.

Contact forms are the most basic method, and there are plenty of plugins available to do this. The downside of contact forms alone is that the site visitor needs to find the form to use it and then explain why they are messaging you.

A better method is to use opt-in forms aimed explicitly at gathering just contact information (invariably email addresses). Often, these take the form of a popup, configurable to appear at the most appropriate time to encourage site visitors to sign-up to your mailing list or newsletter or to register on your site. Indeed, opt-ins are essential nowadays, as increasingly strict legislation globally requires recipients’ express consent to receive emails from you.

Facilities for your site visitors to chat and interact with you are also an excellent lead generation method. Being easy to contact makes your site and business more trustworthy, while you can configure the chat so that the visitor must give their contact details to instigate a conversation. And don’t worry if you do not have the resources for live chat operators – there are chatbot plugins available that do everything digitally using artificial intelligence.

Our Top Ten Suggested WordPress Leads Plugins

We will now tell you about ten WordPress lead capture plugins that will help you effectively harvest the attention of prospective customers and grab their contact details before they leave your site. That will allow you to stay in contact with them, attract them back to the site, and hopefully buy from you. As always, the plugins we have selected are fully up to date and work with WordPress version 5.8.1.

WPForms

WP Forms is an immensely popular plugin with over a million active downloads and an impressive 4.9/5.0 stars user rating. It allows you to create various forms, including subscription sign-ups (e.g., email lists, newsletters), registrations (e.g., events or special offers), quotation requests, orders, and many more. It even allows you to create contest entry forms, a great way to engage with potential customers and capture their contact details.

With the free version of the WPForms plugin, you get some great functionality, including:

• Drag and drop form builder
• Custom fields
• Pre-made templates
• Responsive
• Optimized for SEO
• GDPR compatible forms
• Spam protection using reCAPTCHA

A selection of Pro plans is available. These range from ‘Basic’ ($39.50 per year for one site) to ‘Elite’ ($299.90 per year for unlimited sites.) Each plan offers different features depending on which you choose, but expect things like integrations for various payment gateways, enhanced customization options, more templates, etc. For further details of what each plan tier includes, please click here.

Before investing in a paid plan, we suggest you begin with the free version and upgrade later to a paid subscription if you need to.

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MailPoet

Offering regular newsletters is a neat way to build your email list and keep potential and existing customers engaged. MailPoet allows you to do exactly that. Thanks to a selection of built-in email templates, you can get started immediately, although you can, of course, create your own from scratch if you prefer.

What is interesting about MailPoet is its pricing structure. Up to 1,000 subscribers, it is entirely free. After that, you pay on a sliding scale. So, for example, if you have 5,000 subscribers, you will pay €55/month, while for 10,000 subscribers, the price will be €75/month. Annual payments attract a discount.

MailPoet comes bundled with great features, including:

• Build and integrate a newsletter subscription form into your website
• Simple to use newsletter builder
• Built-in templates
• Manage your subscribers
• Automatic welcome and new post emails
• WooCommerce emails (e.g., welcome, upsells, abandoned cart, etc.), including a customizer
• Audience engagement statistics
• No setup or configuration is required (plug and play)
• Translation ready
• Device responsive
• GDPR compliant

Once you have exceeded the 1,000-subscriber limit for the free plan and you switch to a paid plan, you will also get:

• Ability to see which subscribers have opened the newsletters and which links had the most clicks
• No MailPoet logo in the email footers (white label)
• Send emails to subscribers using your preferred method (e.g., your web host, SendGrid, Amazon SES, etc.)
• Same-day support (weekdays only)
• 30-day moneyback guarantee

Because MailPoet is free for the first 1,000 subscribers and then is pretty much ‘pay as you go,’ it is perfect for fledgling businesses that want to control costs as they scale. The plugin boasts an impressive 300k active downloads and a 4.5/5.0 stars user rating in the WordPress plugin directory.

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OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a premium popup builder and marketing plugin designed to help you gain more email subscribers, increase your sales, and ultimately scale your business. Using this plugin, you can easily create popup campaigns, email subscription forms, sticky announcement bars, and much more. What’s more, it is possible to create highly targeted campaigns so you can focus on your ideal customers.

Four subscription tiers of OptinMonster are available, the cheapest being ‘Basic’ at $108 per year, and the most expensive at $588 is ‘Growth.’ The most popular option is ‘Pro,’ which costs $348 per year and has features like:

• Drag and drop popup builder (lightboxes, floating bars, slide-ins, spin-a-wheel, etc.) with a wide range of customization options
• Popups can have features like animation, sound, etc
• Prebuilt popup templates
• Exit-intent popups and onsite retargeting
• Targeted popups, including mobile-specific campaigns and device targeting
• A/B testing of popups
• Email marketing integrations
• Analytics and reporting
• Social media sharing
• Integrates with most popular email marketing and CRM plugins and platforms
• White label (no OptinMonster branding)
• Limited to a maximum of 25,000 page views and three websites
• Support and updates
• 14-day moneyback guarantee

OptinMonster may look a little pricey on paper, but its ability to target specific demographics makes it worth every cent.

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OptimizePress

OptimizePress is a marketing platform that includes everything you need to generate leads and grow your business. Even in its cheapest form, this plugin allows you to generate unlimited leads and traffic. Opting for a more expensive plan also enables you to create funnels and checkouts, do split testing, and more.

Three plans are available. The cheapest, ‘Essential,’ costs $99 per year. It can be used on one domain and includes the following key features:

• Page builder for building unlimited pages
• Unlimited leads and traffic
• SmartTheme marketing theme
• More than 250+ built-in templates, all optimized for conversion
• Over 30 premium integrations
• Updates and support
• 30-day moneyback guarantee

The next plan, ‘Suite,’ costs $199 per year. It includes everything in Essential, plus:

• Sales funnels templates and builder
• Checkouts for accepting payments through your website, including recurring subscriptions
• A/B testing
• Metrics and statistics such as opt-in rates, sales revenue, etc.
• Scarcity alerts
• Premium templates
• Valid for use on up to 20 personal websites

The most expensive plan is ‘Agency Standard.’ That costs $399 per year and is identical to Suite, except you can also use it on client sites. That is perfect if you are developing sites for others.

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WP Call Button

Adding a “call now” button to your website is a brilliant way of allowing your customers to contact you immediately without having to write emails or enter numbers into their telephone, both of which are prone to typos.

If the customer is calling from a cellular-enabled mobile device, calls can be patched through to you using their subscribed network (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) If they call from a laptop or desktop, the plugin integrates with several business service providers (which you will need to subscribe to) for VoIP calling. If you don’t use one of those providers, it is possible to hide the call button on those devices.

WP Call Button is entirely free. It offers the following key features:

• Customizable buttons (text, style, color)
• Phone icon can be shown or hidden on the call button
• Highly optimized button placement options
• Smart floating call buttons
• Static phone call button generator
• Place the button wherever you want using shortcode or a Gutenberg block
• Option to show call button only to mobile users
• Widget to place the button in the sidebar
• Google Analytics Event Tracking

WP Call Button has an impressive 20k active downloads and a good user rating of 4.5/5.0 stars.

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Hubspot

Despite being a free plugin, Hubspot offers excellent features to help you capture and manage leads and customers via forms, automatic distribution of marketing emails and newsletters, plus it also allows you to incorporate a live chat facility on your website. This CRM plugin offers many great features, including:

• Manage up to one million contacts, deals, and tasks
• Unlimited users and customer data
• Track prospects, emails, and deals
• Create responsive email newsletters via drag and drop
• Templates for emails and scheduling
• Form builder
• Engagement notifications
• Document sharing
• Meeting scheduler
• Email tracking and notifications
• Live chat, chatbots, forums, and popups
• Dashboard for analytics and reporting
• Integration with many other plugins and platforms

Hubspot also offers several other paid upgrades, including what they call ‘hubs’ for marketing, sales, service, and operations. You can find further details of those on the Hubspot website.

Hubspot has over 200,000 active downloads and a good user rating of 4.4/5.0 stars. Given that it covers so many aspects of lead generation plus much of the follow-on activities, it’s the perfect choice for both novices and established businesses alike.

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Tidio Chat

Tidio Chat is a freemium plugin that integrates live chat, chatbots, plus the ability to receive and reply to messages via Facebook Messenger into your website. Furthermore, it has email integration allowing you to conduct email marketing campaigns.

The free version of the plugin, understandably, has some limits, namely, you can only send up to 500 emails per month, and you are limited to 100 unique reachable visitors using the chatbot. That would be perfectly adequate for most smaller businesses, though. This version boasts the following features:

• Unlimited chats with a customizable chat widget
• Chatbots (limited to 100 unique reachable visitors per month)
• Chatbots and live chat are combinable
• Incoming visitor notifications to engage them the moment they start looking at your website
• Natural Language Processing technology to quickly identify commonly used words to help with simple inquiries
• Device responsive
• Visitor information (location data, contact details, etc.)
• Third-party app integrations
• JavaScript API
• Free iOS and Android apps

Purchasing a paid plan will remove the limitations mentioned above on the number of emails and unique reachable visitors. Three plans are available: ‘Chatbots’ costing $390 per year for three chat operators, ‘Communicator,’ which is $150 per year per operator, and ‘Mailing,’ which costs $250 per year for up to three operators. Monthly plans are also available.

Depending on the paid plan selected, you will get some or all of the following extra features:

• Pre-made email templates and visual editor
• Email address validation
• GDPR and CAN-SPAM compliance
• Contact segmentation
• Automated email campaigns
• Built-in chatbot templates for abandoned cart recovery, discounts for returning customers, automatic lead collection and qualification, etc.
• Live typing to see what they are typing before they send it
• Viewed pages to see what pages your visitors are looking at
• Live visitor list to instigate personalized conversations
• Additional integrations (e.g., Zapier)
• 7-day free trial

The wonderful thing about chatbots is they are available to your potential customers 24/7, and you don’t need to employ someone to do the chatting. You can use them to address the most frequently asked questions, and more detailed ones can be redirected to email or live chat.

Tidio Chat is an excellent way of engaging with your visitors and gathering contact information from them. It has over 100k active downloads in operation and an excellent 4.8/5.0 stars user rating.

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Smash Balloon

Social media remains a potent marketing and brand-building tool, something which is unlikely to change any time soon.

Smash Balloon is a premium plugin that helps you boost your social media followers and subscribers. It does this by displaying your social media content in a smart, customizable feed on your website. Embedded social buttons allow your visitors to like, subscribe, or follow directly from your website.

Price-wise, separate plans are offered for each of the social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter), and those plans are further split into ‘Personal’ ($49 per year), ‘Business’ ($99 per year), and ‘Developer’ ($149 per year). However, an ‘All Access’ plan is also available for $299 per year, covering all four social media platforms plus a few extra bits and pieces.

All Smash Balloon plans include the following key features:

• APIs for live streaming and YouTube search
• Customizable end-of-video actions
• Carousel sliders
• Combine feeds
• Facility to convert videos to WordPress posts
• Favorites
• Video filters
• Smart video player loading
• Updates and support
• 30-day moneyback guarantee

While you need to invest a small amount of money to purchase it, Smash Balloon does offer a great way of integrating your social media into your website.

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MC4WP (Mailchimp for WordPress)

Mailchimp is the holy grail of email lists, having a whopping two million+ active downloads and a 4.8/5.0 stars user rating. It enables you to create email campaigns for distribution to subscribers, plus forms for opt-ins, comments, etc. To use Mailchimp, you need to set up a (free) account, and the plugin then integrates your WordPress site with that.

The plugin is entirely free for email lists of up to 2000 subscribers. Once you exceed that limit, you must upgrade to a premium plan. Those are very reasonably priced, costing €59 per year for a single domain, €99 for three websites, and €149 for ten. Both the free and premium plans bundle the following features:

• Create customized, mobile-optimized sign-up forms
• Integration with other plugins, including the default WordPress comment and registration forms, Contact Form 7, WPForms, Ninja Forms 3, etc.
• Gutenberg block
• Plentiful user documentation
• Developer friendly
• Several add-on plugins and integrations are available (free and paid), such as Mailchimp Top Bar, etc.

The premium plans also benefit from:

• Unlimited forms
• WooCommerce integration
• Email notifications
• Styles builder
• Detailed reports and analytics
• User sync to update subscribers in Mailchimp whenever a user updates their WordPress profile
• Updates and support
• 30-day moneyback guarantee

If you are after an affordable and reliable way of growing your email list, Mailchimp could well be the solution you need.

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Thrive Suite

Thrive Suite is a complete range of tools that can help you develop and grow your business, with each tool focusing on an aspect of lead generation and increasing user engagement. For example, the plugin includes Thrive Leads for growing your email list, Thrive Architect for creating a customer-grabbing landing page, and several more.

Thrive Suite is a premium plugin that costs $228 per year, or $90 if you pay quarterly. For that, you get a very impressive bundle of features:

• Create customized, mobile-optimized sign-up forms
• Thrive Leads for building your email lists
• Thrive Theme Builder
• Thrive Architect landing page and content builder
• Thrive Quiz Builder to build quizzes
• Thrive Apprentice to create online courses
• Thrive Optimize for A/B testing
• Thrive Comments for increasing website engagement via comments
• Thrive Automator for interfacing plugins with marketing tools
• Thrive Ultimatum for creating countdown campaigns
• Thrive Ovation to import testimonials and reviews into your website
• Support and updates
• 30-day moneyback guarantee

All plans are valid for use on up to 25 domains.

We think that Thrive Suite offers big bangs for your bucks, with its collection of useful tools for engaging users and generating leads.

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What’s your favorite WordPress lead generation plugin? 

So, there you have ten suggested plugins for adding lead generation functionality to your WordPress site. Sadly, as marketing is big business, few free offerings exist, although most of the paid plugins offer good value for the features they give.

What WordPress lead capture plugins (if any) are you using on your business website to build your email lists and generate leads? Do you have a particular favorite? And if you have not yet added lead generation to your site, we really hope that some of our suggestions have caught your attention.