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Boost Your Online Presence with Sumo: An All-Inclusive Review of the Plugin (2023)

Last Updated on August 31st, 2023

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Optimization is now everything when it comes to SEO. There are various marketing tools that will help you improve and boost your site’s performance. However, you may become overwhelmed with the number of tools available in the market. If that’s the case, you can start with a marketing suite. If you don’t know what you are looking for, consider getting SumoMe – a plugin that is composed of different marketing tools in one.

Here is a review about Sumo (formerly SumoMe) and everything you need to know about: starting from the overview, key features, pros and cons, and installation and setup.

Sumo: Overview

Sumo or known before as SumoMe differs a little bit from most other WordPress plugins. Instead of offering one set plugin experience, you install the plugin and then choose which apps you want to use. So basically, SumoMe is a collection of marketing apps that you can pick and choose between. They are all packaged within a single plugin.

Everything in these apps is geared towards one thing which is Growing your traffic. 

All the apps are free to use for up to one million visits per month. But, they’re limited in functionality compared to the pro version. The pro version offers you features like:

  • A/B testing
  • Advanced Visitor Targeting
  • Remove Sumo Branding
  • Advanced Email Integrations
  • Ecommerce design templates
  • Advanced analytics

The pro version comes in with:

  • Monthly – $49/mo
  • Yearly – $39/mo

Key Features

  • Has more than 60 social media platforms including the popular ones like Twitter, Facebook and Pinteest
  • List Builder
  • Image Sharer
  • Social Sharing 
  • Contact Form
  • Highlighter
  • Content Analytics
  • Integration with Google Analytics
  • Embedded List Builder Popup
  • Smart Bar

Pros 

  • Integrated with major email marketing tools like MailChimp and Aweber
  • The initial setup is easy
  • Documentation is available
  • Easy to understand user interface

Cons

  • If you don’t like having the branding everywhere on your site, you must upgrade to the Pro version
  • The tools can take a toll on the site performance and SEO
  • Campaigns are not intuitive

Sumo Plugin Installation & Setup 

You install Sumo (formerly SumoMe) like any other plugin. But once you’ve installed it, you need to activate it with an external SumoMe account. You can either create this account at the SumoMe website or inside the plugin:

SumoMe - login page

Once you’ve activated the plugin, you’ll be at your dashboard:

SumoMe - my apps

This is an overall look at all your SumoMe details. Because I haven’t added any apps on this account yet, there’s not much to see. So I’ll click on the My Apps button to add some:

SumoMe - apps

You just click on the apps you want to toggle them on. Once you’ve turned on the apps you want, you can click on one of the apps to edit all its settings. That’s all you need to do to get started.

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But, you may have noticed the list of apps is quite lengthy. So to give you some information on what all you have available, we’ll dig into all the SumoMe apps to show you what’s best.

Currently, SumoMe offers 13 separate apps, with varying levels of usefulness. We’ll divide them into categories and go through them:

Email List Builder Apps

These apps help you build your email list and generate leads. Because they overlap, you probably don’t want to install all of these. Pick your favorite and use it to build your email list.

List Builder 

SumoMe - list builder

List Builder is probably the email generation app people think of first when they hear “SumoMe”. Tons of sites use it to grow their email list. It’s basically a lightbox popup that asks visitors to enter their email addresses.

It integrates with all the major email providers to make list synchronization easy. You can time it to pop up when visitors first come to your site or use exit-intent popups to try to catch them right before they leave.

It also gives you analytics for your email building efforts. You can see the exact conversion rate for your box and tweak things to get more subscribers.

And if you go with the Pro version of SumoMe (more on that at the end!), you can even directly implement A/B testing.

Scroll Box

Scroll box helps you build email lists in a slightly less aggressive way. Instead of asking visitors to sign up right away, you can display a box near their scroll bar that displays when they scroll down the page.

This version is better than List Builder. Why? It’s less invasive and it ensures the visitor is at least a little bit engaged before you ask them to join your email list.

Welcome Mat

SumoMe - welcome mat

Welcome Mat is an aggressive way to build your list. Personally, it’s too aggressive for its performance. When users come to your site, it “rolls out” a welcome mat that pushes your content down. The welcome mat then takes up the user’s full screen. It’s a very poor user experience, in our opinion.

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But, if you want to give it a try, it’s definitely a unique way of list building. On top of that, SumoMe claims it will double your email signup conversion rate, so it may be worth testing.

Smart Bar

Smart Bar creates a notification bar that asks for email signups. This option is the most user-friendly app on this list. Though it may not convert as well as the other apps.

Social Sharing

If you also use other social media platforms, this part will help you share your website and blog posts via social sharing. In that way, you can generate more traffic and you may also gain followers too! 

Share

SumoMe - share

Share is definitely the second most popular SumoMe app. For good reason, it’s one of the best social share plugins out there. It creates a beautiful social share bar that can lock to the side of the user’s screen so it’s always visible.

It has tons of options for social sites – it covers much more than just the main social networks. This is great if you want to add some niche social networks.

We would recommend this app to anyone looking to add social share buttons.

Image Sharer

Image sharer

Image Sharer essentially does the same thing as Share but for all your images. It makes it easy for people to share on Pinterest, Facebook, or other networks you enable.

If you have a visual site, this is a great way to generate some traffic.

Highlighter

Highlighter

Click-to-tweet buttons are a great way to make it easy for people to share your content.

Highlighter lets your readers highlight any portion of your content and automatically share it on Facebook or Twitter. If you’ve ever used this function on Medium, you know how it works. As long as you’re a quotable writer, this is a great way to boost shares.

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Analytics

This tool will help you track down your site’s performance. 

Heat Maps

Heat maps

Heat Maps is a really helpful analytics tool that shows you exactly where people are clicking on your sites. ConversionXL put together a great guide on how heat maps can help you analyze your site.

Understanding how people use your site is the first step in optimizing your site.

Content Analytics

Ever wondered how many of your posts people actually read? If so, the Content Analytics app can help you answer that question. It tells you how far down your posts most people scroll. Now, this doesn’t guarantee they’re reading (they could just be scrolling), but it does correlate pretty well.

Content Analytics can help you figure out where to place your CTAs and whether you need to improve your visitor engagement.

Google Analytics

The Google Analytics app lets you view your Google Analytics data inside your SumoMe dashboard. Not very exciting, but the added convenience is nice.

Other

These apps don’t really fit into any category.

Contact Form

The Contact Form app helps you easily build and add contact forms to your site. It’s pretty standard contact form stuff. You can also add an auto-response to let people know their message was received, which is a nice bonus feature.

Discover

Discover is essentially a traffic exchange between your site and other sites in the SumoMe network. When you send traffic to other sites, you earn credits that can be used to purchase traffic from other sites.

It exchanges traffic by creating a “Recommended Links” box at the end of your posts. Not my personal cup of tea, but if you’re looking to boost traffic it’s a good option.

Buy Button

Buy Button allows you to easily create a payment button that integrates with Stripe for payment processing. You can use this button to essentially sell whatever you want on your site, be it physical products or digital downloads.

Verdict

There you have it! Well, that’s a lot of apps! You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) install all of them. But we thought that using one of the list builders, all the social apps, and all the analytics apps is a great solution for most websites. We suggest getting the free version instead, to play around with it before getting the Pro version. However, if the set features on the free version are lacking, then you can always upgrade to the Pro version. Try SumoMe see for yourself! Let us know how you get on in the comments below!

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A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.