Through out the last month, we had our own March Madness going on. We were sprinting every day to make OptinMonster better.

We have silently released several updates in the past month, and here is what’s new in OptinMonster as of version 1.1.8.

Manual Optin Trigger

OptinMonster now allows you to launch a popup with a click of a link or a button. This functionality existed in our plugin previously, but it was limited to developers only. Now we’ve made it really easy, so all of our users can take advantage of this.

Why is this useful?

Well up until now if you wanted to create a highly targeted list, then the steps were:

1. Create a custom landing page that highlights your offer (simpler the better).

2. Place a banner or link in your sidebar to bring traffic to that landing page.

We thought why have the user go to the next page just to fill out their email address? You can do this on the same page and save your users the hassle thus capturing more email subscribers.

This is exactly what manual optin trigger allows you to do. See our documentation on how to add OptinMonster manual trigger on your site.

Sidebar & After Post Optins

Raise your hand if you have seen a blog with a sidebar or after post optin. Yup just about everyone has it.

The problem is that most folks either simply add this in their themes or through a text widget. When you do this, you are clueless of how effective your optins are. When we asked some of our friends how many subscribers they get from their sidebars, most answered “I don’t know”.

While sidebar forms work for some, it may not for others. But most folks put them there anyways. Why? Because they don’t know.

Using our add-ons, not only do you get the full power of OptinMonster list segmentation and targeting, but you also get to make data-driven decision. Learn how well your sidebar optins convert when compared to the other optins.

We’ll also be adding some high converting sidebar and after post themes.

Huge Performance Improvements

We have always taken pride in OptinMonster’s performance and ability to scale. Well, we just made it even better. OptinMonster now loads a lot faster. We built our own custom ajax route to speed up everything.

To make OptinMonster scalable on all hosting environments (yes the slow shared ones), we have turned off detailed reports by default. However it’s very easy to enable if you’ve the server resources.

It’s important that you know only the detailed reports tab is turned off. The reporting on the main OptinMonster plugin screen is still turned on which is what gives you the overview of each individual optin (number of impressions, conversions, and conversion percentage).

Prevent Loading OptinMonster for Existing Subscribers

This was one of the most asked support question by our users. By default OptinMonster gives you the ability to set a cookie which means that each user only sees the popup once every 30 days (or the value that you set).

This is great for new subscribers, but what if you already have an existing email list with tons of subscribers. Several of you asked for the ability to hide OptinMonster for existing newsletter subscribers when they visit your site from your newsletter.

This is now possible.

All you have to do is add ?omhide=true at the end of your URLs in your email newsletter template.

For example:
https://staging.optinmonster.com/how-it-works/?omhide=true

If you’re a developer and want to use a custom query parameter, then that’s also available through a filter as well.

New Test Mode

Up until now, it was very hard to preview your popups and other cookie based forms more than once. Why? Because once you close them, a cookie was set on your browser.

This means that the form is working exactly like how it should.

However as a site admin, you may want to test the popup every once in a while. In the past, you would have to either clear your cookies or use Private Browsing / Incognito Mode to run the test.

Well not anymore. In the recent release, we added a test mode which you can enable by clicking on the setting icon next to each optin.

This means that your optin will load on every page despite the cookie.

Last but not least, there were tons of bug fixes and improvements across the board. Our next priority is to give you what you’ve been asking for (lots and lots of design options). Stay tuned because these will be coming later this month.