WordPress is a great blogging and content management system (CMS) platform, especially for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. But, there’s more to making a WordPress website work for you than just loading it up with content and great SEO. You want your WordPress site to turn into a lean, lead generating machine. You want it to become a point of contact with your target customers. And you want it to enable a community that can expand into a small empire.
To make all that happen, you need to start working with forms in WordPress. Thankfully, one of the great virtues of WordPress is the ease of installing new features, especially through plugins. Let’s take a look at how you can get the most out of your WordPress forms.
This is a plugin designed specifically for splash page and landing page business model websites. Email Before Download does exactly what its name suggests. It produces a form that requires the user to fill in their email before they can download certain content. This allows you to build a larger mailing list.
Let’s say your WordPress site has a strong call to action. You want to emphasize the call to action on every single page. That’s what Scroll Triggered Box is built to do. Once users have scrolled to the bottom of the page, and presumably stopped reading, Scroll Triggered Box has an animation that appears. The animation will prompt the user about whatever your site’s core call to action is.
There is also a slightly less subtle version of this type of plugin. It is called ViperBar. ViperBar appears immediately at the top of the page. We advise against this, as it can be a bit ham-handed to smash users right away with your call to action. Scroll Triggered Box has the virtue of giving the user something before demanding something in return.
This plugin allows users to subscribe to a comment thread on your website. The form gives the user the option to fill in their contact information. This contact information is then sent to the mailer program. The site then monitors the thread to see if anyone has replied to the user’s comment. When someone replies to the comment, the user will receive an email notification.
Letting users know their conversation has been actively engaged by other users is a great way to drive traffic to a website. Nothing gets people posting and replying faster than an old school flame war. People love to hash these matters out online. And it’s a great way to reinforce the behavior of visiting your website.
This is a plugin whose function is simple, yet its marketing value is massive. Users will leave comments on your website. This automates the process of thanking them. It also makes sure to thank them at a later point. You set a designated time lapse for the thank you to be issued. When that time has passed, your site will send the user an email thanking them for their participation.
5. JqTransform
JqTransform is a plugin designed to allow you to skin your forms. This ensures that forms are more stylistically consistent with your overall website. As the name suggest, it accomplishes this using JQuery, the JavaScript platform that is wildly popular for use with a number of PHP-driven sites, like WordPress sites.
Keep Forms Working
This one isn’t a plugin. This is a reminder to make sure your mail forms are working. All the work in the world building these forms won’t help you if your mailer is broken. Make sure it keeps working properly.. This guarantees that everyone receives all the emails they subscribed to receive.
