Popup Zen – Small, Simple, Lightweight Email Optin

Description

The Popup Zen Box is a cleaner, simpler way to collect emails with a popup.

It looks great, works great, and stays out of the way of your site visitors.

Integrate your email provider, choose where to show it, customize the colors, and publish. Done!

No complex settings or 3rd party SaaS dependencies.

Features

• Customize the text, image, and colors
• Choose where it displays – posts, pages, taxonomies, etc.
• Integrate your email provider: MailChimp, ConvertKit, MailPoet 3, Drip, Active Campaign, or send to your email address

Why Popup Zen?

Popup Zen is clean, fast, and simple. It’s also non-intrusive.

Obnoxious popups may have a good opt-in rate, but they could be damaging your brand. Popup Zen is a new way to get high quality leads without pissing off your site visitors.

• Simply collect emails
• Minimalist design, easy to use
• Ultra-lightweight codebase

We built Popup Zen because we just couldn’t bring ourselves to put that horrible popup in front of our site visitors. We wanted something that represented our brand better.

Instead of damaging your brand just to get a higher opt-in rate, Popup Zen believes in building trust.

Popup Zen gets high-quality leads by asking permission before displaying a popup. This builds trust with your site visitors, and keeps your brand image intact.

What it won’t do

• Create obnoxious spinning and shaking animations
• Choose from 100 different designs
• Create insanely complex rules for how to display it
• Block the screen without permission

Learn more at getpopupzen.com

Developers can contribute on Github

Screenshots

Installation

Install and activate this plugin.

Visit Popup Zen => Settings, and add the API key for your chosen email provider (if necessary). Some providers only require that you have their plugin installed, such as Drip or MailPoet 3.

Next, visit the Popup Zen menu item, and add a new item.

Options

Choose to display your item at the bottom right or bottom left of your website.

Next, choose Zen Box or Popup. This is what your opt-in will look like when someone chooses to open it. The Zen Box is the default, it’s a small vertical box. If you choose Popup, it will show a screen blocking popup, but only after the user clicks to show it.

Customize

Choose your colors, text content, and image. Save as a draft and then click the Preview button to see what it looks like. You can also click “View on site” to preview the popup on your site.

Email Integrations

Choose an email provider.

You must have an API key saved in the Popup Zen settings for MailChimp or Active Campaign.

For Drip, MailPoet 3, and others you must have the plugin installed.

Note, we do not support MailPoet 1 or 2, only version 3.

Display Settings

• Pages: choose all pages, or select certain pages and begin typing a page title. It will automatically populate a drop down list, simply click the page title or enter page titles comma separated like this: Home, Features, Pricing
• New or returning: show to only new visitors (since you activated the plugin), or returning visitors. Tracked with the hwp_visit cookie.
• When should we show: after the page loads, show immediately, with a delay, or based on user scroll.
• When should it disappear: if you want the notification to show briefly and then disappear automatically, enter a delay here.
• How often show we show it: a visitor will be shown your message, then you can choose to continue showing it, or hide it based on number of days or user interaction. Interaction is either submitting an email, or clicking a link with a class of hwp-interaction.
• Show on devices: choose mobile, desktop, or both.

FAQ

Are there any limitations?

No, you can create unlimited popups using all of the features described on this page.

Does it use the wp_mail() function to send mail?

Yes, if you have an SMTP plugin like Postman, Mailgun, or other mail plugin it will automatically use that to send mail.

How do I setup MailChimp?

First, add your API key under Popup Zen => Settings.

You can find your API key in your MailChimp account under Account => Extras => API Keys. Generate a new one if it doesn’t exist.

Save your API key.

Next, in your Popup Zen, choose Mailchimp as the opt-in provider. Add your list ID. You can find this under Lists => Your List => Settings => List name and defaults. Look on the right side of the screen for List ID.

Copy/paste that into the MailChimp list ID field and save.

How do I find my ConvertKit form ID and API key?

Your API key is on your account page.

To get your form ID, visit Forms => your form. Look in the browser address bar, it should be something like this:

https://app.convertkit.com/landing_pages/445667/edit

That number is the form ID, in this case it’s 445667. Enter that number as the ConvertKit form ID.

How do I setup MailPoet?

Install MailPoet, version 3 or later. Create a new Popup, and select MailPoet as the email provider. Choose your list and save, new subscribers will be added to this list.

Email signups are not working

Make sure your email form does not have a required field that is not displayed. For example, if you required first and last name, it will not work. Change your form to only require email, the rest of the fields optional.

Reviews

perfect, lightweight, improved GTMetrix score for Mailchimp

James Revillini February 8, 2020

This plugin got me a 5% improvement on my GTMetrix score. That’s a huge bump. The lightweight scripts and clean CSS delivered and compiled into the site was a major advantage. Previously, I had configured the standard Mailchimp popup on the MC site and integrated using the MC4WP plugin. It was loading 2-5 remote scripts, remote images, and remote CSS which created extra HTTP requests and added anywhere from 300-500k to a page load. This plugin eliminated the remote script loading lag, allowed scripts to be combined, served from our Cloudflare cache … BOTTOM LINE: it’s a must have if you want a modern popup solution that is unobtrusive to your clients visually and in terms of site performance. p.s. I would love to see an option to alter the amount of time that the thank you message is shown after someone submits their email!

works well after some adjustments

Jonas January 20, 2020

I had to use some CSS-adjustments with custom classes. For example, there is no spot to properly show some privacy information, so I used a custom class in to content area to display this small text. I also had problems with the image: When I deactivated “do not crop”, it wouldn’t display. (Maybe something with lazyload?) With cropping disabled the banner looks kind of awful, so I used CSS to cover that up.

Great plugin!

Suanlian Tangpua December 18, 2019

This plugin is very lightweight and simple. Thank you!

Clean, Simple, Easy-to-Use

liamdempsey May 31, 2019

Our team recently used this great little plugin on a client’s site where we wanted an elegant and clean way to encourage subscriber’s to the client’s soon-to-be launched newsletter. Popup-Zen made the task easy. Great tool!

One of my new favorite plugins

Allie Nimmons April 8, 2019

I hate pop ups in general, but my clients always want them. I’m so happy to have found a pop up that prevents me from putting invasive or annoying pop ups, but still accomplishes the connection my clients want. I also really love that it takes the font stylings from my site without needing custom CSS! Added bonus. ??

5 Minute Setup

John Hawkins March 31, 2019

I’ve used a number of popup plugins and they always seem overly complicated. Popup Zen wasn’t like that at all. I installed it, connected my mailchimp account and had a pop-up created in under 5 minutes. Dead. Simple. Popup Zen just became my new favorite popup tool. Thanks, Scott!

Contributors & Developers