Over a decade ago, Internet was a thing of only the big companies and the geeky people, then WordPress enabled anyone to start a blog and start bringing visitors to the site to make them take an action.
Whether this action be Clicking on Ads, Subscribing to the Newsletter, Buying Something or simply sharing the content across various social media channels.
There are tools to do all that, and they have gotten better over the years. We are now at a point where Webmaster tools are getting smarter and capable of doing more things.
But the objective remains the same, i.e, making people take an action on the site.
This includes,
- Subscribe to the Newsletter or any other channel.
- Share the content across various social media channels
- Check out a special section, product or deal on the site
We have written about the tools that let you do all that without having to scratch your head in overwhelm. All these services are from different developers.
But there are a few Services that offer the bundle of apps to make it easy for webmasters to manage them from one place. One such service is SumoMe, which is a bundle of apps from AppSumo.
The bundle includes Sharing Buttons, Listing Builder and Smart Bar. There is also a very interesting app called HeatMap, which lets you see where your visitors are clicking it.
It looks something like this,
Click here to view the Heatmap on full web page
We will be talking about each app in detail below to give you a better idea how it performed for me.
Here are the SumoMe apps that I tried
I have been using SumoMe on my site since last few weeks to review it on the blog, so in this post, you will find everything I learned about it so that you can decide whether you want to use it or not.
Sharing Buttons
I’ve already been using the best looking (and highly customizable) Social Sharing Buttons on my sites from a long time, but I’ve noticed several sites were using this nicely placed Buttons when you browse them on Mobile phones, they used to be sticky at the bottom of the page, meaning, it remains at the bottom while the user scrolls down.
I Assumed that these sites might be getting good number of shares from them, so I found SumoMe offering similar kind of Buttons.
After the user of over 10 Days, here is the screenshot of the shares I’ve got by activating these buttons on one of my sites.
Not only on mobile phones, they look beautiful on Desktop version of sites but I turned it off as I Didn’t want to change the layout of current plugins.
SumoMe lets you customize buttons if you upgrade your account for the Pro version for $10/month. They also offer a 14-day trial which I opted to put WhatsApp button in place of WhatsApp.
List Builder
After Installing SumoMe, I played around with what else it has to offer and found Listing Building App that could be installed with just a click on a button.
List Building lets you collect emails of visitors by showing them a popup. They support all the major email services and it’s very easy to design your popups as well.
Again, the Free version limits you to use only the default popup design (there are plenty of popups layouts in the pro version) plus there is a SumoMe branding on the popup which says ‘powered by SumoMe’.
You can unlock these features by opting for the Pro Version which is again $10/month. Which, I think is not too high considering the easy of use and the reports you get to see in a nice interface.
Plus, they offer a 14 day trial for this as well, I used the trial of Pro account but didn’t bother to choose any other layout as the default one gave me pretty impressive results.
Anyway, if you do not like it, We’ve written about the best popup plugins available for you to choose.
Smart Bar
You may have noticed a bar appear on the top of many websites, SumoMe calls it smart bar, it helps you grab the attention of your visitors and ask them to take an action on something, you can put anything from Newsletter Optin to a Coupon code, Deals, Download/ Install something.
It’s nothing revolutionary, or neither innovative but SumoMe offers nice reports that lets you see how many people click on the link or convert into a subscriber.
Again, there is a pro version that lets you make more customizations which can be upgraded at $20/month.
Heat Maps
Well, we can call this one a revolutionary feature, If you are a visual person like me, you will love knowing where your visitors are clicking on a web page.
This is an amazing data, which solves many problems and confusions you have over the layout and design of your site.
For example, I enabled heat maps on the Homepage to see the important and non-important elements on the page and after running it for several days, It recorded over 800 clicks on the homepage which gave me a fair idea of how people interact with my site and what elements are worth keeping on the homepage.
I used it for a very simple case, but Heatmaps can very useful in optimizing a sales page or a product listing page by evaluating different elements.
Plus, they are super easy to enable and disable and view the reports.
There is again a pro version of HeatMaps which lets you record more than 1000 clicks on a page, enabled heat maps for Mobile users and view real time stats, all for $20/month.
Other SumoMe Apps that I didn’t try
SumoMe offers way more apps that I could actually try. But all of them are essential for a website. The Reason I did not try because I am already using something that works for me and then there are few things I am not doing right now.
Scroll Box
The Scroll box is a feature to increase your email opt-in rate by sliding in the Newsletter Subscription form after a percentage of content has been viewed.
It is Something that I have been using on my blog, using a plugin called Easy Slide In.
SumoMe calls it the Scroll Box and offers a nicely designed interface for the settings. There is a pro version for this app as well. Pay $20/month to get more design control and ability to split test different Scroll Boxes.
Analytics
I honestly didn’t bother to know much about as I though it’s would be like any other analytics and I am already using a lot of them. But now this app looks interesting to me after knowing about it.
It tells you how many visitors on your site are reading your content by showing you the percentage of people who scroll down to the page.
I think this is gold, you can evaluate what is making your visitors not go down and finish the articles. Are they distracted by Ads, too many links that takes them on a different page etc. You can then solve the problems you never know existed.
I will be using this app in coming days as I am curious to see how many of you read my posts here on this blog. 🙂
Image Sharer
Is shows overlay sharing buttons on the images, which works very well for sites with a lot of virual content. I didn’t use it as I am already using sharing buttons for images, a feature in the Easy Social Sharing Buttons. It works amazingly.
Highlighter
When enabled, users will be able to able to highlight few lins of the site’s article and share it. Works for well for news, tips & tricks and motivational sites where Quotes and one liners have valuable information.
Contact Form
AS the name suggests, it’s used for letting your visitors send you messages to ask you something.
You can set multiple contact forms by placing buttons in different areas of your site.
Perhaps the eCommerce or Community sites can use this feature effectivly, I don’t find it useful for any of my blogs as one Contact form is enough which can be creaed usig a Free plugin called Contact Form 7.
If you want to do more with Forms on your site, such as Registration form, booking form etc. You can take a look at our post on Form Builders.
So, these are the other apps SumoMe offers while Sharing Buttons, List Builder and Heatmaps being the essentail ones for a blog.
Free Version vs Paid Version
The Free features are a nice way to get started with SumoMe but there is too much branding on the free version of apps.
Even if you are using apps like Heat Map or Analytics that are not visible to the visitors, there will be a blue bar on your site, in the hopes that SumoMe gets a referer or two from that blue bar. It can be turned of by paying $10/month
And Paying $20/month for pro version can make sense only if you are using selected apps. Your bill is going to be high if you opt for all the upgrades offered.
SumoMe comes with a solution by offering SumoMe Pro, that unlocks pro features of all the apps of SumoMe for $100/month. I would be happy to pay that much for the features if I was allowed to use it on Multiple Sites.
Limitations of Pro Version
But sadly the Pro version works on one Domain and you have to Purchase another Pro (meaning another $100) for another site, which is, not a very good option if you own multiple sites.
And paying that much for sharing and optin tools does not make any sense when you are just getting started with your blog or making few hundrad dollars a month.
Or maybe the Analytics, Heatmap, List Builder and the abiity to view all of them from a single dashbaord are worth paying for.
Or maybe you can use the Free versions of Analytics and Heatmap and Pay $20 for extra featurs on List Builder and $10 to remove the blue bar from your site.
So, in $30, you can get the essential apps of SumoMe without slapping the extra SumoMe branding in your visitor’s face.
➤ SumoMe
Hope you will benefit from this post. If you do, please share it with the ones may find it useful. Thanks.
