You can’t possibly expect to put out your best work or to reap the rewards of the best results if you don’t arm yourself with the right tools for the job. You still need to have your brilliant ideas and you still want to put your own unique spin on them, but you want the right tools. This is just as true with Internet marketing as it is with baking or woodworking.
I’ve written about Wishpond twice before and each time the online suite of tools has introduced more features and enhancements to empower you to achieve ever greater success. Today, we return with an updated review and overview of what you can expect from Wishpond.
What Is Wishpond?
No matter what kind of business you run, it is undeniable that marketing will always play a critical role in your success. You want to be able to reach the right customers at the right time with the right offer, and you want your marketing strategies to scale right alongside your business too. That’s what Wishpond is designed to do.
Calling itself “a platform designed for growth,” Wishpond consists of a full suite of marketing tools that don’t require any expert coding or technical experience. The tools are meant to be easily approachable by almost anyone, allow for a more accessible approach to marketing on a grander scale.
Wishpond consists of four main areas: landing pages, popups and forms, contests and promos, and marketing automation. You can use any one of these tools as you see fit, but you will likely see the greatest success when you use a combination of them as part of a well-crafted marketing strategy.
And while you can certainly use Wishpond on its own, what’s really great is that the marketing platform seamlessly integrates with a number of popular services too. If you’re already using Slack to coordinate with your team, Wishpond works with that. The same is true with CRMs like Salesforce and Infusionsoft, and email marketing tools like AWeber and MailChimp, as well as SurveyMonkey, GoToWebinar, Live Chat and more.
An Upgraded Interface
When you log into your account, you’ll see that the main navigation runs along the top of the screen: campaigns, leads and automation, as well as quick access to support, your account settings, and free 1-on-1 training.
Something that I found very convenient, and you might too, is that the large images for creating a new campaign are featured front and center. This makes it really easy for you to get started with a new marketing campaign without having to dig through the user interface.
Below that, you’ll find a list of all your campaigns, including those that are live, in draft, completed, or whatever other status they may be. For each campaign, you can see the number of views, the number of conversions, the conversion rate, and the date of last activity. This is great for “at a glance” information and you can always dig deeper into each campaign to learn more.
Building an Instagram Campaign
To get a sense of what it’s like to build a marketing campaign with Wishpond, I decided to try something a little different and try an Instagram contest. If you click on “view more” from the main campaign page, you bring up several options for lead capture (like a welcome mat) or for contests and promotions (like a referral promotion).
Regardless of what kind of campaign you choose to create, you get to select for a handful of different templates to get started. They’re all professionally designed and they all look pretty terrific. After you pick your template, you’ll then be taken to a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor where you can change and edit the individual features.
This is what they mean when they say that no coding expertise is needed. All you do is click on the part you want to change and it’ll bring up the ability to edit that component. This is how you can easily swap out images for your own, for example, or edit a body of text.
In the case of the text editor, you get an interface that is similar to most word processors. This isn’t just plain text! There are buttons for bold, italics, headings, font, font size and so on, as well as easy insertion of Google Maps, uploaded images, and even Facebook comments.
You can then preview the resulting page on desktop, on mobile, on Facebook and more, as well as create an A/B split test or edit the CSS/JS directly.
Automating Your Workflow
Another major component of Wishpond is its suites of workflow automation solutions.
Start with a blank workflow (standard) where you can define the specific actions that are triggered when a lead meets certain conditions. Alternatively, use one of the preset configurations for a calendar-based workflow so emails are set on certain dates, welcome emails, hot leads for when someone visits your pricing page twice within 15 days, a sales lead automatic follow-up, or a cart abandonment solution that will automatically send an email to leads who get to the check-out page but don’t complete the purchase.
How Much Does It Cost?
When you sign up with Wishpool, you can get started with a free 14-day trial with no obligation. There are three main pricing plans to choose from, all of which are billed yearly.
Starting Out is $49/month, giving you unlimited landing pages and social contests, but you are limited to a maximum of 1,000 leads. The most popular plan is Everything You Need for $99/month, bumping that up to 2,500 leads and allowing you to create up to five user accounts.
Beyond that, there’s the Rapid Growth plan with unlimited user accounts and free implementation coaching. This starts at $199/month for up to 10,000 leads. If you have more leads than that, additional versions of Rapid Growth are available, but these don’t qualify for the free trial. One million leads would be $2,989/month. Something to aspire to, right?