Wishpond Review: The Do Everything Lead Generation Tool

Email marketing and lead generation are essential for running a successful online business these days.

But to make it all work, you need to have certain pieces in place.

For example you might use ActiveCampaign to collect leads and send out emails. Perhaps you have a LeadPages account to create a highly converting landing page. And you might install Thrive Leads to create and add lead capture forms to your web site.

But what if you didn’t want to use separate products to do these important functions? Wouldn’t it be more convenient and perhaps more affordable to do everything within one place?

This is where Wishpond comes in.

Wishpond is like the swiss army knife of lead generation tools. It has all the features mentioned above, plus a whole lot more. I recently got a chance to play with Wishpond a bit, and in this review I’m going to give you an overview of how you might use it to enhance your online business.

What is Wishpond?

Wishpond is another software as a service (SaaS) product. Which means you create an account and you manage everything on their site. Wishpond allows you to:

• Build nice looking, professional landing pages
• Add lead capture forms and popups to your website
• Launch contests for various social networks like Instagram and Pinterest
• Send out email newsletters
• Create email marketing automations

All these can be built out using Wishpond’s easy to use real-time drag and drop interface so you can truly create customized designs that fit your vision.

Creating Landing Pages

If you are selling a product or just trying to collect more leads, then you will more than likely want to build a landing page for it.

WishPond features a really nice realtime landing page builder that makes creating these pages very simple. The built in templates mean that you don’t need many design skills to get started and the drag and drop system makes everything simple to manipulate.

To start building landing pages with Wishpond, you need to pick a template. At the time of this review, I counted 134 landing page templates to choose from.

That’s a lot of templates, but one feature I miss from LeadPages is the ability to filter landing pages by some sort of criteria like niche, type, conversion rate.

I do like Wishpond’s same page template preview which does a good job showing you what each landing page looks like when trying to pick.

Once you’ve picked your template, you can start to customize it.

In WishPond, landing pages are built up from sections, rows and content columns. It includes a fairly basic set of widgets you can put on your pages including Text, Image, Video, Buttons, and Icons.

You can also place Social Buttons, Countdown Timers, Maps and Facebook comments. All these are accessible from the left hand side of the editor.

Everything can be dragged around and placed however you like and you can easily resize components to fit your vision.

Click on a button for example and a pane with the properties you can edit for that button will appear to your left.

Double click on any text and just start typing to customize your message. A toolbar above will appear that lets you customize the style.

All in all, everything is quite customizable so you can really build any design you like. I also like the fact that WishPond includes a blank template so you can even design a landing page from scratch if you want as well.

One really cool feature about Wishpond landing pages is that they support dynamic text replacement. This means that whenever a lead visits your page, you can personalize your landing page for them by displaying their first name for example.

To do this, you can just add a merge tag to your landing page and Wishpond will automatically fill in the leads’ info there.

Once you’re done customizing your landing page, you have a variety of options to publish it. If you don’t have a site, you can host your landing page on Wishpond’s own servers. You can also embed the landing page on your own site by copy and pasting the included javascript code.

If you’re using Wordpress then you can use the Wishpond Wordpress plugin.

And you can even embed a landing page to your Facebook page or Twitter profile.

Building Popups and Email Forms

Almost every successful marketer uses email popups on their site to help collect leads. And Wishpond has two ways of helping you to collect emails through popups and embedded email forms.

There are only 12 different templates for email popups and forms. Honestly, most of them aren’t particularly inspiring which is kind of surprising since the landing page templates look much better.

You can edit your lead capture forms using the same landing page editor.

With Popups, Wishpond gives you several ways to trigger them to appear including

• By click (for 2-step optin)
• Scrolling down a certain % of the page
• After a certain period of time
• On exit or entrance

There’s also a fairly simple url matching mechanism so you can control which pages your popup appears.

Email Marketing & Automations

Products like LeadPages contain both a landing page builder and popup functionality. But where Wishpond starts to stand out are it’s additional email marketing and marketing automation capabilities.

While not as sophisticated a platform as say ActiveCampaign or Drip, WishPond does have all the functionality you need to handle your email marketing needs.

WishPond includes it’s own Lead Database. Any leads that you collect through your popups and email forms will appear there. Leads will have basic properties like email address and you can collect more information through your forms if you want like first name, last name, etc.

You can also view each lead’s activity stream, so you can see things like what pages on your site they have visited, or converted on specific landing page, etc.

Wishpond also supports lead scoring so you can assign “points” based on actions that your leads take. The higher the lead score, the more valuable a lead is and you can do some

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is another very cool aspect of Wishpond. There’s a visual automation workflow editor that allows you to create both simple and more complicated workflows. An automation workflow is essentially a set of conditions and actions.

To start an automation, you need to give a condition like:

• Being part of a list
• Viewing a particular page on your site
• Received a certain email
• Having a minimum lead score

Then once a lead meets a condition, you can define an action. WishPond supports actions like:

• Send an email to the lead (or yourself as a notification)
• Update a lead property (like lead score)
• Add or remove someone from a list
• Wait for a certain period of time
• Trigger a webhook

This allows you to do things like create a standard autoresponder series where a lead joins a list through a form and then goes through a series of emails that you put together.

Starting a social contest

Another distinguishing feature of Wishpond is its ability to create sweepstakes and other social contests. Done properly these contests can go viral and help you generate more leads.

Sweepstakes

Wishpond includes several built in sweepstakes templates and you can use the same Wishpond editor to customize the template how you like it. Each template has a countdown timer, an entry form for your visitors to join your sweepstakes, and a call to action button.

Sweepstakes are quite configurable. So you can change basic settings like start and end date, and customize the email message you want to send to participants. Plus, you can also add in an image to be used when people share your sweepstakes on other platforms.

Sweepstakes can be hosted on Wishpond, on your own site or even your Facebook page.

Wishpond also gives you the ability to create other social contests as well. My favorites are the vote contest which lets you do market research by having users vote and then offer a prize to encourage more participation.

Or you could create a referral contest where you encourage your users to refer their friends and family to signup for a chance at prizes.

You can also create these types of contests on Wishpond:

• Photo Contest
• Instagram Hashtag Contest
• Essay Contest
• Photo Caption Contest
• Pinterest Contest
• Video Contest

Pricing

Wishpond offers 3 different pricing tiers which they call Basic, Pro and Growth. The main difference between the tiers is how many Leads you can have. The Basic plan gives you 1,000 leads for $69 a month, the Pro plan gives you 2,500 for $119 a month and the Growth plan gives you 10,000 for $199 a month.

If you pay yearly, you get a 36% discount so the Basic plan for example would work out to be $45 a month. Plus you get a 14-Day Free trial if you pay yearly.

There’s also a lite version of Wishpond that you can try as well if you want to give it for a test spin. It’s limited to 200 leads and you can’t use any of the integrations or social promotions. However, it’s still very functional and will give you a good idea of what Wishpond can do.

Comparison to Other Products

Wishpond has so many features and can do so many things, that it’s hard to make a 1-1 comparison against other competing products. However, here’s how Wishpond features compare to othe products I’ve had experience with.

Wishpond vs Leadpages

Leadpages is primarily a landing page builder with popup capabilities (via LeadBoxes).

Interface wise, I like elements from both products. For example, LeadPages has filtering capabilities that make it easier to find a landing page template you like. With Wishpond it’s a bit hard to scroll through all the available templates.

Wishpond’s drag and drop editor is much more flexible than LeadPages, although the new Leadpages drag and drop editor is a big improvement. At the time of this review though, only a handful of the LeadPages templates support drag and drop.

I do like Leadpages templates a little better in general. They look a bit more professional and there’s more variations in my opinion.

However, Wishpond does have Leadpages beat in the fact that it can actually send autoresponder emails and it can help you put together social contests.

Wishpond vs Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is currently my favorite product for creating optin boxes on my site. While perfectly functional, I don’t think that Wishpond can really compete against the full feature set that Thrive Leads provides.

Thrive Leads has better looking templates, and loads more advanced features that can really boost your conversions.

Still, Wishpond is not bad per se for creating lead capture forms. It has all the basic features you need and will be quite suitable for many of you.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Wishpond is a really nice platform for generating more leads for your business. It can do so many different things and it’s quite powerful as well. The only downside is that there’s a lot to learn, although the site does include a lot of training videos to walk you through the various features.

The pricing is also reasonable for what it gives you. At $69 a month, you could use it to replace your LeadPages account, Thrive Leads and your favorite email service provider. This makes it perfect for someone who doesn’t like subscribing to so many different services.

If you are looking for an all-in-one product that will help you build landing pages, create email lead capture forms and send out emails to your subscribers, then I would definitely recommend checking Wishpond. There’s not many other services out there that I know of that can do all that it can do.

Take advantage of their 14 day free trial and give Wishpond a try.

Boost Your Leads with Wishpond