OptinMonster vs Sleeknote

OptinMonster vs. Sleeknote: Campaign Creation

So here’s the thing with Sleeknote that we should get out of the way right up front: our entire team is a big fan of their marketing strategy and their web design.

They’ve done a great job branding, and it’d be wrong to say otherwise. So as we would expect, Sleeknote’s campaign building process is detailed, intuitive, and easy to understand.

They walk you through all 6 steps when it’s time to build your build campaign and force you to define your goals upfront.

That said, it quickly becomes obvious that Sleeknote’s campaign options are more limited than OptinMonster.

This is evident as soon as it’s time to choose your campaign type:

As you can see, you have 3 options for a campaign. To be more accurate, you have 2 options at this stage (and one more later, but we’ll get to that in a second).

• Center screen popup
• Slide-in on either the right or left-hand side

With OptinMonster, you have 5 different campaign types to choose from:

• Popup
• Fullscreen
• Slide-in
• Floating Bar
• Inline

But then with these 5 options, you can also build:

• Sidebars
• Spinning Wheel Optins
• Content Lockers
• Countdown Timers (static or dynamic)

You can show all of those campaigns through anchor texts with shareable MonsterLinks™. Another popular campaign type is a sidebar widget (mentioned in the list above) for optin forms on the side of your content.

You’ve probably seen those before. Sidebar optins look like this:

Again, when it comes to OptinMonster campaign types, we’ve got loads to choose from!

This means that, right away, the scale tips toward OptinMonster for clients looking to build a variety of campaigns across their site or sites.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The very first thing that Sleeknote asks you to do is define your goal:

Your selection will determine which campaign templates you see. Choosing your goal upfront helps you get more clarity on what you want to achieve and helps you design a more targeted campaign throughout the entire process.

But what about the customers who want access to all the templates right from the get-go and have the ability to filter options if needed.

Because there may be a template that matches the campaign design you want, but you’d never see it if you chose the wrong goal.

That’s why at OptinMonster, our engineers created over 50 templates that we show you upfront. Then on the side, you can filter all those templates depending on your specific goals:

We know you have a particular style in mind for your campaign, so we want to give you all the options to choose from if it can save you time.

Again, two different approaches, but a big enough consideration to mention here.

As we continue this comparison, we’re going to choose Sleeknote’s Center Screen Popup so we can Collect Email Addresses. Now, we can explore the templates.

Sleeknote has 50 templates to choose from (45 themed templates and 5 blank ones). They allow you to filter between themed and blank templates though we’re not 100% sure why this filter exists:

It doesn’t change your options or simplify your template choice. If you want to see the blank templates, you can scroll to the bottom of the page.

There’s also another thing to point out at this stage. Only 3 of the 50 templates allow you to create a Multistep campaign (which is the equivalent of OptinMonster’s high converting Yes/No campaign):

This is important because Yes/No optins are super effective.

They rely on the Zeigarnik effect, which suggests that people are more likely to finish a process once they’ve started. So if you ask your wesbite visitors a simple Yes or No question, they’re more likely to engage with the campaign:

Consequently, there’s a good chance they’ll finish by opting in because they’ve already begun the process of doing so.

That’s why OptinMonster allows you to make any template a Yes/No campaign. It turns most site visitors into subscribers. So out of all our 50+ templates, you can use the power of the Zeigarnik effect with all of them!

Making the transition to a Yes/No campaign is how ChinaImportal boosted webinar attendance by 18%, subscriber growth by 200%, and recovered 11% of abandoned visitors.

We’ll show you how we can help you do that in just a minute.

Today, we’ll choose a Multistep campaign from Sleeknote so we can explore everything as thoroughly as possible. Now it’s time to decide whether you want your campaign to be at the center of the screen, or on the bottom left or right-hand side (like we saw earlier):

Again, we’ll go with Center.

Ok, in Sleeknote, we’re shown the Multistep campaign, and we can begin editing. This multistep feature was frustrating. That’s because it’s broken down into 4 steps:

• Form I
• Form II
• Teaser
• Success

Here’s Form I of the template we chose:

You’ll notice that right away, your reader is asked to put in their email address. This defeats the purpose of a multistep optin, and, in a second, we’ll explain why. First, here’s a glimpse of Form II:

Form II’s default template asks for a name, phone number, and, for some reason, gender. We can’t imagine a scenario in which this default template meets the majority of their user’s needs without major customization.

So, why does asking for an email in Form I defeat the purpose of a Yes/No (or “multistep”) campaign?

Because the first part of a Yes/No campaign should be as simple as possible with zero information to fill in. After all, that’s what gives these campaigns their power.

Again, notice the first step from one of OptinMonster’s Yes/No campaigns:

The user is prompted to click Yes or No.

The goal is to get them to take a tiny action so they can warm up to the idea of giving their email address later. Once the email is obtained, if our users need more information, we teach them how to use progressive profiling to get it.

The point is this: each field you ask your users to fill out is another obstacle that can prevent them from doing so.

Put even more simply, more fields = fewer conversions (and vice-versa).

Here’s the second part of our Yes/No campaign for that same template:

Again, this is as stripped down as can be. Once the user has clicked through the Yes option, they’re asked to provide basic details about themselves, like name and email address.

You can always customize this form to collect more information if you need it, but the default will work out-of-the-box. In fact, our clients have found that most of our templates need very little (if any) customization before putting them on a website.

But not everything about Sleeknote’s template was frustrating. In fact, there was one part that caught our team’s attention (in a good way). Their third form is called a teaser and is a nice addition to their software.

It looks like this:

The teaser is like a miniature version of your campaign at the bottom of their screen. This functions like a Floating Bar from OptinMonster:

It’s essentially a 2-step optin that gets users to click something before they see the optin form. This, too, takes advantage of the Zeigarnik effect. With OptinMonster, though, Floating Bars aren’t the only way to use a 2-step optin.

You can also use Inline campaigns or shareable MonsterLinks™.

Both of these options allow you to make smaller campaigns throughout your site and encourage higher click-through rates. Then, once a customer has started the process, they’re more likely to finish.

However, neither of these options are offered by Sleeknote.

Finally, we have the Success page view. This is standard across both platforms. They both allow you to send a warm message to your customers, provide discount or coupon information, or redirect users to a different site.

So now, let’s move away from the types of campaigns you can build with OptinMonster vs. Sleeknote and look at design customization features.