The Hello Bar Alternative: How I Got 196 New Subscribers With Just 15 Minutes of Work

Recently, I thought about adding a hello bar to the top of my site.

As you probably know, I’m always looking for ways to build my email list.

I mean, I even wrote a post about how you can get more subscribers by optimizing your website.

In this post, I’ll be covering how I got 196 new subscribers with just 15 minutes of work.

Yes, really.

For those of you who don’t know what that is, Hello Bar adds a “slim bar” at the top of your website that sticks to the top as you scroll down.

Mine looked a little something like that:

Made using Hello Bar

Hello Bar Alternatives?

Unfortunately, Hello Bar didn’t quite work out for me…

After a few minutes, I realized that Hello Bar’s free plan has quite a lot of restrictions.

Particularly, there’s a huge “H” at the left side of each Hello Bar – this will direct people away from my site to the Hello Bar website.

Needless to say, that’s something I’m trying to avoid.

I thought about paying for the paid plan, but not before doing a quick search for any other alternatives.

And that’s when I found WP Notification Bars, a WordPress plugin that’s 100% free!

Both seem to work in exactly the same way too, so why not?

Proceeding to the “Hello Bar” Experiment

Pin me friend!

For the sake of convenience, I shall call this experiment the “Hello Bar” Experiment, even though I’m technically not using Hello Bar. I’ll be using WP Notification Bars instead.

Here’s why:

• No need to give Hello Bar credit and bring people away from my website
• WP Notification Bars allow people to click on a button first before inserting their details, as compared to Hellobar’s free plan whereby people have to fill in their details right inside the Hellobar (this decreases the opt-in rate).
• I can link the “submit” button to a Leadbox and hence have control over what thank you page people are directed to, unlike Hello Bar whereby subscriber emails are collected into Hellobar and I cannot connect the Hellobar to my email service provider without paying.

Wondering what a Leadbox is? Check out my Leadpages review.

Hello Bar probably offers some more advanced options like A/B testing using its paid plan, but most of my readers aren’t at that stage yet.

So… how did the experiment go?

The end result: 196 new subscribers, without me doing anything! 

All I had to do was set it up.

I’ve only installed the bar for slightly over a month, so I must say that it has been really effective.

And the best part? The only thing I did was to install the bar! 🙂

Made using WP Notification Bars

By the way, I have absolutely no affiliation with WP Notification Bars and this post is not sponsored. 😉

You can download the plugin here.

I hope this helps!

xx Raelyn