Social proof and FOMO (fear of missing out) are two popular marketing strategies to boost your conversion rates and move your visitors to action.
NotificationX is a freemium WordPress plugin that helps bring those two marketing strategies to your WordPress site, with eye-catching notification alerts for new sales, comments, reviews, and more.
You’ve probably seen these around the Internet, but if you’re not sure what I mean, here’s a quick example:
NotificationX helps you add those notifications, along with convenient features like built-in integrations for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Zapier, and more.
Keep reading my NotificationX review so you don’t miss out (!) on learning what this plugin has to offer.
NotificationX Review: The Full Feature List
Ok, so you should have a decent idea of the basic premise of NotificationX at this point.
It displays those notifications, which lets your visitors know how popular you are and want to get in on the action. That makes them more likely to perform whatever it is you want them to do – signing up for your email list, buying a product, leaving a comment, etc. (or at least that’s what the theory says – I always recommend you collect your own data to see the impact of any tactics you try).
Let’s get into some more specifics of how it does that…
First, NotificationX helps you display six different types of notifications:
- Notification bar – any offer or notice that you want to promote. You can also add a countdown timer for urgency. This shows up as a true notification bar, rather than the notification popup style that the other types use.
- Comments – show recent comments from users as a notification alert.
- Sales notifications – display recent sales from WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads via built-in integrations.
- WordPress product review – display the latest reviews for your WordPress product from WordPress.org or Freemius (great if you run a WordPress extension business).
- WordPress download count – the same idea, but for your download count. Again, it supports WordPress.org or Freemius.
- Email subscriptions (Mailchimp or ConvertKit) – showcase people who have recently subscribed to your email list.
You’ll be able to choose exactly which pages your notifications appear on and which users will see them.
You can also choose different themes for your notifications and further customize the design and content as needed.
Beyond that, other helpful features include:
- Notification sounds (these are optional, of course)
- Control over how many notifications to show/how often
- Cache control for performance. E.g. you can choose how often to check for new reviews, downloads, etc.
And you’ll also get analytics to track views, as well as an option to add UTM tracking codes for further analysis.
NotificationX Pricing
NotificationX has a limited free version at WordPress.org, as well as a full-featured premium version.
The free version supports five notification types:
- Sales
- Comments
- Reviews
- Downloads
- Notification bar
However, it doesn’t support all sources. Notably, it excludes Freemius, Zapier, and custom notifications.
To unlock the Mailchimp/ConvertKit email subscription notifications, as well as those other sources, you’ll need the Pro version. The Pro version also adds other features like access to all the notification themes, analytics, and some other smaller features.
There are three premium plans. They all have the same features – the only difference is the number of sites you can use it on:
- 1 site – $49
- 5 sites – $99
- 25 sites – $199
All plans come with one year of support and updates. If you want to continue receiving support/updates after the first year, you’ll get a 25% renewal discount.
My recommendation is to start with the free version as it still gives you a good feel for the functionality. If you like what you see, consider going Pro to access all the features.
How NotificationX Works: Going Hands-On
To start things off, I’ll use the free version of NotificationX from WordPress.org because it will show you exactly which features are free and which require the paid version.
When you install and activate NotificationX, it will give you this nice quick builder wizard to configure what type of notifications you want to display:
This quick builder doesn’t give you access to every single feature, but it helps you get up and running with all the important basics.
I have the plugin running on my WooCommerce test site, so I’m going to choose the Sales Notification option for WooCommerce.
Once you’ve made your choices there, you can choose the theme for your notifications (AKA their design).
These themes vary based on the type of notification that you’re creating. About half of the themes are free, while the other half require the Pro version:
Next, you can configure the Display rules, which let you control where and when your notifications appear. You get three options:
- Position – bottom left or bottom right.
- Show On – you can show notifications sitewide, on specific pages, or sitewide but excluding certain pages. For example, if you’re running an eCommerce store, you probably don’t want to display notifications on your checkout page.
- Display For – you can show your notifications to all visitors. Or, you can only target people who are either logged out (anonymous) or logged in to your site.
Finally, the last page lets you launch your notification.
More Detailed Notification Settings
The quick builder is great for getting up and running with a notification, but you can access more settings if you open the full editor for a notification.
For example, you’ll be able to customize the colors, images, and typography of your notification theme:
You also get a new Content tab that gives you a lot more control over the content in your notifications. For example, if you’re creating a sales notification, you could limit it to specific products and choose where to link the notifications.
You can also add UTM tags to help track everything:
In the Display tab, you’ll get a new option to choose what image to use. For example, for a sales notification, you could choose the product image or the purchaser’s Gravatar image.
Finally, the Customize tab lets you:
- Enable sounds
- Change the size
- Show/hide a close button
- Hide notifications on mobile devices
- Choose the timing for when to display notifications and how long to display them
- Control how many notifications to select from and whether or not to loop them
So if you want it, you have some pretty detailed control over exactly how your notifications function.
You Can Create Multiple Notifications
The neat thing is that NotificationX doesn’t limit you to a single notification. You can create as many notifications as you want, each with their own type, theme, and display rules.
For example, you could display sales notifications on your shop pages and comment notifications on your blog page…or any other mix that fits your needs.
To create additional notifications, you’ll use the exact same interface that you saw above.
Exploring the Settings
At this point, I’ve installed the Pro version to unlock all the settings and features.
In addition to the notification builder interface above, you also get a detailed settings area to control other aspects of the plugin.
First, you can enable or disable the different modules. You can also choose how to calculate analytics, like whether to count views from everyone or just logged-in/out visitors (more on analytics in the next section):
The Cache Settings area lets you choose how many notifications to cache in your database, as well as how often to fetch new review and download data.
These are important performance considerations, and you’ll want to balance your site’s performance with the desire for recent data:
The other settings are all about helping you connect to various integrations, like Mailchimp, Freemius, Zapier, and ConvertKit. You’ll also be able to specify cache durations for some of these services, as well.
Viewing Analytics
With the Pro version, you can view analytics for all of your notifications.
First, you can see a basic view counter when you look at your notifications list. Then, you also get a more graphical interface that shows views, clicks, and CTR. I’ll use a GIF from their help docs here as it does a better job of showing how much data you can look at:
Exploring the Zapier Integration
While NotificationX’s built-in integrations are helpful for a lot of use cases, I think the most interesting integration is the Zapier integration that you get with the Pro version.
With it, you can set up your own Zapier recipes to trigger notifications, which opens up a ton of possibilities given the thousands of apps that Zapier supports.
For example, you could display your latest Tweets as notifications. Or, you could showcase your latest YouTube videos…the possibilities are pretty endless.
You can see the full setup process here.
Final Thoughts on NotificationX
If you want to experiment with notification alerts on your WordPress site, NotificationX is the slickest way I’ve seen.
The designs are modern and nice-looking right out of the box, and I like how it supports different notification types, which makes it work for an eCommerce store, blog, WordPress theme/plugin shop, and more.
Plus, the Zapier integration adds another degree of flexibility if you want it, and being able to view analytics and add UTM tracking lets you see how effective your efforts are.
The free version at WordPress.org is pretty generous and should give you a good feel for how everything works, so give it a try and then consider upgrading to Pro if you like what you see.
Related Articles
-
Plugins hosted on the WordPress repository enjoy a very neat and integrated update procedure whereby as soon as you upload a new version of the plugin, the users will get…
-
If you're creating a WordPress plugin or theme for distribution outside the .org repository, one of the best things you can do is implement auto updates. Here are a few…
-
Some resources I've collected that will surely help in developing WordPress plugins.
-
Starting this page as a repository for resources that can help you with creating great plugins taking into consideration best practices.
0 comments:
Post a Comment