Wishpond Marketing Suite Review

Recently I came across a service called WishPond that allow you to generate leads for your business online. After playing with their software for a few weeks I decided to write a review of WishPond and whether you should give it a go.

What Is WishPond?

There are tons of lead generating software out there on the internet. WishPond is no different, however we have to understand the broader market of lead generating software in order to understand their position on the market.

Basically, there are two types of products for any category.

• Products there have a huge breath.
• Products that have a lot of depth.

After user testing WishPond I think it’s clear that they are aiming for more breadth in the lead generating market.

If you are familiar with LeadPage, Hubspot, Unbounce or Instapage then you san safely categorize WishPond into this category. Some of the services offered by WishPond are:

• Landing Page Design
• Opt-in Box (popup)
• Forms
• Social Promotion (Sweepstakes, Contests etc.)
• Email Automation

It seems like their goal is to be a one stop solution for all your online marketing needs. In the next section I will go in-depth with the software itself.

Landing Page Designer

Fishpond has a comprehensive landing page designer that allows to create and deploy attractive landing pages to acquire new leads for your business. While the designer offers a list of pre-built template I personally feel that they could improve a lot on their inventory. The templates look a little old.

You can start from scratch if you want and build using a landing page designer. The first time I used the landing page designer I had to go through a little leaning curve but it’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it.

I have been given access to their top tier plan that also allows you to embed conversion tracking pixel into any landing page. Once your are happy with the design of your landing page and the follow up thank you page you can check out how they look in the preview window. I found it a little difficult to setup my mailchimp list with the existing landing page form. As a matter of fact throughout their software you will encounter barriers where you simply cannot find what you are looking for.

One way of solving this problem is to go through their resources and tutorials and familiarize with the interface. It’s not the most user friendly interface when you start using it.

Testing landing page on other devices inside WishPond

Opt In Boxes & Forms

Wishpond is trying to cater towards the complete range of content marketing and lead generation tools. Another piece of the puzzle is their opt-in boxes. Opt in boxes can be displayed based on a series of events on your website. You are required to copy paste a simple javascript and Fishpond does the rest.

When I was experimenting with their opt-in boxes I still felt that they should have updated their entire lineup of pre-made templates because they look a little outdated. Sure, you can change every element or custom design your own opt-in but it’s very time consuming. A pre-built high converting template saves a lot of thinking time when you are preparing to launch a campaign.

A cool feature with their opt-in boxes is the ability to A/B test several variations and pause the ones that are not performing well. This feature is particularly helpful if you are having lots of traffic to your website and you are eager in finding out what converts best and what doesn’t.

This is where you can create a basic form that can be embedded to your website. At first I could not understand the difference between opt-in boxes and forms. However, I found out that forms do not have a trigger action like the opt-in boxes.

Social Promotions

Are you planning to run a social promotion as a marketer? Well, this is also something covered by WishPond. Be it a contest, sweepstake or a simple vote you can display pretty much anything on your social media accounts.

However, they do have some major shortcomings. Social promotion templates are not attractive and they pretty much look like an adapted landing page template that you can slap on your Facebook Page or your website.

I wished they had something like that of a like gate or a point based system but that is not something WishPond is offering at the moment. Yes, you can connect to Facebook and other network but the interface is not well laid out and feels like a copycat of the landing page templates.

Leads Database and Email Automation

If there is one thing that WishPond does exceedingly well it has to be their leads database (an in-built CRM of your leads) and how you can use it coupled with their email automation platform.

The leads database allows you to import from Mailchimp, Aweaber and other popular software. Once you have the leads from your existing clients you can also redirect any new lead generated under the WishPond ecosystem to your internal database.

Types of Workflow in WishPond

The email automation feature is pretty useful when you want to customize your email marketing based on certain segment of the audience or their behaviour with your brand. My particular favourite was the calendar based automation workflow that allows you to create a series based on certain calendar dates. This is particularly useful for targeting anniversaries or special dates for your business.

Final Thoughts

Now that I have covered almost all the features inside WishPond it’s time to reflect and analyze whether you should really go for it. The pricing starts from $69 a month for 1000 leads and goes all the way up to $199. I am not a fan of leads based pricing to be honest but the one good thing that you get is access to all their features regardless of the structure. The upper tier pricing models are designed for large agencies or someone looking for API access. Most of you reading this review should be fine with the basic plan. You can always upgrade later if you really need to.

WishPond is for someone looking for a complete lead generation package under one platform without the complexity of managing multiple applications and syncing all of them together. Having said that, you are left with compromises in their suite. Landing pages might not be attractive enough, social promotions templates looks repetitive and to top it all of you have to watch the video tutorials and their blog to master the software. I feel that their user interface and workflow has all the options you are looking for but you simply need to know your way around.

Finally, I think that WishPond is definitely worth a try if you are looking for a complete package marketing suite.