It’s extremely important to build a strong community around your brand. These plugins help you connect with your visitors and bring more value to your website.
After testing and analyzing oodles of plugins, we’ve decided to save you a boatload of time, and share the three we think are best.
Calculated on the merits of usefulness, accessibility (learning curve), as well as being free (or at least freemium).
1. MailMunch
MailMunch is an extremely intuitive and fluid platform to host simple and effective newsletter subscription forms. This allows your website to garner followers that you can reach out to. After activating MailMunch, you can decide where on your website to place the subscribe form (with many options available, including pop-up). After that, you can generate lists of your subscribers and easily import them to services like MailChimp, that you can use to update and interact with your audience.
2. Badges OS
Badges is one of our favorite plugins for building community engagement on your website. Badges let you create and assign badges to members after they fulfill certain tasks, that you can assign for each badge. BadgesOS goes great with its sister plugin, Badges Community, that you can add on for added flexibility and user-badge management.
Bonus
Golden Ticket is a very fun and quirky plugin that lets you add a “golden ticket” popup to a specific page. When a user randomly visits (or finds) this page, their golden ticket pops up, with a bonus attached (that you can manage).
Gratisfaction is a new plugin that lets you easily manage social reward programs directly on your website. It has numerous other features like manageable loyalty programs, that will keep your community of viewers engaged and coming back to your website.
3. LiveChat
Well, LiveChat does just that, letting you chat with visitors in real-time. This is a great way to engage with users if you are providing products or services, by answering questions and helping them make a purchase decision.