10 Best List Building Software To Grow Your Email List (2023)

Picking the perfect tool to build your email list is crucial for attracting and converting visitors on your website. I’ve thoroughly evaluated the top 10 list building software, taking into account factors like user-friendliness, pricing, and integrations.

Plus, I’ll also share my personal top 3 favorites with you.

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you click on the link and make a purchase. TIA if you decide to purchase through me 🙂

I regret not building an email list sooner.

There are 4 billion daily email users and this number is expected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025.

A report by Statista shows that email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023.

If you haven’t decided to build your email list yet, you’re seriously falling behind, no matter what industry you’re in—whether it’s e-commerce, content marketing, SEO, or social media marketing.

If you’re a blogger or content creator, it’s absolutely essential to start building an email list ASAP. It’s the key to driving super-targeted traffic to your blog and increasing your affiliate conversions.

Trust me, you don’t want to miss out on this!

How do you build an email list?

In the simplest language, the following 3 steps are required to build an email list.

1. Offer high-quality content that your target audience will find useful and relevant. Mainly, a blog post or a website is used for offering content to build an email list

2. Place opt-in forms strategically on your website, such as in the sidebar, footer, or as pop-ups. Make sure they are eye-catching and clearly explain the benefits (next step) of subscribing

3. Provide incentives to encourage people to join your email list. This could be a free e-book, a discount code, or exclusive content that is only available to subscribers

There are awesome email list building services on the internet that make the whole process a breeze.

So let’s dive into the list.

What is the best list building software?

Here are the 10 best tools to build an email list.

• OptinMonster

• Hello Bar

• Outgrow

• OptiMonk

• WP Forms

• MailerLite

• Brevo (Ex Sendinblue)

• Leadpages

• Thrive Leads

• Sleeknote

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a powerful email list building tool that helps you convert website visitors into subscribers and customers.

With its easy-to-use interface and extensive features, OptinMonster lets you create attractive opt-in forms, pop-ups, and other lead-generation campaigns.

The software provides various opt-in form types, such as pop-ups, floating bars, slide-ins, and more, which can be customized to match your brand’s design and messaging.

If you are an email marketer, you must have heard of exit intent popups. Exit-Intent® was first introduced by OptinMonster and they have patented it since then.

Key features

I highly recommend OptinMonster because it offers you the following features and benefits:

• Variety of pop-ups and campaign types: Apart from the static opt-in forms, you also get a wide variety of pop-ups such as slide-in scroll boxes, floating bars, sidebar forms, etc. And a variety of campaign types such as content locker, coupon wheel optins, playbooks, countdown timer, etc.

• Drag-and-drop builder: Helps you design visually appealing opt-ins that are optimized for high conversions and mobile devices. You can also choose from attractive animations and sound effects.

• Campaign triggers: Choose when your forms appear with features like Exit-intent, scroll trigger, inactivity sensor, etc.

• Highly targeted campaigns: Precision targeting features such as Geo-location targeting, cookie retargeting, device-based targeting, etc.

• Integrations: OptinMonster plays nice with popular email marketing tools like MailChimp and Active Campaign, allowing you to optimize your campaigns and seamlessly integrate them with other outreach strategies.

• Loads of themes and templates: Choose from lots of available themes and templates for your pop-ups and forms to suit your preference.

Pricing

OptinMonster has highly competitive pricing.

• Basic: $9/mo (billed annually)

• Plus: $19/mo (billed annually)

• Pro: $29/mo (billed annually)

• Growth: $49/mo (billed annually)

• 14-day moneyback guarantee

2. Hello Bar

Hello Bar is a list builder famous for high conversion rates. The pop-ups or opt-in forms are designed and timed in a way that lures visitors to sign up for your list.

It offers the following types of popups:

• Bars at the header and footer that scroll with your visitors

• Modals to capture attention at key moments

• Alerts that give prompts to users

• Sliders that can be seen with relevant content

• Page Takeovers that are full-screen popups to get maximum attention

Key features

• Design: 100s of pre-built themes, custom design options such as fonts, layouts, colors, etc., and a design assistant that detects your site design and suggests colors and styling based on it

• Targeting: Target your visitors by country, city, state, ad campaigns, source, medium, and more

• Tracking and optimizing: Analytics for what’s working and what isn’t, A/B testing to conduct split tests, and custom reports generation

• Integrations: Integrates well with all your favorite platforms and tools such as WordPress, Shopify, GetResponse, AWeber, Brevo, etc.

Pricing

Starter

• FREE forever – up to 5000 popup views (in total; not per month)

• Limit of 1 active popup and unlimited subscribers

• Basic level support, design features and integrations

For an unlimited number of active popups, A/B tests, and advanced support, the paid plans are:

• Growth: $24/mo (billed annually) – up to 50,000 popup views per month

• Premium: $41/mo (billed annually) – up to 150,000 popup views per month

• Elite: $83/mo (billed annually) – up to 500,000 popup views per month

• Monthly plans are also available

3. Outgrow

Outgrow is a unique email list-building solution that relies on interactive content such as quizzes, polls, assessments, calculators, giveaways, chatbots, etc. for attracting leads.

It offers several templates for each of these methods.

For example: A calculator has templates like a savings calculator, calorie and weight calculator, tax calculator, etc.

Key features

• Interactive lead capturing content: Capture leads with interactive content such as quizzes, polls, assessments, calculators, giveaways, chatbots, etc.

• Integrations: Easily integrates with over 1000 sales & marketing tools such as AWeber, HubSpot, GetResponse, MailerLite, etc.

• Interaction: Increase interactivity with dynamic charts and graphs based on user input

• Embed in different styles: Embed interactive content in the form of full-page content, sidebar content, pop-ups, floaters, greet bars, and chatbots

Pricing

Here are the Annual plans:

• Freelancer: $14/mo for 3000 leads per year

• Freelancer pro: $25/mo for 12000 leads per year

• Essentials: $95/mo for 90000 leads per year

• Business: $600/mo for 600,000 leads per year

• There’s also a free BASIC plan that just offers forms and surveys and 1200 leads per year

• The number of content types is limited based on the plan you choose

• Monthly plans are also available but annual plans offer savings of up to 44%

• A 7-day free trial is also available

4. OptiMonk

OptiMonk is another email list building tool ideal for e-commerce websites that helps boost conversion rates manifolds.

Rated 5 stars on G2, Shopify, and Capterra, OptiMonk is used by big organizations like CR7 and WWF.

Some pop-up types include Smart Welcome Popup, Conversational Popup, Win-A-Gift Popup, Lucky Wheel Popup, Ebook Popup, etc.

Key features

• High-performing list building formulas like cart abandonment stopper, pre-seasonal list builder, Smart Welcome forms, etc.

• Subscriber recognition: Show popups only to those visitors who haven’t subscribed to any of your campaigns yet

• Lightning-fast popups optimized for mobile devices

• Integrate with your favorite email marketing software

• Collect customer-first data: Engage your visitors with questions to know what they are interested in. Then, segment them based on that

• Guide your visitors in finding the best products, offers, etc.

Pricing

All plans come with various message types and embedded content, third-party integrations, customization with themes, and campaign analytics.

OptiMonk has a FREE plan that allows a maximum of 1 domain and 15000 pageviews.

For more pageviews and domains and other features like A/B testing and smart tagging, the following paid plans are available:

• Essential: $32.50/mo (billed annually)

• Growth: $82.50/mo (billed annually)

• Premium: $207.50/mo (billed annually)

5. WP Forms (Best for WordPress)

WP Forms is a popular WordPress plugin that lets you build forms to collect emails addresses of your website visitors.

Its user-friendly interface makes it stand out from other form builders in the market.

With WPForms, you can quickly design and customize contact forms, subscription forms, surveys, order forms, and more, all without any coding knowledge.

Key features

• Drag and drop editor: Allows you to effortlessly add fields, rearrange them, and customize their appearance to match your website’s branding

• File uploads: Lets users upload files and media with form submissions

• Conditional logic: The form fields automatically change based on the user’s selections. You can choose to show or hide specific fields depending on what the user picks

• 100% mobile friendly: The forms are 100% mobile-responsive

• Add-ons: There are several add-ons available for collecting payments, coupon codes, PayPal addons, and other email marketing service provider add-ons

Pricing

All the pricing plans come with unlimited users, unlimited submissions, and unlimited forms.

The pricing plans are extremely cheap. In fact, cheaper than any other tool on this list.

Here are the plans (billed annually):

• Basic: $4.10/mo

• Plus: $8.30/mo (marketing integrations)

• Pro: $16.6/mo (accept payments)

• Elite: $24.95/mo (everything plus premium integrations)

• 14-day moneyback guarantee

6. MailerLite

MailerLite is the list building software I use for myself. It is not just a list building tool but a complete email marketing solution for businesses, bloggers, and website owners.

You can use embedded sign-up forms, pop-ups, and promotion pop-ups of different styles and animations to collect your website visitor’s emails.

Apart from building your list, it also lets you send email campaigns to your subscribers.

The best part about MailerLite is that it has a FREE plan that lets you collect and store up to 1000 emails in your list. I use the FREE plan which works perfectly fine for me.

It doesn’t have a lot of features like exit-intent, scroll sensor, inactivity sensor, etc like OptinMonster.

I recommend this tool to those who don’t want to fancy up (at least not yet) in their list building efforts and are looking for a cheap or better yet, FREE option.

I recommend MailerLite for the following reasons:

• FREE Plan: Has a lifetime FREE plan that lets you collect and store up to 1000 emails or contacts

• Websites and landing pages: You can also build beautiful websites and landing pages

• Apart from collecting emails, you can also send up to 12000 emails per month to your subscribers with the FREE plan

• Email automation: Automate your email campaigns like a pro

Pricing

• FREE Plan: Lifetime FREE

• Growing business: $9/mo (with annual plan)

• Advanced: $19/mo (with annual plan)

• Enterprise: Custom plans for businesses with over 100k email subscribers

• A 30-day FREE trial is also available

7. Brevo (Ex Sendinblue)

Just like MailerLite, Brevo is also a complete email marketing solution that lets you build your email lists flawlessly and send emails to your subscribers.

Again, Brevo doesn’t have a lot of fancy features like other tools on this list. I recommend it solely because of the value it provides with the FREE plan.

A perfect choice for beginners, I must say.

It’s even better than MailerLite because guess what? MailerLite’s free plan allows up to 1000 contacts or leads. But, Brevo lets you store UNLIMITED contacts or leads even with the FREE plan.

That’s huge if you are looking for a tool solely for the purpose of storing a lot of contacts.

But it doesn’t provide features like marketing automation with the free plan, while MailerLite does. So choose accordingly.

Pricing

• Lifetime FREE plan with unlimited contacts – 300 emails per day

For more features like automation, A/B testing, and advanced statistics, the paid plans are as follows:

• Starter: $25/mo

• Business: $65/mo

8. Leadpages

Sometimes, only popups are not enough to capture leads.

If you are selling a product such as an E-book, online course, or software, then you need a full-fledged landing page to showcase all its features and necessary information.

A landing page, when clubbed with forms and pop-ups can work wonders in increasing your conversion rate and bottom line.

Leadpages is an awesome tool that lets you do both!

It lets you build beautiful landing pages that are optimized for high conversion rates. Also, it lets you easily add pop-ups and forms to these landing pages or any other pages or websites you own.

Other key features

• AI Engine: Streamlines your copywriting process with AI-generated content, headlines, and ad copy

• Integrations: Leadpages integrates with TONNES of other software ranging from CRM and e-commerce to social media and marketing automation

• Unlimited popups and alerts: Collect emails with an unlimited number of popups and alerts on your landing pages or websites

• Site builder: Drag and drop site builder to design beautiful landing pages

• Unlimited landing pages, traffic, and leads. No extra money is charged for your progressive success

Pricing

Leadpages has a straightforward pricing structure:

• Standard: $37/mo (billed annually) – 1 site

• Pro: $74/mo (billed annually) – 3 sites

• FREE custom domain and FREE hosting with both plans

• Unlimited pages, traffic, and leads with both plans

• 14-day free trial available

9. Thrive Leads

Thrive Leads is another WordPress plugin for building your mailing list. This list building software uses the most cutting-edge conversion tactics used by smart business owners and growth hackers.

Key features

I trust Thrive Leads because of the following reasons:

• Wide variety of forms: A wide range of forms to choose from – inline forms, floating ribbons, content upgrades, 2-step opt-in forms, etc.

• Advanced A/B testing to know what works and what doesn’t

• Discover detailed stats and reports. Check how your campaigns are doing

• Direct API integrations for the most popular email services

Pricing

No fluff here! One single plan that will cost you $99 per year translating to $8.25/mo.

Thrive Leads is a part of the Thrive Suite that has various other tools to grow your dream online business.

The entire thrive Suite costs $299/year.

10. Sleeknote

Sleeknote is another list builder ideal for E-commerce and service websites.

You can have forms for reducing cart abandonment, running giveaways, offering welcome discounts, and building seasonal email lists for events like Black Friday.

Sleeknote is aimed at improving your conversion rates and sales.

Sleeknote is used by companies like AUDI for building their email lists.

Key features

• High-precision targeting: Sleeknote believes that “no two visitors are alike”. It lets you target visitors based on what stage they are in the buying journey

• 1200+ integrations to connect your email list with other marketing software

• A user-friendly dashboard gives you a handy overview of your performance, so you can see how things are going at a glance. Track your performance in Google Analytics events that are sent automatically upon integration

• Easy drag-and-drop form builder

Pricing

All plans come with countless features, unlimited domains or websites, unlimited campaigns, and unlimited support.

The prices change based on the number of visitors per month.

The plans include Lite (€49/month), Basic (€59/month), Plus (€114/month), Pro (€225/month), and Premium (€369/month) – starting from 25000 visitors per month to up to 500,000 visitors per month.

The above plans are billed annually. Sleeknote is a little expensive but the quality of service isn’t compromised.

There’s also a 7-day free trial available.

It also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on a monthly plan and a 100-day money-back guarantee on an annual plan.

Final thoughts

There are many list building tools on the internet but you need to choose the best one for yourself. Some of the tools on the list are good for WordPress, some are good for e-commerce websites, while some also let you send emails to your leads.

Take a look at the list above and shortlist the ones you feel are a good fit for you.

Plus, here are my personal recommendations.

Start building your email list today!

Make sure to add any other awesome tools you know about.

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Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you click on the link and make a purchase. TIA if you decide to purchase through me 🙂