Apr 17, 2018
The Ultimate Sumo WordPress Guide
Everything you need to know about Sumo WordPress rolled up into one awesome guide.
Find out the following in this comprehensive guide to Sumo WordPress (Sumo’s WordPress plugin integration):
- What is Sumo
- Why use Sumo
- What can Sumo do?
- How to use Sumo with WordPress
- How to setup Sumo
- Sumo Pricing
SumoMe and Sumo
A quick note about SumoMe’s name. Last year SumoMe decided to change their name to Sumo. A lot of people still probably know Sumo as SumoMe, so I just thought I’d include this quote note in case you’re wondering who Sumo are!
What is Sumo?
Although it might like some kind of sumo wrestler awareness movement, Sumo is actually a set of tools to automate your business growth.
Sumo WordPress plugs into your website and does the heavy lifting for you, by providing you with a simple set of tools to get more traffic, get more customers and track your success.
Why use Sumo?
The reason Sumo have been so successful is that it allows businesses to supercharge their growth with no coding needed.
One of the main reasons people use WordPress is due to the fact that you can build websites without having to touch any code.
Using Sumo also means you don’t have to pay for custom solutions for things like list building and driving traffic.
If you can get an all in one solution for driving traffic, converting leads and getting more customers for such an affordable price, why would you look elsewhere?
What can Sumo do?
Get ready. This is where our guide gets meaty.
Sumo focuses on helping you grow through three areas.
- Get more traffic
- Get more customers
- Track your success
Get more traffic
Getting more traffic is one of the hardest things to do when it comes to online marketing.
The internet is awash with online marketing guides, tutorials, videos and solutions all claiming to be the answer to your problems.
Growing your business online is actually quite a simple and methodical process, it just requires a lot of hard work and incremental improvement.
Sumo Share
Share is one of Sumo’s solutions for driving more traffic to your website.
Share helps you:
Share makes it stupid-easy for your visitors to share your content to their friends, family, and others with built-in social media buttons for your site. The more people share your site and content, the more viral traffic you get.
Sumo Share example
Below you can see Share in action.
Get 20% more visitors with Share.
Sumo Highlighter
Sumo Highlighter allows you to highlight and share relevant, useful snippets of information from your website.
This is awesome for Twitter in particular.
With Highlighter, your visitors can highlight sections of your articles to share with their friends, coworkers, and more. This does two insanely valuable things: 1. Drives you social traffic 2. Highlights popular sections for you readers.
You can use Higlighter to drive more traffic by sharing useful, intriguing snippets that will make users on social media want to learn more and click through to your website.
Sumo Image Sharer
Image Sharer does a similar thing to Highlighter, allowing you to share useful images from your website on social media at the click of a button.
The benefit here is that these images are shared direct from your website, so when they are clicked, users are directed back to your website.
As Sumo put it:
Right now, it’s insanely hard for visitors to share the images on your site. This means that you’re missing out on a ton of easy viral traffic. Image Sharer makes it dead simple for your readers to auto-magically share the images on your site and link back to you, driving you viral traffic!
Get more customers
What are you going to do with all that new traffic you’re driving?
You’re going to turn it into new customers.
Which is where the Sumo’s ‘get more customers tools’ come into play.
Sumo List Builder
Sumo describe List Builder as:
List Builder converts one-time visitors into lifelong readers and customers. Create professional-looking pop-ups that appear on clicks, timers and before people leave! With advanced drag-and-drop functionality, this is the most advanced (yet easiest to use) email capture tool on the internet.
Once you start driving traffic to your website, you need to turn that traffic into leads that you can nurture and turn into customers.
It all starts with a list.
Why you need List Builder Pro
The free version of List Builder is a good place to start, but the List Builder Pro offering is insanely cool.
List Builder Pro comes with Click Triggers which are proven to result in higher conversions. Click Triggers fire on certain events like clicking a button or taking a certain action and generate a dynamic sign up form.
In a world where everyone is trying to compete for the same email signups, any competitive advantage you can get is worth taking advantage of.
Welcome Mat
Welcome Mat allows you to:
Turn any page into your highest-converting page with Welcome Mat. Welcome Mat displays a full-screen call to action that shows when visitors land on your site. Encourage your visitors to join your email list, check out your popular blog post … the possibilities are endless!
This is a great tool for driving visitors to a landing page.
Hit your visitors with an offer or incentive to subscribe as soon as they land and watch your list explode.
Welcome Mat Pro
So why use the paid Sumo plans for Welcome Mat Pro?
Welcome Mat CTA and Welcome Mat Video will allow you to stand out from the crowd and generate conversions in a competitive online marketing battlefield.
Welcome Mat Video in particular isn’t something you see everyday. And it’s these incremental improvements that will allow you to gain an edge over your competitors.
Sumo Scroll Box
If Welcome Mat is the shotgun approach to generating leads, then Scroll Box is the gentleman’s approach.
Sumo describe Scroll Box as:
Okay, so you want to grow your email list, right? But we get it, you don’t want to be too pushy about it. Scroll Box provides the solution: a polite way to ask your visitors for their email address as they finish reading your latest blog post or learning about your product.
What’s in pro?
Pro Scroll Box users see a 20–40% uptake in conversions due to the advanced targeting features (and probably lack of SumoMe branding).
Sumo Smart Bar
Smart Bar is a clever reminder to join your list that sits neatly at the top of your website.
This tool is super useful, as it’s fairly subtle and can enabled on your blog pages so that when you’ve delivered sufficient value to a reader, they may decide to subscribe if it’s easy enough for them to do so.
Smart Bar sits beautifully at the top of your website reminding your visitors to join your email list, check out your new blog post, or whatever else you want them to do. You’ll be amazed at what a simple reminder can do :-).
This is an insanely cool tool and what you can do with the pro version easily justifies the affordable monthly price tag.
Again users on the pro version see an average of a 20–50% increase in conversions.
Using advanced display rules you can show different smart bars to different visitors.
For example, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from Twitter you can display a specific smart bar for visitors from these channels.
Being smart about your smart bar (see what I did there) usage will help you maximise the conversions you generate from this nifty tool.
Track your success
On top of this collection of lead generating super powers, Sumo also helps you track your success with a suite of analytic tools.
Sumo Heatmap
Sumo describe Heatmap as:
Heat Maps shows you EXACTLY where people are clicking on your site. With this information, you can then improve your pages to show your visitors what they want to see.
Pretty useful information. If you can understand what your visitors want via their clicks, you can make data driven improvements to the UX and content of your website, driving more signups in the process.
Sumo Heatmap Pro
Driving a decent amount of traffic? You’ll want to sign up for one of Sumo Pro’s paid plans to access Heatmap Pro, which allows for heatmap metrics on unlimited traffic. The free version is capped at 1,000 visitors.
Google Analytics
Sumo has a handy Google Analytics integration allowing you to view your Google Analytics stats right from your Sumo dashboard.
This further supports my view that Sumo is an incredibly useful tool for freelancers, small business owners and marketers looking to simplify their digital marketing without touching any code.
Many small business I speak to aren’t Google analytics savvy, and just want the bottom line.
Having everything setup in one simple dashboard is a good step toward helping these owners get on top of their digital marketing metrics.
Sumo Contact Form
Sumo also offers a no code contact form solution, for when your leads are ready to reach out to you directly.
Having this all under one roof keeps things simple and means you won’t have to look elsewhere for further plugins to do all of this. Potentially saving you 8 separate plugin installs when you add up all the features.
Sumo WordPress
Now that we’ve covered how awesome Sumo is, how do we use it on WordPress?
Sumo make it easy with their Sumo WordPress Plugin.
You can download the Sumo WordPress plugin free from your WordPress dashboard. Don’t worry, I’ll show you how now.
Log in to your WordPress dashboard via /wp-admin
Click Plugins > Add New and search for Sumo
Install Sumo
Click on the blue box to setup Sumo
Log in or create an account
Sign up for Sumo Pro
Pricing
So how do the various Sumo plans stack up?
Well, first of all I think it’s important to note that Sumo offer a 30 day money back guarantee. So the risk is low if you decide to purchase on an annual discount and decide Sumo is not for you.
Sumo Free
The Sumo free plan provides you with the basic functionality of the Sumo suite of products and includes Sumo branding. It includes basic support, and basic targeting. Enough to get started, but probably not enough to make a big difference in today’s competitive online marketing landscape.
Sumo Professional
The professional package is great for freelancers, consultants and bloggers.
It gives you a noticeable increase in functionality and features, including pro support, pro targeting, click triggers, browser push notifcations (that cool new popup box you see on websites asking if they can notify you of new content) and up to 750 subscribers.
Customer feedback
$30 per month paid monthly / $24 per month paid annually (save $72)
Login to upgrade and get Sumo Professional.
Sumo Small Business
The Sumo Small Business package provides everything you need to grow your small business (along with some elbow grease).
On top of the Professional package it includes up to 5 seats so all of your team can use Sumo, 2 sites membership, content upgrades (so you can upload and email content all your subscribers automatically), live chat and unlimited subscribers.
This package is for businesses serious about growing a big list.
Customer feedback
$73 per month paid monthly / $59 per month paid yearly ($168 saving)
Sumo Ecommerce
Struggling to take your ecommerce store to the next level? Try out SumoMe’s ecommerce package.
With all the features included in the Small Business package, the Ecommerce package integrates directly with Shopify.
Combine the two and you have everything you need to sell online.
Customer feedback
$248 paid monthly / $199 paid yearly ($588 saving)
Go forth and Sumo
That wraps up The Ultimate Sumo WordPress Guide.
Hopefully you found this useful, and it opened your eyes a bit to what Sumo could do for you and your business.
If you have any questions or would like help setting up Sumo, let me know.
*Disclaimer* As well as being a Sumo customer, I’m a Sumo affiliate which means I earn a small commission whenever a new business decides to use Sumo.
You might also like this:
Why WordPress Is The BEST Platform To Build Your Business or Startup Website On
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