Sumo.com Review: Boost Your List Building, Social Shares and Your Business

Sometimes there are a helpful bunch of people who create all the tools you need to really make a difference in your business.

Then, they stick them in one handy place, where most of the stuff is free!

And that place is called Sumo.com.

What is Sumo.com Exactly?

The name certainly does not give it away, but Sumo.com is a collection of very well thought out applications that you can add to your website to boost your online business.

It includes a wide range of handy apps such as:

• tools to increase/build your email list faster (and we all know that leads to more sales)
• tools to analyse your website, traffic and clicks (to focus visitors attention and get more leads or sales)
• tools to increase your social media shares (to bring in more traffic) 

Whether or not you want, or even need all of the above, I will put it all in one simple sentence for you.

Sum.com is here to grow, improve and boost your online business.

Why Is Sumo.com So Different?

Apart from the huge range of tools they have to help your business in almost every online area, they are also very creative!

 I know what you are thinking! Who needs Picasso painting you a pretty picture, when what you really want is more money, right?

In marketing and sales, creativity is what really counts. This is because if you are ahead of your competition, using tools and ideas that they are not yet using, then you are probably going to win more business.

And that is what we are all after in the end. To crush the competition!

Although many of the tools they provide are not fundamentally new or ground-breaking, almost every single one of them has some new or innovative features that I have rarely (if ever) not seen anywhere else.

Sumo.com has your back when it comes to online marketing and sales, so why not give it a go? 

Email List Building (Optins) Applications

Like all SumoMe Applications, there is a basic functionality that you get for free, which is more than enough to do what you need.

But, if you want more options, more functionality (and bells and whistles) then you have to pay.

Quite fair really.

Further down this review, I will break down the Free vs Paid versions in detail, but first let’s take a look at the different applications.

List Builder App (aka Popups)

We all know the popups that appear on a website when we visit, and this is what the List Builder application from Sumo.com does.

It is very easy to set up and use, and has all the functionality you would expect from a popup:

• Control over how it looks
• When it appears
• How long before it appears again
• Fine-tuned page control (which pop ups appear where)

Below is an example of how the standard Sumo Me popup looks:

Pretty straight forward, right?

But you want more stunning templates?

Of course, if you have the Pro Version, you get 30 other amazing templates to choose from!

Scroll Box

Another popular and effective way to collect email addresses is via the more subtle scroll box.

Unlike the popup, which can be a bit too “in your face” for some people, the scroll box cruises onto the screen, to a specific corner, after the user reaches a certain point in the content.

So, you can scroll your email sign up (optin) box in once the user is more engaged in your posts. This means you are more likely to get better quality leads.

The scroll box is quite similar to the List Builder/Popup with the ability to edit most everything on the page (via a very similar interface, so I won’t show you it again).

Below is an example of one of the paid templates you can use:

Smart Bar

If you have ever seen the Hello Bar or similar “top of the page” bars that are always visiblethen you have seen a Smart Bar.

It is yet another great option for list building and showcasing current offers on your website.

Below is one of the Pro version templates to show you how it can look:

The Smart Bar is a little simpler than other optins, but has the following options available:

• Editing all the text, fonts and colors
• Determining when it is shown (always, or every x days/weeks/months)
• Deciding if it is always shown or hidden on scroll (up or down is possible)
• Some control over  what pages it appears on (home, blogs, mobile, desktop)

Welcome Mat

Quite a newcomer to the email list building scene, the welcome mat is one of the best ways to currently collect emails.

It is a full screen cover (or mat) that dominates your website when people first visit. Visitors have no choice but to see what it offers, or choose to move on with your content.

If they decide to not give their email, they can exit via the No Thanks button or the arrow at the bottom. The mat then slides nicely out of the way to reveal the content they were after.

Here is an example of what you will see on your first visit to my website at the time of writing:

Email Service Integration

The guys at Sumo.com have made sure that integrating with your favorite email service is easy as pie!

A lot of list building tools only integrate with the most popular, then for the rest you have to go get the code and paste it in yourself (so not great for non-techies!).

Here is the current list (Nov 2015) of email marketing services Sumo.com connects to:

With these ones only being available to Pro users:

• HubSpot
• Infusionsoft
• Ontraport
• Pardot 
• Sailthru
• Exact Target

So as you can see, the list is huge (bigger than most optin/list building tools I have seen).

A/B Testing

If you are not familiar with A/B testing, it is when you run two different versions (A and B) of something to see which one works better.

When you are attracting leads via forms on your website, using all of the above list building tools, A/B testing. Just conduct a few tests with various elements to see what works best. This can increase your conversions (number of leads) significantly.

How easy is it to set up an A/B Testing?

With all Sumo.com Pro versions, it is very simple to add a second version of an optin form (like welcome mat) and adjust it to something you think will work better. You could try a better headline, image, button etc, and then over the course of a month or so, see if it is. Then try something else. 

It can all be done in minutes.

While testing out Sumo Me on this website, I tried too significantly different welcome mats (not ideal for A/B testing, but interesting nonetheless) and you can see the outcome below. The first version I had was getting nearly double the optins, so I deleted the other one!

List Building Recommendations

There are a lot of options for email list building using optins, and I know it can get confusing.

But one thing is for sure, building your email list is one of the most important things you should be doing online.

If you plan to make money that is.

Even if you don’t understand why yet, you will eventually, and you will look back and be happy that you have lots of emails already!

For Beginners

If you are just getting your feet wet online, or have a limited budget, you can stick with the Free Version for now.

It gives you most of what you need and leaves you room to improve (go Pro) in the future.

What optin forms should you add to your website?

I would try a few different options at the same time to maximise your email list sign ups, such as:

• scroll box and welcome mat
• popup and smart bar

Don’t go overboard and use them all. But have at least one or two.

For Advanced Users

I would go Pro on at least one of Apps that are delivering the most emails for you.

Because you should not have all optin methods turned on at once, you may not need the full pro pack (unless you are using Heatmaps, Analytics etc, then it is worth it – more on that below).

But, you can get the email pro pack for the price of 2 Pro packs (ie. $40). So consider that too.

Why go Pro?

You get A/B testing (which is a must for really improving your optin rate) and also tracking and conversion using pixels (so if you use ads, or retargeting, this is a must).

Social Sharing Applications

SumoMe have not only focused on building your email list, they have also added some pretty unique features to increase your social shares too.

There are three tools in all, including

• the image social sharer
• the highlighter
• the standard social sharing bar

Many of the features these tools offer are either:

• never seen in a WordPress plugin,
• or they are attached to a Chrome extension like Buffer. 

So it is great to see such pro features in Sumo.com, and all of them are Free too!

So, let’s take a look…

Image Sharer

This is one of my favorite apps from SumoMe because it is so rare to see people share images on places like Twitter.

In case you were not aware, people are far more likely to read/share your content on social networks if you have a great image.

And on Twitter, you can really stand out with images.

** Check out my Twitter feed and you will see the difference images make.

So allowing your visitors to share your content directly from your images (and then including that image in their social shares) is killer!

I can’t count the number of times I have tried to share someone’s image and gave up because it was so hard (or impossible).

Then that person misses out on extra social media exposure.

So what does the Image Sharer do?

Quite simply it puts social sharing buttons over your images, so visitors can share your content directly from and with the image.

When you hover over a particular image in a post for example, you will see the following:

Features and Options

The image sharer is not overly complex, but it does have some great options to help you tune and tweak how you want to use it:

• which social media to share to (Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Tapiture and Yummly)
• where the buttons appear (centered, or a corner)
• button colors (override the standard social media colors with your own branding)
• control over when the sharing buttons appears (which images, only which pages or content etc)

Share

A must have feature on any website is the ability to share your content via social media.

Their answer to that is the Share application.

It comes with most of the standard share functions you would expect (various social media channels, locations of buttons etc) but also some unexpected ones in the Pro Version, such as sharing via mobile apps (Whatsapp and SMS).

The standard installation includes various social media buttons and appears floating on the side of your content like this:

Features and Options

The Sumo.com share App has a whole bunch of useful options, even with the free version:

• which social media to share to (Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and many many more, some I have never heard of)
• where the buttons appear on desktop (top, bottom, side) and mobile (separately defined)
• fine-grained control over buttons (color, labels, size, share counts and more)
• click tracking
• powerful display rules (control over exactly where the buttons appear – types of pages, content etc)

Highlighter

This is another great feature that is rarely seen in the social sharing world. They have given us the ability to highlight a piece of text and share that with the post/page. 

Buffer (like with the image sharing) already has this feature built into their browser extension, but rarely is it available right on your website for anyone to use!

Of course, it is not a feature that will be heavily used, but once your users get used to sharing whatever quote they love from your post, they will be hard pressed to live without it (it will be similar to those click to tweet boxes, but everywhere).

This is how the Highlighter looks in action:

Features and Options

The Sumo.com Highlighter App is pretty self-explanatory, but here is what you get:

• Twitter and Facebook share buttons (ability to add your Twitter handle at the end too)
• Highlighted text is placed in the share box
• Box and button colors can be customized
• Display rules allow you to fully determine when this feature is available

Social Sharing Recommendations

If social shares is high on your agenda, then the tools you get are almost second to none.

Image sharing, especially on Twitter, will definitely increase your social engagement – so the Image Sharer is awesome for this.

The more general Sharer App is more or less the same as any other sharing plugin – except for the mobile specific sharing options like Whatsapp and SMS. Also, the fact that they have mobile specific settings is a real plus.

So if you don’t already have a good share buttons plugin, then the Sharer could be one of your best options. After all, the state of WordPress sharing plugins (apart from Social Warfare) is pretty dismal in my opinion. 

Analytics Apps

That’s right, it does not end with Sumo.com email list and sharing apps! These guys have built an amazing suite of applications to help boost your business.

The analytics apps range from integration with Google Analytics to Heat Maps (something I pay for separately with Crazy Egg, so this could save you that money!).

Personally I love heat maps, as they give you great insight into what elements people are paying attention to on your website. A must for tweaking and tuning (or even redesigning) and increasing your conversions.

So let’s start with the Heat Map App…

Heat Map App

If you are not familiar with heat maps, here is a quick explanation.

They essentially record clicks on your website and show you visually where these clicks are happening (using colors to indicate few or many clicks).

The Heat Map also shows you exactly how many clicks, and where they occurred, when you hover over specific (or general) areas of your pages. So you can kind of drill in to an area if you want fine-grained click information.

This is insanely helpful in determining what users are clicking on (ie. navigation, call to action etc) or not clicking on. Which can help you fix your site and get more sales.

It is also sometimes surprising to see where they are clicking. It can often be places you had not thought to place a link. So you can also capture more traffic that would otherwise perhaps leave! 

Heat Maps are pretty simple to set up. And once they are, all you have to do is wait for enough visitors in order to start seeing results.

I have had mine running for a week or so, and this is the resulting heat map for my home page:

As you can see there is a lot of attention on my Blog link and some of the other navigation items, as well as some random clicks where you would not expect. But overall it can help me fine-tune my menu at the very least.

Heat Map Features

• Click tracking done in campaigns
• Campaigns can control what pages 
• Can ignore clicks from logged-in users
• Can set to record bulk pages via rules

Content Analytics App

This is almost the siamese twin of the Heat Maps, only here we are dealing with scrolling.

Content Analytics allows you to see, through a visual heat map how far down your content people are scrolling.

On the right is an example from the Sumo.com website.

Why is this useful?

There are many reasons you would want this data:

• determine the most useful place to put calls to action (to increase optins, sales etc)
• find out where people are dropping off (eg. exiting) on a specific page so you can improve your content or sales pages
• generally figure out if people are actually reading something, or if it is better reworked or placed elsewhere.

When it comes to conversion and website optimization, this kind of data is pricelss. Otherwise you are just guessing what is working and what is no.

I have not had a chance to try this, but the idea is pretty simple. 

Content Analytics Features

• Scroll tracking done in campaigns
• Campaigns can control what pages 
• Can ignore logged-in users
• Can set to record or ignore bulk pages via rules

Google Analytics App

Who doesn’t want direct access to their Google Analytics data right inside their website?

Sumo.com makes it their mission to give you the tools and data you can use to improve your website, today.

Sure, this is not a new feature, or an amazing application. But if you are using the other Sumo Me applications why not just turn this one on and stay in their dashboard for all your analytics data.

Content Analytics Features

One feature that really stood out to me was direct on page analytics. Analytics actually provides you a lot of the on-page stats as you view right in your pages and posts.

Here is a depiction of how it looks:

Other interesting features include:

• Customizable dashboard (create your own)
• Real-time stats from Google
• Top content (most viewed pages)

Below are a couple of examples of how Sumo.com’s Google Analytics App looks:

Traffic & Communicate Me Apps

There are so many apps in the Sumo Me arsenal, but these last ones are also quite interesting.

First, there is the Discover App, which is similar to services such as Taboola, Outbrain or Zemanta.

The second one is a different take on the good old contact form for your website. 

Discover App

I am a little intrigued by the Discover App. In Sumo.com’s words:

Discover App gets you more traffic. We connect you to 150,000+ other SumoMe sites to send free visitors your way. Other SumoMe sites promote your content on their sites, and you promote new content for your visitors on your site.

How does it work?

You agree to show other people’s content on your site and earn credits for each impression and click you get.

In return, you can spend your credits getting your content shown across the Sumo Me network.

So it is a two-way street, and you may want to check what kinds of content are coming through.

But who can say no to free traffic?

The discover app presents a grid of posts and images on the bottom of your content, according to your settings

• categories (a big list of common blog categories)
• languages (full list of languages)
• level of content (G, PG, or R)

How does it look?

You have a lot of control over the colors, fonts etc as you do with any of their Apps.

There are also two options for displaying the content. A full grid as below:

Or a simple scroll box like this:

Other Notable Features

The Discover App has been well thought out with some fine-tuned controls available:

• Control over exactly which URLs of your content are being shown on other sites
• Blocked list of sites you no longer want to display (Pro version)
• Full page control over where the Discover App appears (like with many other Sumo Me Apps)
• Also statistics on what the incoming and outgoing traffic is

Contact Form App

Never just doing what everyone else is doing, Sumo.com has changed the way contact forms are used on websites.

Think of it as a hybrid between a scroll box and a contact form. 

Basically, their contact form is a very simple form (two fields) that you can place anywhere on your website, without disrupting the flow of the site.

It also means, there are far fewer steps required for someone to get in touch – always a good thing in business and sales.

Here is what the standard form looks like:

So, as you can see, it is also super simple, requiring an email address and a message. That is all.

Features

The contact form is edited with their standard editor, so all of the text, fonts, colors etc are editable. No surprises there.

It also comes with the following handy features:

• Auto-reply message to assure customers you got their message (fully customizable)
• Control over where the contact form appears (like all other apps, very fine-grained)
• Conversion tracking (so you can target people who have visited before)
• And full control over where on the page the contact form is displayed – both on desktop and mobile (done via an intuitive interface shown below)

Is Sumo.com For You?

If you are looking at improving any aspect of your online business, Sumo.com has something to help you out.

Whether it be

• increasing your social media presence,
• building your email list and leads, 
• or tweaking your website to improve sales and conversions.

Not only that, but they are super easy to set up, and have lots of sexy templates ($6 a pop) if you want to go that extra mile, without upgrading to pro!

And the great thing about it all is that you can try any of the Apps for free!

Or, if you like playing with all the settings, (tweaking, testing and improving) they give you all the bells and whistles too (many of them in the free version).

What is not to love?