Growing your customer base is often one of the most important aspects of creating a profitable ecommerce business, no matter the niche.
With digital marketing more necessary than ever, keeping track of leads and contacts is a lot easier with the help of email capture tools. These tools provide a digital bridge between your website and those interested in you or your product.
And as ecommerce stores evolve, so do the tools that help them grow.
In 2023, there are a number of email capture tools that will help ecommerce stores capture more leads, grow their customer base, and increase sales.
Let's dive in and explore what it means to capture email, and seven of the most popular email capture tools for ecommerce.
What Does Email Capture Mean?
Email capture is a process where a website collects an email address from visitors and stores it in a database.
In the old days, the database might have been a simple spreadsheet. But now, with email capture tools, it’s easier than ever to collect and store an individual's information.
You have probably seen pop-ups before, like this one from Oodie:
Ecommerce brands use pop-ups like these to capture emails from visitors to their sites.
This information is then used to send out marketing emails, newsletters, and special offers.
And the role of email capture tools is to help create pop-ups like this.
You can think of email capture tools as the foundation for any successful email marketing strategy. To send out emails, you have to first capture emails.
With features like pop-ups, forms, click-to-subscribe buttons, and countdowns, email capture tools help you do just that.
Some email-capturing tools include the ability to send emails as well, while others focus solely on capturing emails.
Those who focus solely on capturing emails must integrate with another email marketing platform in order to be effective.
The integrations are relatively easy most of the time, but if you don’t have an existing email marketing platform, we recommend choosing an email capture tool that offers both capturing and emailing capabilities.
After all, why not cut out the middleman?
To help you, we will give you both options! Those that can do it all, as well as those that only focus on capturing emails and require integration with an email marketing platform.
Let's get started!
The Best Email Capture Tools for Ecommerce in 2023
Let's look at each of these 7 email capture tools in more detail, and go through what they offer.
1. Drip (Best Overall)
Features
Drip is a comprehensive all-in-one marketing automation platform that helps you capture emails through forms, popups, and other interactive elements.
Unlike other marketing automation platforms, email capture isn’t an afterthought with Drip — the same time and attention is afforded to email capture as it is email marketing. Drip provides complete customizable freedom, as well as tons of ready-to-use templates to use.
These email capture templates include spin-to-win, exit-intent, mystery offers, and urgency pop-ups. If you choose one template, you can still customize it any way you want to give it your own personal touch.
Once you have captured your emails, you can segment your lists into different segments, send personalized emails, do A/B tests of different versions, and track the performance of your campaigns.
Integrations
Drip has native integration with all of the major ecommerce platforms including Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. On top of that, it integrates with hundreds of other third-party providers, making it one of the most versatile email marketing platforms out there.
What's best, as Drip is also a marketing automation platform, you won’t need to integrate it with anything but your ecommerce platform to get up and running.
Pricing
Drip comes with a simple pricing plan, offering only one plan that starts from $39 a month for 2500 contacts, and goes up depending on the size of your email list. No matter the size of your email list, you get a 14-day free trial that you can cancel at any time.
2. OptiMonk
Features
OptiMonk is an email capturing tool that specializes in creating popups, surveys, and header bars to grow your email list. To start with, you can select from one of their hundreds of ready-to-use templates, or create email capturing widgets from scratch.
You can select from different types of widgets, including popups, side messages, surveys, gamification, and sticky bars. OptiMonk also offers analytics and A/B testing capabilities to help you optimize your campaigns. You can track the performance of each widget, as well as split-test different versions.
Optimonk doesn't provide the ability to send emails out, so it's best used as a complement to other email marketing platforms.
Integrations
Optimonk integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento, as well as all major email marketing platforms including Drip, ActiveCampaign, and Omnisend.
Pricing
Optimonk monthly plans range between $39 a month to $249 a month. They also have a fully free plan, with limitations of 15,000 pageviews a month, and a max of one domain. Once your pageviews grow, you have to choose one of their paid plans.
3. Popupsmart
Features
Popupsmart is an email capture solution, designed for building email lists via popups. It comes with over 35 free templates, that you can use as is or further customized to your liking.
As with other email capture tools, Popupsmart includes different widget types to start with, such as get free shipping, webinar invitations, free ebooks, and more.
You also get access to analytics, so you can see how each widget is performing. You can split-test different versions of widgets, to see which one works best for your business.
Popupsmart doesn't have the ability to send out emails, so to use it effectively, you have to integrate it with an email marketing platform.
Integrations
Popupsmart doesn’t have the capability to send out emails, so you have to integrate it with an email marketing platform to use it effectively. It has native integrations with major email marketing platforms, as well as ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and ClickFunnels.
Pricing
Popupsmart has four different plans to choose from, the cheapest one is free. The free plan has a limit of 5,000 pageviews a month, and the ability to create one popup. If you cross that line, you have to opt for one of their paid plans.
4. Getsitecontrol
Features
Getsitecontrol allows you to capture emails with different types of popups, including surveys, contact forms, special deals, and discount offers.
For the popups, you can enable triggers like time, scroll depth, or page visit to show the popup. Triggers help you get the most out of your popups, as you can target the right people at the right time.
One standout feature of Getsitecontrol is its extensive analytics for all of the popups.
Real-time results are available for things like sales (when integrated with an email marketing platform), devices used to see the popup, daily views, and email signups.
Integrations
Getsitecontrol doesn't have the option to send out emails (only capture), so you have to integrate it if you want to send out the emails. It integrates natively with the ecommerce platform Shopify, as well as with multiple email marketing platforms, including Drip, Benchmark Email, Omnisend, and many more.
Pricing
Getsitecontrol has three different plans to choose from, with prices ranging from $9 a month to $29 a month. They don't offer a free plan, but they do have free trials for their paid plans.
5. Wisepops
Features
Wisepops is an email capture solution for your website, offering the ability to create and customize popups, notification bars, and other widgets.
It comes with an intuitive popup editor, allowing you to customize the look and feel of your popups. You also have access to different templates, which you can use as is or further customize.
Wisepops has some interesting personalization features, such as targeting and segmentation. You can show different popups to different people based on their location, device type, or behavior on the website.
Integrations
Wisepops provides a tool for capturing emails and building your list, but it doesn't have the capacity to send out emails, so to use it effectively, you have to integrate it with an email marketing platform. It does have an integration with the major email marketing platforms, as well as with ecommerce platforms like Shopify.
Pricing
Wisepops offers only one plan, with prices based on your monthly page views, starting at $49 and going all the way up to $299. They offer a 14-day free trial to get started with.
6. Nextsale
Features
Nextsale is a lead-capturing tool that enables you to create widgets for capturing emails. With its drag-and-drop widget builder, you can fully customize the popups you show on your website. Or you can select from one of their available templates.
You can target the popups based on visitor behavior, like their IP address, device language, and geolocation.
Something worth noting is that outside of the email capturing features, Nextsale also has tools for capturing phone numbers for later targeting with SMS marketing.
Integrations
Nextsale offers native integration with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, WordPress, and custom-coded websites.
It has direct integrations with all the major email marketing platforms, so you can send out the captured emails (not possible from Nextsale). It's good to note that the integrations with email marketing platforms are not available on the free plan. You have to opt for a paid plan to do that.
Pricing
Nextsale has five plans to select from, the cheapest one is free and offers free popups up to 1000 page views a month. The paid plans range from $39 month to $249 a month, and all of them have a 10-day free trial.
7. Bloom (For WordPress)
Features
Bloom is a WordPress plugin specifically designed to capture emails with forms and pop-ups.
Bloom has over 100 pop-up and form templates to select from, which you can use as is or customized further.
Here is an example of their email-capturing pop-up:
You can create and save your own templates, so you never have to start from scratch again.
Other notable features include the ability to split-test different designs and track your results.
You get access to basic analytics that include your average conversion rate, amount of email subscribers gained, average list growth, and more.
Integrations
Bloom integrates natively with WordPress sites.
Pricing
Bloom is part of the Elegant Themes product group, and to access it, you have to opt for all of its products. If you're building an ecommerce store within WordPress, it does include everything you need. You have two options in terms of pricing: the yearly plan, which is $89 a year, or lifetime access for $249.
Choose a tool that suits your needs
The use of email capture tools is becoming more and more popular amongst ecommerce stores, driven by the high return on investment that email marketing can offer.
With over 4 billion daily email users, it’s crucial to use email marketing to succeed in the ecommerce market.
To capture emails, brands can use email capturing tools, which can be integrated into popular email marketing platforms.
Or you can use a platform like Drip, which does it all.
Drip is an email marketing platform that helps to capture emails, build lists, segment and personalize your content, and send out automated emails. It is a comprehensive solution for all your email marketing needs.
Drip offers a 14-day free trial to get started and a native integration with platforms like Shopify.
