Hello Bar Review – Will This Lead Capture Tool Drive More Conversion On Your Platform?

You never want to let a potential sale walk away. However, there’s a fine line between being too aggressive—like having fifteen popups—and creating enough opportunities to engage with your website visitors. 

Hello Bar is here to help you find the balance between these two areas to better capture the leads on your site by designing messages that appear in a “Hello Bar” or small notification bar that runs across either the bottom or top of the screen at all times. 

With it, you can time messages, customize their appearance, collect email sign-ups, and more. Overall, it’s easy to use and requires zero technical knowledge to get it deployed on your site. With it, you can promote links, display your social buttons, make announcements, and increase conversion dramatically. 

Additionally, Hello Bar works across devices, so whether someone is viewing your site on an Android Phone, MacBook Pro, Linux Computer, or anything else, they’ll see the message. 

And did we mention that Hello Bar includes a free forever plan? That means you can really test it out before deciding whether upgrading to its advanced features is the right call for you or not.  

There are quite a few engagement tools out there to help drive leads, such as Outgrow and QZZR. So, how do you decide if Hello Bar is the right choice? Discover what you need to know about Hello Bar in this review. We’ll cover its main features, pricing, competitors, and a lot more to help you determine if it’s the right fit for your marketing needs. 

What Is Hello Bar?

Hello Bar has been around for nearly a decade now. Over 583,000 websites use their services, including major brand names like Fox, Men’s Health, Salesforce, and Neil Patel. 

What is it exactly? Hello Bar allows you to design notification bars for your visitors to enhance your site’s performance. With over 500,000 website partners, you’ve undoubtedly seen Hello Bar’s work before.

Here’s an example of Hello Bar on Neil Patel’s website: 

The key thing you’ll notice is that as you scroll up and down the page is that the Hello Bar stays with you. 

Some occasions you can use Hello Bar include: 

• Advertising sales
• Product launches
• Affiliate marketing
• Newsletter opt-in
• Customer service
• Promote social media accounts
• Post news or job openings

Hello Bar also integrates with email services like MailChimp, Aweber, and other big names to integrate visitors into your email subscriber lists. 

Overall, it’s easy to use and affordable. The free plan includes up to 5,000-page views per month. After that, you can sign up from the Growth Plan, which covers up to 50,000 page views and starts at $29/month. 

Hello Bar Features

• Lead capture 
• Dashboard 
• Email marketing
• Integrations 
• Social media sharing
• Targeting 
• Landing pages
• Segmentation
• A/B Testing
• Analytics
• WordPress Plugin

Getting Started With Hello Bar

Hello Bar is really easy to get started with. Since they offer a free forever plan, they require no credit card to sign up and give the software a test drive. Just enter your email address, set an account password, and you can begin creating your first Hello Bar. 

The first thing you’ll do is choose a goal for your campaign. You have one of six options: 

Next, select which type of Bar you want to use. Depending on your goal, Hello Bar will recommend one of the options for you. Of course, you can decide if you wish to go with that option or not. 

From here, just fill out the template, configure your settings, and you’ll be good to go. Hello Bar walks you through every step along the way. Once you get the hang of using it and have your fonts and image library set up, you can create your own Hello Bar in minutes. 

When you’re ready to publish, you can either copy/paste the HTML code into your site or use the WordPress or Wix integrations to do that for you. 

That’s all there is to it. You’ll love that the software is so easy to use that you or anybody on your team can create a bar in just minutes. 

Hello Bar Pricing

Hello Bar has three main plans: Starter, Growth, and Elite. The free starter plan is a pretty sweet deal. With it you get: 

• Up to 5,000 pageviews/month
• 10 ads 
• Unlimited subscribers 
• Basic design customization
• Devie type-based targeting 
• 1 split test 

This likely won’t be enough for most businesses’ needs, but it’s a great way to try out the software and compare it with their competitors. 

From here you can upgrade to either the Growth or Elite plans shown below: 

Do note that Hello Bar does have overage charges. While they’re not much, $5 for every 25,000 additional views in a month, they can add up. 

Also, if you don’t think you fit the Hello Bar pricing model, then contact them directly. They have a custom pricing structure for clients with multiple domains, 500,000+ visitors per month, and agencies. They also will help you migrate from one of their competitors and give discounts to registered non-profits. 

Hello Bar Main Features

Hello Bar (hereafter HB) does a lot more than you might initially think. As mentioned, it makes it easy for anybody without programming experience to create popups that run across the screen at all times. But it has a few other tricks up its sleeves that will go into more detail about below. 

1. Create A Hello Bar 

This is the main HB function. With it, you place a thin, floating banner to display at all times either the top or bottom of a website.  

Creating a bar is really easy. Select your goal, choose a type, and either use the chosen template or choose from the HB library. Once you’re done, copy/paste the HTML code onto your site or use the WP integration. 

HB has responsive design built-in so you can see exactly what it will look like on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. 

2. Exit Intent Ads 

Exit Intent ads are your one last attempt at capturing a user before they leave your site. These are ads that popup as you’re about to click away from the site. There are actually a lot of exit-intent solutions out there like Picreel and Exit Popup. 

What’s really cool about Hello Bar is that you can get this functionality in addition to one of its bars simply by configuring when your ad will display in settings. 

That’s not all, though. You can also create sliders, alert bells, and more giving HB more robust functionality compared to some of its competitors. 

3. A/B Testing 

A/B testing and digital marketing are two sides of the same coin. It’s the best way to improve your approach and target your audience better. 

HB makes it really easy to do split testing and includes a generous unlimited number of tests starting from its $29 plan. You even get one free test per month on the Starter plan. What could be better than that? 

4. Analytics 

With HB analytics, you can track how well your campaigns are doing in real-time. Your analytics will be based around the goals you set, whether that’s collecting emails, phone calls, or anything else. You can customize the time frame measured and combine this with split testing to both modify existing campaign and create better ones in the future, 

5. Integrations 

Hello Bar doesn’t just collect new emails for them to sit there. With the help of integrations, you can add subscribers to your email list, introduce segmentation, along with a ton of different automations via Zapier.

Integrations are built directly in either through your email marketing service or the API, so you won’t spend hours wringing your hands why your email leads aren’t getting transferred over to where they need to go.  

Who Is Hello Bar Best For? 

Hello Bar is perfect for sites looking to capture and convert more of their leads. Neil Patel stated he got around a 10.1% conversion rate for the HB on his website. Other sites have had similar success. 

We all know the 1% conversion is the average, so who wouldn’t want that extra 9% even if it is just email sign-ups and not sales directly. 

Since Hello Bar offers a forever free plan, it’s a great option for new sites, freelancers, and those with limited marketing budgets. You don’t even have to sacrifice your time to pay for it, too, since it’s so easy to use. And the HB branding on this plan is hardly noticeable and a more than fair trade-off. 

The plug-in doesn’t even affect site performance and integrates easily into email marketing software. The paid plans are even better, giving you more page views and additional features to really make the site work for larger needs. 

Overall, Hello Bar is an excellent tool for everybody involved in online promotion, including digital marketers, agencies, eCommerce platforms, SMEs, and even large brands. 

Is Hello Bar Worth It? 

Anytime that a solution offers a free plan, it’s hard to argue against that software being worth it. Hello Bar is no exception. It’s easy to use, creates attractive and effective Hello Bars, exit intent ads, and other forms of content, and plays with your email marketing software. 

They also have a great support team and plenty of onboarding tools to make getting it up and running a breeze—even for people with absolutely no programming and design experience at all. 

Their paid plans are also affordable and are around the same price as competitors who offer only one or two of the services that Hello Bar offers. 

The one word of caution is that you need to be careful how you deploy HB onto your site. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too many popups, but finely balance it. Also, some people just want to click away the Hello Bar. Be cool and enable the ability to close the Hello Bar to help your site visitors who might be browsing from smaller screens. 

Pros

• Easy to use, no programming skills required 
• Attractive templates 
• Analytics 
• Extra tools like exit-intent popups 
• Split testing 
• Free plan 
• Built-in WP integration
• Email Marketing Integration 
• Good Customer Services 
• Segments 
• Responsive design 

Cons

• Would be nice if there were gamification features (like a spinning wheel for promotions)

Hello Bar Alternatives

There are a lot of other lead capture ads out there that offer similar functionality to Hello Bar, including: 

1. Smart Bar by Sumo 

Sumo makes a variety of SaaS tools. The Smart Bar includes customized design, email opt-in, and targeting. They also include a free plan as well as eCommerce solutions. 

The pro version starts at $39/month and includes advanced integrations, analytics, and A/B testing. Overall, the Smart Bar is just as effective as Hello Bar but isn’t as affordable, so it might not be the best call for smaller businesses and freelancers.

2. WP Notification Bar Pro 

WP Notification Bar offers you unlimited notification bars, social media, custom HTML, A/B testing, and responsive design all for a one-time fee of $19.00 per site (with discounts for multiple sites). Best of all, it’s a WP extension, so there’s no figuring out APIs or HTML codes.

It’s not quite as intuitive or feature-rich as HB, but if you want a very affordable alternative to HB with most of the same features, it’s hard to beat WP Notification Bar Pro. WP Notification also offers a limited free plan. 

Hello Bar: The Bottom Line

If you want an effective and easy way to capture more of your traffic, Hello Bar is a great way to do it.  With it, you can create a variety of different notifications, target specific audiences, and more. Try it for yourself now to see just how much it can do for you.