Creating a Hello Bar with WordPress

Email lists are powerful. In a world crowded with a plethora of social networks, from Facebook to Snapchat, email is still one of the most powerful marketing channels.

Giants like Kissmetrics, Buffer, Michael Hyatt, and Jeff Goins agree that building and marketing to an email list is one of the best moves you can make for your brand. But actually doing that is much easier said than done. If you’ve tried to collect emails from your site, you know how slow of a process it can be.

You might have heard of Hello Bar. It creates a thin bar at the top of your site that spans the screen’s length. Readers can conveniently enter their email into the opt-in box.

It sounds simple, and it is, but that’s why it works. If you use the Hello Bar right, you can get a jaw-dropping amount of emails. The numbers are crazy, Derek Halpern at DIYThemes got 1,180 emails in a month (He posted more about it on Social Triggers).

The only downside is the click limit for free users. If you use the free Hello Bar, you’ll have a 100-click limit on your bar. That means you won’t be able to collect 101 emails without upgrading. There’s also a watermark that doesn’t go away without a Pro plan. While their paid plans are reasonably priced, you don’t need to upgrade because you can build your own Hello Bar for free.

With a little basic WordPress manipulation, you can create your very own Hello Bar clone. Those giants I linked to earlier don’t necessarily love Hello Bar, they love the Hello Bar concept. And you can build that same concept for absolutely no cost. You can also integrate it with your email marketing service. I’ll be showing you how to integrate it with MailChimp.

If you’re a WordPress novice, fear not––all you have to do is install a couple of plugins and change some settings. It’s that simple, and the result is a nice, appealing top bar in the Hello Bar style that you can modify to your heart’s content.

And for those who favor more versatility in the way of coding, we’ll also go over how to code a bar from scratch. But even that’s not complicated.

So if you’re ready, let’s get started.

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by Ian Chandler via SitePoint