Must-have WordPress Plugins for Customer Engagement

WordPress is one of the most popular, open-source website creation platforms available to small businesses today– and for good reason. In addition to a customizable theme and template system, WordPress employs a plugin architecture, allowing you to add missing features, expand functionalities and enhance the website experience overall. These plugins are powerful marketing tools for small business owners, as they can lead to valuable business results like increased customer loyalty, brand awareness and conversions.

With just under 60,000 WordPress plugins available to choose from, however, it can be hard to narrow down exactly which plugins will add value to your site. To make it a little easier, this post will highlight some of the most popular plugins small business owners can use to support customer engagement efforts on their websites today. 

Customer Engagement WordPress Plugins

For CRM

HubSpot is without a doubt at the top of the list of must-have WordPress plugins. The plugin requires creating or connecting to an existing HubSpot account and works seamlessly with HubSpot’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, allowing you to manage leads, segment them into lists, monitor their interactions on your site and more. With automatic syncing and integrations with over 800 other tools, HubSpot is flexible, powerful and requires no coding, making it a low-effort, high-reward plugin for small business owners. 

For Conversion Rates & Lead Generation

OptinMonster is one of the most popular lead generation and conversion rate optimization plugins available to add to your WordPress site today. With a variety of features and hundreds of easy to use, drag and drop popup form templates, OptinMonster helps small business owners recover abandoned cart sales, grow email lists and convert and monetize their website traffic.

For Email Marketing Integrations

Email is one of the most effective and reliable marketing tools for small businesses today. Integrating email efforts with your small business web marketing is possible with the help of WordPress plugins like WP Mail SMTP and Mailchimp. WP Mail SMTP is a great plugin for making sure your marketing emails go out on schedule and reach your audience’s inboxes. For small business owners that use the Mailchimp email marketing platform, the Mailchimp WordPress plugin integrates seamlessly with your account and allows you to collect and sync lead information from your website to help grow your email list.

For Web Forms

WPForms and Gravity Forms are two well-known and effective plugin options for building and adding custom forms to your site. With drag and drop interfaces, templates and integrations with countless other third-party services, both of these plugins are user friendly, reliable and comprehensive. 

For Push Notifications

PushEngage is the most robust push notification plugin available for WordPress sites. PushEngage can help increase customer engagement and website traffic by allowing you to “push” targeted messages and announcements to website visitors to encourage them to perform a certain action like fill out a form or purchase a product. 

TrustPulse is another notification plugin that leverages Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) through social proof notifications. These pop ups show users how other customers are interacting with your site and what positive actions they are taking in real time (like purchasing items, signing up for memberships, or leaving reviews), in hopes of influencing them to do the same. Actively showcasing the activity of other users helps to show the liveliness or “popularity” of your site, builds urgency to purchase your products and can be a game changer for driving conversions and sales.

For Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is a dialogue-driven, go-to strategy for driving customer engagement, conversions and improving the overall customer experience. On small business websites, you often see this marketing tactic employed via live chat or chatbots that enable communications with new or existing customers in real-time. Two of the most well-known live chat plugins are Drift and the aptly-named LiveChat.

While this is not an exhaustive list, these plugins offer a great starting point for aiding and amplifying your customer engagement efforts on your small business WordPress site. For more information about specific plugin features and pricing, follow the links throughout this post.