Hello Bar Review and Pricing: Best WP Notification Bar?

Many business owners spend all their time focusing on how to get traffic without thinking about how to capture leads and monetize said visitors. 

Most websites are poorly optimized and lose out on far more customers than they should because they don’t get to the point. 

Hello Bar can assist with that. Today we’ll take a look at how the tool works and why it’s known for improving website performance.

What is Hello Bar?

Disclaimer: Links throughout the article may be affiliated . If you click one of these links and make a purchase, we will get a commission.

Hello Bar is an easy-to-use call to action bar that sits the navigation of a website and encourages visitors to convert. It’s as simple as that. 

Think of it as a friendly advertiser encouraging your visitors to take action. For example, a plumbing company may use Hello Bar convincing visitors to call for a free quote. 

If you’re selling a book, the bar could be leading visitors to a sales page. Hello Bar can help you accomplish whatever goals you have, and it’s streamlined and straightforward.

And a top-bar is not the only type of Hello Bar offered. You can use one of five types of CTAs: bar, modal, slider, page takeover, and alert.

I like using the bar and page takeover for most uses.

Should I Use Hello Bar for My Website?

Hello Bar provides a simple solution for creating calls-to-action. Their sales page highlights just a few creative ways you can use the plugin:

• Grow your email list
• Target a specific website
• Generate more sales
• Make announcements
• Get calls from customers
• Promote social engagement

It supports all of these goals by merely showing a simple CTA with whichever type you choose. 

With the right message you can give visitors a reason to visit a specific page of your choice. You could encourage them to buy your new book, see a funny new video you just released, or donate toward your latest Kickstarter campaign. 

No matter why you want to redirect visitors, Hello Bar is very good at accomplishing this goal.

If you’re looking to build up an email list, the tool is suitable for that as well. Offer your visitors a perk in exchange for their email, and you’ll start building a list of eager customers in no time flat. 

The software can stores emails for you on the platform, or you can integrate it with you email provider. Hello Bar supports the following email providers:

• MailChimp
• AWeber
• Vertical Response
• MyEmma
• Campaign Monitor
• iContact
• MadMini
• Weebly
• SquareSpace

If your software happens to not be on the list, you can use integration software like Zapier to send leads from Hello Bar to any software. Since we use Drip, we have to include this additional step, but it’s not a huge deal.

Affiliates benefit massively from the use of Hello Bar, as it’s possible to send visitors away from your website to an offer, for example. On my site, I often send my visitors to sales pages I recommend and promote.

When you have a particular website you’re interested in promoting, you can use a custom message and an animated box to help get people to visit the link.

Promoting your social channels is also easy, as well.

Hello Bar is the ultimate little nudge device that gets site visitors to act.

Google is known to penalize pages with disruptive popups that load on the main page, but Hello Bar doesn’t have to be disruptive at all. By using it as a notification service, it helps encourage action taking by your visitors, and it shouldn’t impact your local SEO rankings.

Hello Bar Pricing

Hello Bar is a powerful little tool, and it offers excellent results to most site owners that start using the service. Before thoroughly reviewing the software, it’s essential to consider what it costs. 

After all, even useful software isn’t always worth getting if it’s too expensive. There are several different service levels available with the tool. Hello Bar is free, but to take full advantage of the platform, you’ll need a paid subscription. 

Here’s the break down of the pricing:

• Free – 5,000 views per month
• $29 per month – 50,000 views per month and more design and integration options
• $99 per month – 500,000 views per month and the most design and integration options along with premium customer support

New users can test the tool without spending anything. The free version has no trial and allows for up to 5,000 views of your popup or bar. There’s a limit of 10 different popups that can be customized, but it’s a useful tool for starting.

The free version does not allow the removal of the company’s branding, as expected.

Mid-sized sites can grow into the $29 per month plan that’s good for up to 50,000 views and offers more design options as well as unlimited popup notifications. 

Finally, at the high-end, there’s the $99 Elite option. Hello Bar allows for 500,000 monthly notification views, making this plan perfect for large websites with significant traffic.

For site owners with more views than the plan allows, there will be a $5 overage fee for every 100,000 views over the limit. 

Site owners with massive traffic numbers can work with the Hello Bar team to come up with a custom plan offering a more reasonable view cost as well. 

The software’s pricing structure is both flexible and reasonable no matter what size website you operate. I’m most impressed at how favorable the company is to new website owners.

In the early days of my first website, I used the free version for some months before upgrading to a paid subscription. And just to note, the paid $29/month plan is so much more flexible than the free version. I can’t recommend it more.

Customizing the Design of Hello Bar

Hello Bar is only as good as its look and its message, which is why it’s good that the design can be heavily customized. 

Using the editor, it’s possible to change up the color, font, and text size. There’s also an option with the premium version to display a custom thank you message for a higher quality finished look.

Paying for the upgraded versions of the tool unlocks additional customization options, which means you can optimize the tool to work as effectively as possible. 

For further optimization, there is an A/B split testing tool built into the software as well. If you haven’t heard of this technique, split testing displays different ads and provides data to which converts better.

By making slight adjustments, it’s possible to get messages that convert more effectively over time.

Using Hello Bar for WordPress

Roughly a third of every website available on the internet today uses WordPress. While I generally opt against adding additional plugins, you can use Hello Bar’s WordPress plugin if you like simple installation.

This plugin makes it easy to add the tool to WordPress websites. Using Hello Bar for WordPress takes just a couple minutes, and it’s the simplest way to use the product overall. 

After customizing your bar on the Hello Bar website, install the WordPress plugin on your site, add the code provided from the Hello Bar, and watch your visitors convert. 

Quick Start Steps to Use Hello Bar

• Visit the Hello Bar website and create an account
• Decide how you want to use the bar and answer quick questions
• Customize your first bar
• Grab the Site Snippet
• Sign onto your WordPress platform
• Install the Hello Bar plugin
• Add your Site Snippet code to the plugin to activate your new bar.

It only takes a few minutes to get a bar up and running on your website, and once it’s there, you can start enjoying the increased performance that it offers.

Feel free to try the free version, but I suggest diving into the advanced targeting and customization capabilities with one of the paid subscriptions.

Connecting Hello Bar with Other Tools

Hello Bar doesn’t offer integration plugins or unique code for each different user platform. Still, the tool works on most HTML-based websites. 

Hello Bar for Shopify is simple to integrate within the page template itself. You can do this on countless other web platforms as well, including options like Drupal.

Hello Bar also works with different list-building tools to help you supercharge your marketing efforts. Using the software with Mailchimp or other email list-building services is simple to do. 

Simply sign into the provider site to connect MailChimp and Hello Bar. With some other email services, you’ll paste in your opt-in form code to make the integration work. Still, many leading services just require an account sign-in making them very simple to use.

Considering Hello Bar Alternatives

There are plenty of Hello Bar competitors that offer website notification services as well. Some position the notifications at the top of the page just as Hello Bar does, while others do things differently. 

Below are some of the most popular options worth considering. We look at each competitor to Hello Bar below and determine if they offer any value or not.

Sumo Smart Bar

Sumo Smart Bar is a direct competitor to Hello Bar, and it offers much of the same functionality. This tool provides opt-in email forms, it offers call-to-action links, and it will give you access to those quick social sharing buttons as well. 

It’s more costly to use the premium version of this software service than the low-cost premium version of Hello Bar. Still, it doesn’t come with the traffic caps that Hello Bar does. 

Users with high-traffic websites considering Hello Bar might be able to get all the functionality they want from Sumo Smart Bar at a lower cost per year than Hello Bar. 

Both tools give testing and customization capabilities. The main difference is that Hello Bar offers additional popups as sliders and modals for increased engagement. 

WP Notification Bars

WP Notification Bars is free at its most limited level. Still, it’s one of the Hello Bar competitors that’s useful at the free tier. 

The product won’t capture emails or link to social media like Hello Bar does. Instead, it can only link to pages on your website. 

It may be more limited than Hello Bar is, but the free version of the tool does allow you to set rules for multiple messages so you can have different top-page notifications displaying on different pages of your website. 

If that’s a feature that you’re looking to implement, WP Notification Bars could be the right tool for you.

Sleeknote

Sleeknote is one of our favorite Hello Bar alternatives because the service focuses on grabbing user attention without being overwhelming. 

It’s possible to customize a range of different message types using this service to encourage visitors to take the desired action. 

The service is suitable for making teasers for creating different forms and for displaying discreet advertisements, and you have reasonable control over the position the messages appear on your page.

Sleeknote offers adjustable templates as well as A/B testing, analytics, and more to help make your marketing efforts more effective.

Hello Bar Review Conclusion: Is it Worth the Cost?

Hello Bar is a simple service on the surface but offers some compelling benefits. 

The service compels your visitors to act, whether that’s joining your Facebook page, signing up to your mailing list, or visiting your new product launch. 

The tool is fully customizable, fully testable, and simple to use as well. It comes with a WordPress Plugin and can be used by most website owners with ease. 

Sure there are many alternatives to the service. Still, it’s known for performing well and is an excellent option for site owners looking for better conversions from visitors. 

The free version will be enough for many beginners, and the medium version is very affordable compared to many other options available today. 

You’ll have to research the competitors before going with the most costly version of Hello Bar though, because many alternatives within that upper price range are competitive.