7+ Best List Building Software in 2022 (+6 Free Ones Included)

Updated: April 17, 2023

By: Marcos Isaias

One of the most critical aspects of building an online presence is having an email list to do email marketing.

An email list shall be approached as a project itself since its challenging and requires planning.

For this reason, we choose to gather a list of the best email list building software providers, Including Free ones.

If you are blogging beyond 2020 and do not have an active email subscriber list, you are missing out on an incredible transactional potential. 

Building lists is the basis of any customer-based business. We have CRMs software that sole purpose is to build, manage and facilitate lead capture and management.

As business owners, we all build up a list of potential customers from product to service companies that we call to lead. 

According to HubSpot, email marketing is increasing. 

“78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.”

HubSpot
Email Marketing Platform Statistics

However, building an effective list is not easy. Getting good leads and keeping them engaged through email marketing can be time-consuming and challenging. 

I’ve done some research, and based on my analyses here; I have a list of the best tools to build, interact and maintain an email list.

In summary, want to go directly to my top picks? The best list building tools I recommend are OptinMonster, Optimonk, or Hello Bar

Optin Monster

First of all, when I started my blog and had little or no resources to invest in an email lead generator tool, Optin was my friend. “Best bank for the buck” and professional customer service.  

Optin Monster has been on the market since 2013, a company that has been on the lead capture and marketing automation business for so long has to be doing something right.

contact lis tool

This application really knows how to generate leads to add to your campaigns. Optin constantly updates its software for bugs, new features, or simply ease of use! I honestly encourage you to give it a try.

Moreover, Optinmonster has more than 100+ templates to choose from and offers many list-building capabilities such as” floating bars, popups, scroll boxes, etc. 

Finally, it includes live stats and A/B testing, allowing you to run several list-building templates to see which one performs better. 

Optin Monster capabilities

  • Optimization of your campaigns based on campaigns analytics
  • Retargeting of email prompts
  • Also, seamless integrations with other tools Such as Mailchimp, Salesforce, Shopify 
  • Detail targeting of your campaigns (Demographics) 
  • Inactivity Sensor detects when a person is not engaging with the web page, prompting and recapturing the user’s attention. 

Pricing

Optinmonster prices
  • Basic: $9 per month
  • Plus: $19 per month
  • Pro: $29 per month
  • Growth: $49 per month

Try Optin Monster now

Outgrow

Outgrow is easily the most interactive tool out there this year. It has contests, surveys, giveaways, and quizzes capabilities.

Home Page of the product

Nowadays, the content creator that has the more appealing and interactive quizzes or other kinds of content is the one that has the competitive advantage.

Think of it as a list generation tool or interactivity management system

Outgrow goes great with landing pages because it can make them more interactive and engaging. It is proven that interactive landing pages have higher retention rates than pages that just ask for contact details in a plain way.

Some of Outgrow key lead generation features include

  • Trending templates capabilities provide 1000+ templates to create content and not written polls or emails. 
  • Plug-and-play. Some email list building stools requires some coding; Outgrow does not; a drag and drop editor allows you to set up templates between minutes. 
  • Intelligent Analytics and Data Integration. Outgrow provides audience data analysis to evaluate and predict the best strategies. 
  • marketing automation features

Pricing

  • Freelancer plan limited: $14 per month 
  • Freelancer plan: 25 per month
  • Essentials plan: $95 per month
  • Business plan: $600 per month

Give Outgrow a try

MailChimp

mailchimp logo

Mailchimp list management has been around more than most of this list building tools and it’s definitely a safe choice if you dont have particular needs.

Key Features

  • Easy to use email templates: These templates are useful when you are not the most creative
  • Training libraries: MailChimp is one of the only list management that has an extensive
  • Suitable for business email lists: Extensive and detailed features to design automated journeys to guide CX experiences. Excels on the business level.

Pricing

MailChimp pricing
  • Free:$0 per month 
  • Essentials: $11 per month
  • Standard: $17 per month
  • Premium: $299 per month

Mailchimp, a list management tool, is a classical and self-service-focused tool! Great place to start learning and use a free agency at the begging, but not the best when you scale to more than 10,000 emails or users a month.

SleekNote

Great tool to create email marketing campaigns or any marketing campaigns

Best for targeted popups and high prospect conversion. 

Another great option is SleekNote; this list building tool works best for pop-ups. You can show Giveaway Popups, discount pops uPS, and newsletter popups. The only limit is your creativity.

In addition, I recommend SleekNote for beginners because it is user-friendly. The customer support is excellent, and it even has a section of the page dedicated to tutorials and uses cases of Popups campaigns to build the best email lists to build your authority. 

If speed is your priority this drag and drop builder will provide you with the speed and ease of use that you need.

The capabilities that make SleekNote one of the best contact list building software are:

  • Smart Trigger: Unique capability that helps you target qualified prospects according to your preferences and guide them through your funnel in a more personalized way. 
  • Lightweight design keeps your landing pages lighting fast
  • Mobile Friendly 
  • Excels at promoting on-site. 

Pricing

Sleeknote prices to create landing page and collect email adressess
  • Lite Plan: $49
  • Basic Plan: $59
  • Plus Plan: $114
  • Pro Plan: $225
  • Premium Plan: $369

*All plans offer a free trial for you to see the results before committing your resources. 

Get Started with a free trial with SleekNote

Bloom

Bloom list building tool

Best Email capture plugin

Bloom is an email list building plugin with elegant themes, which works perfectly for you if you use their theme.  

Moreover, Bloom has a beautiful and intuitive interface making its use fast and effective. 

This list-building plug-in comes with great pre-made templates and works best with WordPress to facilitate your email marketing tasks.

It does have the downside of not being a drag-and-drop system like the others on this list. 

Key features of this email marketing plugin 

  • Endless customization. Blooms know branding is essential to creating your brand. The ability to customize gives you the ability to be unique. 
  • Timed triggers: You can configure the popup or form to show after any given time, making it less invasive for the user. 
  • Inactivity trigger. 
  • Advance account management and lead targeting.
  • Import-export capabilities: If you already have a list of emails, you can import it to bloom in a few clicks. 
  • Bloom offers six different types of opt-in contact forms. 

Pricing

  • Yearly Plan: $89 per year
  • Lifetime: $249 per lifetime

Give Bloom a test run

Thrive Leads

Thrive Themes front page, popular emial marketing software

Thrive Leads is a digital marketing list-building tool that offers many options for building email lists: Contact forms, Lightbox, Post Foote, Ribbon, screen filler, and scroll mats.

This software is one of the fastest and most lightweight email list management tools on the market.

Also, since it is part of the thrive themes ecosystem, you can get them in a package and save some costs.

Features

  • Thrive leads has beautiful and appealing forms 
  • Easy to use and has a low learning curve
  • Incredibly detailed statistics and conversion tracking
  • Optimization of forms: You can optimize the best performing forms with the form conversion statistics. 
  • Thrive leads offer a comprehensive report dashboard on Impressions, conversions, and CTR based on your site visits, pretty useful if you are planning to do some marketing automation. 
  • A/B testing: If you dont test several forms, you won’t know which one works best with which lead. 
  • Do not need coding knowledge

Pricing

Thrive Tjemes email list building plugin prices
  • Thrive Suite: $299 per year 
  • Thrive Suite: $97 per year 

Both plans give lifetime updates, customer support, installation, and a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you dont feel satisfied with the product. 

Picreel

Picreel is one of the most popular and easy-to-use popup builder tools out there that relies on its advanced features and beautiful popups to collect contact information from website visitors. 

The tool offers over 100 built-in popup templates that you can customize from top to bottom and create stunning-looking popups such as exit surveys, newsletter popups, lead capture forms, and much more. 

Picreel also comes packed with advanced targeting and triggering capabilities that allow users to only gather information from the relevant people while improving the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. You can also set up A/B tests within the tool itself and test the effectiveness of your campaigns with real users.

Picreel capabilities:

  • Create personalized popups, discount offers, surveys, and nano bars with the help of the intuitive visual builder. 
  • Show your popups only to the right people based on their behavior, scroll action, and more with advanced targeting.
  • Build beautiful-looking popups within minutes with the help of 100+ built-in templates and design customization. 
  • Track your popup’s performance using the detailed reporting and analytics feature. 
  • Integrate Picreel with 700+ online tools to automate your workflow. 

Pricing:

  • Annual Plan: $39.97 per month

Try Picreel now

GetSiteControl

GetSiteControl grat for capturing email addresses and create landing pages

One of the best simplest and cheaper solutions to build your email marketing list 

Great to create pop-ups to get new subscribers, sales, survey responses, or offer deals and general information on your site. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=gjJSj1uV0xk

Here’s a quick overview of the intercom’s most prominent features

  • Multiplatform support: It does not matter if your visitors come from mobile or Persona Computer. GetSiteControl adapts and supports both.
  • Real-time dashboards: Look into your email list, building statistics live. There is no delay in the refreshing time of your visitors’ actions on your site. 
  • Upsell and Cross-sell capabilities 
  • Inactivity tracker, Stop shopping cart abandonment pop-ups. 

Pricing

Small plan: $7 per month (up to 20,000 impressions per month)
Medium Plan: $14 per month (up to 100,000 impressions per month)
Large Plan: $21 per month (up to 500,000 impressions per month)

 Free Email List Building Tools

As a bonus, I researched a few tools that you can use for FREE.

Yes, these email list-building tools have some limitations on their free plans, but they are worth it! And in case you like them and want to fully use them, you can pay a small premium to up your game.

If you are new to the digital marketing business, SEO and blogging, you can start small with one of these tools and grow with it before paying a dime. 

Contactout

Contact featured image

Powerful yet simple tool for all your marketing leads needs. Especially useful with its custom extension to get Linked in the contact information

I tested Contacout on LinkedIn with 10 contacts. I already knew the emails, so I would know if it get them right, which were really hard to get. I was surprised to see it got all 10 contacts.

Moreover, besides giving you email contacts, it actually has a module where you can design and send your mails.

Contactout test

Features

  • Chrome extension
  • Search Portal
  • Email marketing campaign manager
  • Affordable
  • Simplicity and effectiveness

Pricing

Pricing of contactout
  • Free Plan: $0
  • Personal: $29 Dollars
  • Sales: $99 Dollars
  • Recruiter: $199 Dollars
  • Team: Custom

Privy

Turn passive visitors into leads and potential customers with customized popups, flyouts, and other high-converting tools. 

Privy Landing Page great tool to collect email addresses for

One of the best email list building free software. Privy is one of the fastest tools to set up and automate Shopify users. This email list building tool has been installed in more than 800,000 eCommerce websites and has moved more than $7 billion in online sales. 

Privy specializes in eCommerce types of websites, according to their website. 

“Stores using Privy generate an average of $33 per email subscriber, and Privy Email users have generated over $475 million in campaign revenue.”

Privy has one of the best customer services representatives,s there is, seven days of a week, 24 hours a day. 

Features

  • Unlimited emails send to your list to maximize your email list building efforts
  • Cart Abandonment Emails: rescue around 20% of the abandonment shopping carts
  • Automatic delivery of campaigns after sign-up: Normally, the email list building tool charges an extra fee to automate email deliveries. Privy does not. 
  • Free onboarding session for migrating users: Do you already have another software you use, no problem; Privy customer care will help you migrate your contacts for free. 
  • Besides emails, Privy also supports SMS, which can increase your rate of interactions with your customers.

Pricing 

Hompepage om email list building software
  • Privy Free Plan: $0 per month
  • Starter Plan: $15 per month
  • Growth Plan: $45 per month

MailMunch

cost-effective lead capture and email marketing that also has a Free plan. Mail Munch provides a toolkit that provides users with an engaging experience.

It offers hundreds of templates that help you create more leads and convert them into subscribers. 

It offers many different options like popups and cart abandonment prompts, spin wheels, coupons, forms, and many others.

Moreover, you also have the opportunity to create a new page from zero or use one of the pre-built templates provided.

In other words, you can get as technical as you want, but no coding is necessary to get things going, which is ideal for a beginner blogger or eCommerce. 

Features

  • Automated welcome emails: preprogram your automatic email welcoming series and start building. 
  • Beautiful curated templates for your visitors
  • Drag and drop page builder: No coding is necessary to use mail munch
  • Mobile responsive layouts
  • Advanced display rules: you can use complex rules to deliver laser-focused campaigns to get the max out of your email list, building free software.
  • Thousands of Images for free to get creative with your popups and forms 

Pricing

Prices table for email list building software
  • Free Plan: $0 per month
  • Premium: $13.99 per month
  • Custom: variable per month

Popup Ally

PopUpAlly email list building plugin

If you are looking to get a list building management plugin for free, PopupAlly is the lightweight WordPress plugin you are looking for. 

Also, Popup Ally has all the advanced features of the best-paid apps. Features included: lightbox pop-ups, opt-in forms, exit intent pop-ups, etc. 

It is a simple plug-in but powerful and effective and counts more than 8,000 active installations. Not bad for a minor player in the email marketing world. 

Features

  • Mobile-friendly for popups and opt-in forms
  • Horizontal and vertical popups
  • Drag-and-drop editor with full customization. Including unusual shapes such as circles or triangular if necessary.
  • Statistics Tracking and A/B Split Testing
  • Add Videos, Social Media Sharing Code, or Anything Else to Your Popups and

Pricing

You dont need the pro version initially; Popupally is one of the most complete free tools.

However, if you are willing to try the pro version, they have a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

PopupAlly: $0 per month
PopupAlly Pro: $99 per month

Optinmonk

Best free email list building tool for eCommerce and capture of contact details

OptInmonk lead generation software

OptiMonk is a complete and specialized software despite having a free list-building plan. This tool allows sidebars, popups, notifications, and even full screens

More than 40,000 sites count on Optinmonk for day-to-day services and lead capture.

Optimonk is a free tool proven to be competitive in the eCommerce sphere. 

Finally, the strength of OptiMonk is that it is excellent at optimizing your leads and converting them into sales more than just a list of email outreach. 

Features that make this one of the best list building tools

Optimonk free software features
  • Advanced A/B testing
  • Vast Gallery of examples to make the process of building popups a lot easier. 
  • Excellent at identifying exit intent of the user by inactivity or page usage, triggering unique popups to keep engagement. 
  • Scroll-Based Triggering: Display your message after a visitor scrolls down at least X percent on your page.
  • No Coding is needed. You just need to select the email capture you would like to use. 

Pricing

Optimonk lead generation plan
  • Free: 0$ per month (up to 15,000 views)
  • Essential: $29 per month
  • Growth: $79 per month
  • Premium: $199 per month

Custom: depends on your personal needs above premium. 

Hello Bar

Top choice for engaging website visitors live. 

HelloBar free list tool

In short, If you are looking for free tools with excellent value, you should consider HelloBar.

The strongest feature of HelloBar is exactly that: Bars.

HelloBar hast outstanding floating or fixed bars that can scroll along with the visitor or seamless pop out at a set time or position.

This list building software Up to 5,000 interactions a month, a 100% FREE is excellent for anyone trying a free tool for the first time.

Hello, Bar specializes in guiding visitors’ traffic to specific pages on your website.

Here’s a quick overview of Hello Bar most prominent features

  • Can have Integrations with other frequently used tools such as Shopify, Wix, MailChimp, WordPress, etc
  • Plug and Play installation. Double click the install button and start creating.
  • Free A/B testing might not be as good as others, but it is worth it for FREE.perfect
  • On-site pop-ups and bars to redirect traffic to pages of interest. 
  • One of the best-automated list building software.

Pricing 

  • Free Plan: $0 per month
  • Growth Plan:$29 per month
  • Premium Plan: $49 per month
  • Rich Elite Plan: 99 per month

Omnisend

omnisend landing page

Omnisend Its a great entry tool that supports not only email but SMS numbers list building as well. This full-stack tool can create pop-ups, web-push, and many other options.

Omnisend is a simple but powerful tool with several features such as:

  • Multiplatform Cookies: The information captured in cookies can be used in other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, Tik Tok, etc.
  • Marketing Automation: You can create a funnel of emails and/or SMS. Once you get a lead the process starts automatically.

Pricing:

omnisend pricing

Pricing 

  • Free: 0$ per month (500 emails)
  • Standard: $16 per month
  • Pro: $59 per month

Omnisend is a simple, economic yet very powerful tool that even offers free email list building software.

Best WordPress Email list building tools

WordPress is the most popular CMS in today’s market, with estimates putting its usage at 42.9% of the entire Web and 64.1% of CMS-built websites.

This means there are endless supply plugin options that can be used for email lists and marketing campaigns alike! One of them is plug-ins or automated list building tools

Pie chart of percentage of web sites on the web that use wordpress

MailOptIn

Mail OptIn is an email capture tool with popups, slide-ins, etc.

It has compatibility with WordPress widgets in your site’s sidebar or desktop notification bar!

It is not only an excellent automated list-building software tool, but it also has hundreds of templates that I have tried myself!
MailOptin is a great option if you want to try a list-building tool that seemingly integrates into WP. I Certified it.

OptIn landing

Pricing 

  • Standard: 99$ Annually
  • Pro: $199 Annually
  • Agency: $399 Annually
  • Lifetime license: $999 This is the only automated list building tool that has a lifetime license. If you like it you can get great savings long term.

If MailOptin got your attention go check their site for extra information

Email List Building Software FAQ

What is a list creation tool? or What is a list-building software?

Building an email list to reach out to your visitors and add them value or send the offers has been a strategy since email was created.

However, creating a list can be a slow and grueling process. A piece of software that through automation, prediction, and digital marketing helps you get leads and collect email addresses to build your email list.

What to look at on an email list building software?

Ease of use

The best tool for you should be easy to use, it does not matter if you are an expert or a beginner, new to email list building. The software should not need code or at least not be code-centric. Moreover, you or your company should enjoy and feel comfortable using the tool

Integrations

Also, Integrations are important. If the application you are using is great but cannot integrate with other tools don’t use it. In other words, blogging and email listing are complex subjects and it is most likely that no single software will have all the answers.

Potential of analytics

This goes almost for any tool, analytics are critical to pushing any project forward. If you don’t know or see what you are doing and its results, you don’t know where you are going in the future.

The tool should give information about the customers/visitors but also give insight into the company or blog performance

Scalability

If you are doing this for real, you are planning on growing. For this reason, the chosen tool needs to be flexible to adapt to your present situation but also your future one.

How do you build a list?

1. First, you need to choose a good platform, free or paid. Refer to the list above for the best ones.
2. Create content or incentives that are attractive and engaging
Invite to sign up
3. Offer exclusive content or deals for the email subscribers
Social media
4. Use exit-intent pop-ups.

What are list-building tactics? 

Identify the best part of your website for the opt-in form
Create free and VALUABLE content
Guest post but not anywhere, guest post on websites that align with your strategy
Use people’s first names
Test different opt-in forms

Bonus: Here 5 tips or tactics to get great results when building your list.Tips for list building

Conclusion – Summary

In Conclusion, this was a guide towards the best list building solutions including Free ones because I also had to start at some point and I know what it is to work with a budget.

From now on if you need to generate leads, gain more subscribers to your email list, or create automatic email campaigns these list building tools can help

What is the best list building tool? 

In short my summary.

Best email list building tools

  • OptinMonster: Best for exit-intent pop-ups.
  • OptinMonk: Best overall list building tools. (Still using this one after a few months of trial)
  • Outgrow: Best to engage website visitors with real time statistic.
  • SleekNote: Best UI and ease of use.
  • Bloom: Best to integrate with most popular email marketing platforms
  • Thrive Leads: Best for speed and lightweight implementation (SPEED)
  • GetSiteControl: Best “bank for the buck” solution

Best free email list building tools

  • Privy: Best one of the free tools at speed of creating popups
  • MailMunch: Most beautiful free templates
  • PopupAlly: Best free WordPress compatible plugin
  • OptiMonk: Most advanced list-building tools that offer a free plan
  • HelloBar: Best at guiding traffic through different funnels

I hope you enjoy this curated list that I worked hard to construct for you guys.

Did any of these list-building tools call your attention? which do you plan to check out? let me know in the comments!

Also, if you are curious about any specific tool that is not featured here do not hesitate to ask me in the comments or via email and I will work on it.

See you on the Metaverse.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marcos Isaias


PMP Certified professional Digital Business cards enthusiast and AI software review expert. I'm here to help you work on your blog and empower your digital presence.

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