Icegram

What Icegram is

Icegram makes a family of WordPress plugins for lead capture, calls to action and email marketing. The email product is Icegram Express, formerly known as Email Subscribers, which sends newsletters and automated campaigns from the WordPress dashboard. Two companion plugins feed it: Icegram Engage for popups and other on-site messages, and Icegram Collect for contact and subscription forms. The home page sums up the goal as helping you "Convert visitors to subscribers, automate onsite and email marketing campaigns, personalize at scale, reduce costs and do a lot more" with plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce.

Icegram reports 230,000+ active users and 1700+ reviews, and the copyright line runs from 2011. Its audience, in its own words, is bloggers and entrepreneurs who want to grow their lists, engage with their tribe and gain more customers. The footer describes the company's stance: Icegram "is built for WordPress users who want growth without giving up control," and everything from converting visitors to sending and delivering emails runs where your site lives. That is why it sits in the self-hosted part of this directory.

Icegram Express: newsletters and automation

The home page calls Express "Newsletters and marketing automation done right" and lists its main strengths: powerful segmentation, list cleaning, spam checks, high speed sending and managed cron. The integration article describes what Express does once someone hands over an email address through a form or popup: it saves the address, sends newsletters, sets up automatic welcome emails, shares product updates or blog posts, and manages your subscribers. A testimonial on the home page, from a musician, says he uses it to message subscribers whenever there is a new post on his blog and found it easy to install as a non-technical user.

Express is privacy focused. The home page says you own your data and use your preferred SMTP, so delivery goes through the sending service you choose rather than a service Icegram runs. The integration article adds that Express integrates with top email delivery services so your messages land in inboxes rather than spam folders. The site's menu also links a product called Mailer.

Icegram Engage: popups and on-site messages

Engage is the attention-grabbing half. It creates popups, action bars, slide-ins and more without code, with over 12 message types, advanced targeting and mobile-responsive templates, plus lots of ready campaigns. Targeting shows the right message at the right time to the right visitor. The integration article gives examples of behavior rules: show a popup when someone scrolls 50% of the page, is about to leave, or has spent 20 seconds on a page. Typical uses on the site are a festive offer for Diwali, a limited-time discount at Christmas or on Black Friday, and an exit-intent message.

Icegram Collect: forms and leads

Collect builds contact forms and subscription widgets in seconds. It can add a captcha to cut spam, show GDPR consent, export entries to CSV, save leads to your database and relay them to email services, CRMs or automation tools.

How the pieces connect

The integration article explains how Engage and Express work together in four steps: create a lead capture or subscription form in Express, start a popup or message campaign in Engage, embed the Express form in it by picking it from a dropdown or pasting its shortcode, then style the popup, set targeting rules and publish. From then on, every signup lands straight in your Express list, with no copying between tools, and Express can send a welcome email, a coupon or a festive greeting at once.

The same article lays out five scenarios for the combination:

• A festival sale: a popup with a discount code collects emails, and Express follows up with a series of festive offers.
• Webinar registration: a popup signs people up, adds them to the list and sends automated reminders.
• A new product launch: a popup announces the launch and sign-ups get an early-bird email.
• Abandoned cart recovery: an exit-intent popup offers a discount for an email, and Express sends a series of recovery emails.
• Blog newsletter growth: a popup offers a free ebook or checklist, and subscribers then get regular blog updates.

Its example popup offers 10% off a first order in return for an email address, and the FAQ answers whether you can use just one plugin: yes, but Engage alone leaves you needing another tool to manage and email the list, and Express alone needs a way to bring people onto the list.

Ease of use and performance

According to the FAQ, both plugins are designed for beginners with no coding needed, and connecting them takes a few clicks. Both are optimized for performance and for mobile devices, so the site stays fast and responsive, and popups and emails work on phones, tablets and desktops.

Pricing

Both Engage and Express come in free versions, which the FAQ says have plenty of features, and premium upgrades that it calls budget-friendly. The integration article currently offers 25% off both Icegram Engage and Icegram Express. The pages behind this entry do not show the premium prices. Buyers log in to their Icegram account to download purchased plugins and to manage, upgrade or renew subscriptions and licenses, and the terms page covers licensing and refunds.

Support and resources

Help comes through the documentation and a support contact, and the blog publishes guides and customer stories about Express, such as how a journalist turned her time-consuming emails into automatic ones with it. A free ebook on the home page, built around a "One Sentence Secret" of 27 words, offers tips on getting people to sign up, open and click.

The company's other products

Icegram's footer lists sister products: StoreApps, which makes WooCommerce plugins, Putler, an analytics tool for online businesses, and Offermative, a WooCommerce upsell and product recommendation plugin.

Who it suits

Icegram suits bloggers, creators and small WordPress or WooCommerce businesses that want to grow a list with popups and forms and email it from their own site through an SMTP service they pick. The free versions make it easy to start, and the Engage and Express pairing covers capture and follow-up in one place. The caveats: it only runs on WordPress, delivery depends on the sending service you connect, and the feature set is aimed at newsletters and simple automations rather than a full CRM.