There are so many useful tools in the Sumo suite that carrying out a full Sumo review has proved to be a massive task.
However, we stuck at it and the Sumo Review is here for you to enjoy.
We used the WordPress plugin version for this Sumo review but all the tools are available across all the versions which include Joomla, Shopify, Magento and Drupal and many more.
The main reason for Sumo’s existance is to provide tools to increase interaction with your blog, your website and your content across social media websites and elsewhere. Sumo supply a whole wide range of free tools to help you to grow your WordPress site or any site created with one of the other supported platforms.
Sumo helps you to engage with your readers and website visitors, encouraging them to join your email list or share your articles. Sumo also enables you to analyse those interactions and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in the context of your overall digital marketing strategy.
So let’s take a look at the free of charge tools that are included in the Sumo toolbox:
Sumo List Builder
We were very interested in this feature because building and managing an email list is a vital component of a successful digital marketing campaign. Sumo’s List Builder lets you build attractive lightbox pop ups to encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list. There is support for a host of email management systems including the likes of MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, MyEmma, Mad Mimi, Infusionsoft, Feedblitz, HubSpot, MyNewsletterBuilder, Inbox First, Sailthru, Klaviyo, Vero, Pardot, Zapier, Ontraport, ExactTarget, Vertical Response, Drip, MailerLite, WhatCounts, ConvertKit, MailJet, Maropost, and many others).

Most Internet Marketers know that one of the most important assets on your website is probably the opt-in email form that helps you to grow your mailing list. Unlike many other well known email subscription boxes which are shown in the form of static widgets in the page’s sidebar, the Sumo subscription box is more effective and helps to achieve high signup rates with an unobtrusive popover signup box. Of course, you are free to decide how this feature is to be used, e.g. by deciding if the subscription box loads manually after the visitor has been on your page for a certain length of time or, very popular these days, when the site visitor moves their mouse so it looks like they are going to exit the page.
Where appropriate, you can simply set List Builder to collect email addresses that you can export in CSV format.
Sumo Share
Share makes it simple for others to share on your content on mobile devices, or on the web. This is a widely used app and lets you add sharing buttons to your desktop and mobile sites. It is common for people to see an increase in pageviews of at least 20% with this tool installed. The buttons are auto optimising and you can choose from the following places for sharing on – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Buffer, Delicious, Digg, Evernote, Amazon Wishlist, Instapaper, Pocket, LinkedIn, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Yummly). The package also includes SMS sharing as well as sharing on WhatsApp.
Sumo Welcome Mat
This is one you could try, it works on the principle that you hit the visitor with a call to action straightaway and make it look and feel like a regular webpage. This tool lets you build a kind of overlaid landing page that shows right up front – as soon as a visitor comes to your site – and displays a full-screen call to action.
Sumo Heat Maps
If you want to know what kind of behaviour your site visitors get up to on your web pages then there is no better way to find out than by using a heat map. It will let you see whereabouts on the page people are clicking and identify areas that are being missed.

Sumo Scroll Box
A scroll box is simply an email collection box which is triggered according to how far down your page the reader goes.
Sumo Smart Bar
The smart bar is a floating CTA bar that can appear either at the top of your pages, or at the bottom if you prefer. This will obviously depend on the design of your site and it could be worth doing a bit of testing to see which position works best for you. The smart bar can include links to encourage people to subscribe to your newsletter or to go to a specific page on the site, as well as the usual social media follow buttons.
Sumo Highlighter
The highlighter is a Twitter sharing tool which enables you to easily tweet about your article by highlighting parts of the content in a similar way to that used by the Kindle and sites like Medium.
Sumo Image Sharer
As the name suggests, this is an image sharing tool that makes it quick and very easy to share images, together with a link, of course, on Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter. According to research carried out by Buffer, image tweets on Twitter get twice the engagement of text tweets so this tool is well worth setting up and using.
You may have noticed that some blogs and websites make it simple for users to share their images on social networks like Pinterest? This is because these images provide a link straight back to your article so that people who share your images on Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook can actually drive large quantities of traffic to your site.
When it comes to sharing images on Pinterest, it is accepted now that Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks at this time and some studies have discovered that Pinterest users spend more than other social network visitors so it makes sense to make it easy for your visitors to share their favorite images from your site on Pinterest. This is thought to be a source of valuable traffic that many website owners are not yet taking advantage of.
Sumo also makes sharing images on Facebook quick and easy and research by KissMetrics has confirmed that photo posts on Facebook are likely to attract up to 84% more click-throughs than a simple text post.
An Alternative To Your “Contact Us Page”
There’s also a contact form facility which is a more palatable alternative to the old, familiar but not that effective, “Contact Us” page, (although we are not suggesting that you shouldn’t have one of those as well).
If you implement it properly, Sumo can help people to find your blog or website, read your articles and other content and share them on Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest. It can generate subscriptions to your email list and everybody wants that, don’t they?
Sumo For Mobiles
As you would expect, all of the Sumo tools are fully optimised for use on mobiles as well as desktop devices. We’ve tested as many as we can in the time available and the presentation on smartphones and tablets was extremely good.
About A/B Testing With Sumo
You can easily A/B test your pop ups and decide which text, size, timing, colours etc convert best on your website. The A/B testing facility can be setup in seconds and it is common for site owners to see a 20-100% increase in email subscriptions after A/B testing has been completed.
Using Sumo Advanced Display Rules
Sumo has an advanced and very comprehensive display rules facility that lets you control to a large extent what happens, and when. For example, you could target any of the apps to any group of visitors you like – so if you want an email pop up to only show for visitors coming from Facebook, you got it! This opens up a whole new world of highly targeted calls to action for different audiences and demographic groups.
Design Flexibility
The email form is completely customisable. You can quickly change the wording, confirmation message, and colors to match the look and feel of the rest of your website. This will increase conversions by making users feel more comfortable when subscribing. If you want even more control over the appearance of your email popover, you can edit the HTML, add a different form, select specific pages to show the popover on, and also add a redirected confirmation URL if you wish.
Here is the official list of Sumo Features
- Free and Easy integration with any WordPress theme
- Simple email integration with MailChimp, Aweber, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, MyEmma, Mad Mimi, Infusionsoft, Feedblitz, HubSpot, MyNewsletterBuilder, Inbox First, Sailthru, Klaviyo, Vero, Pardot, Zapier, Ontraport, ExactTarget, Vertical Response, Drip, MailerLite, WhatCounts, ConvertKit, MailJet, and Maropost.
- 100% mobile optimized. A lot of your traffic is mobile, make sure your tools are too.
- SumoMe uses Asynchronous loading so that page load speed won’t be adversely affected.
- Total control over which features to enable and which to leave for later.
- Sharing on Twitter made easy.
- Customise templates to make your email popups both attractive and effective.
- See the gravatars of your recent email subscribers.
- Highlighting of popular Twitter sections (like Kindle and Medium) – simply delete any tweet highlights you don’t want
- Promotion of your Twitter handle.
- Works with other social plugins like Digg Digg
- Popover that significantly increase email subscribes
- Custom email subscription popover timing
- Optional smart email popover timing (like Exit Monitor)
- Customizable email subscribe box wording and colors
- Full HTML control of popover content
- Export email subscribers in a .csv file
- Quickly growth your email list & view email subscription statistics for all time
- Easily add Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest sharing to your images – images have higher engagement on social networks.
Include your Twitter username in tweeted images.
- Share count shows how often people share your images.
- Choose which features/apps you want to enable.
- Smart Bar to ask for emails at the top of your website.
- Heat maps so you can visually see where your visitors are clicking.
- Share app – Get more traffic to your site with these super easy to setup share buttons!
- Contact Form – Simplest way to have your readers contact you.
- Content Analytics – See how people behave on your website.
- Welcome Mat – Now you can instantly add a full-screen call to action to grow your email list or drive visitors to a certain page.
I suppose that the app that will be used most often, (Sumo confirm this), is the Share function. Its optimised social share buttons are used by many top 1000 sites many of whom report getting at least 20% more page views as a result. These clever buttons auto optimise themselves and you are always in control of the places where you want to share, which include; Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, Buffer, Delicious, Digg, Evernote, Amazon Wishlist, Instapaper, Pocket, LinkedIn, Tumblr, StumbleUpon and Yummly. There is also an SMS sharing function but we haven’t tested that yet.
Get more tweets with Sumo
The included Highlighter feature is intended to improve your Twitter shares in two ways. The first way is to enable users to highlight portions of your text which they can then quickly share on Twitter. Operating in a similar way to Kindle’s share feature or Medium’s commenting function, this facility makes tweeting about your latest post very simple and convenient. With SumoMe, social sharing has never been more intuitive and straightforward.
Another nice touch is that when someone tweets a quote from one of your articles, the SumoMe Highlighter automatically highlights that portion of your text in much the same way as the popular highlights feature in Kindle. This is known to attract your reader’s attention and can give a further boost to social sharing. All of this can be edited if you don’t want a particular highlight to be shown.
Any Tweets generated through the SumoMe Highlighter Tool will link to your article and also include your Twitter username. Not only does this increase traffic to your website bit it can also improve your Twitter profile and increase your following. Adding your Twitter username is easy and you don’t need to give access to your Twitter account.
A URL shortener has been added for most of the above tools but not yet tested by our team – we will do so and update later.
Summary
As we said right at the start, Sumo includes many tools and not everyone will need or want all of them. The pricing model allows you to start with a free plan, which includes all the apps, and grow as you need to by adding more sites or users. There is a huge difference between just “having a website” and truly optimising it for visitor conversions and traffic growth. SumoMe won’t do all of the work for you but it provides you with a great set of tools to get you started.
Sumo is free, with an option to upgrade to Sumo Pro starting at £39/month if paid annually – here’s the link.