So imagine I was just visiting your website I landed on your home page, and it’s just started to load and… ah crap the pop-ups just go to my road! I freaking hate pop-ups! … Just let me deal with that.
Okay we’re back, we’re scrolling through looking at maybe one or two things and oh far out! That pop-up’s back, and it’s just in my face! I absolutely freaking hate it, so I’ll leave your site! 🙁 …
So I’ve just dealt with the pop-up, and I’m so over your site it that I’m gonna leave it! So are popups worth while? There’s a lot of stats out there that say that they actually are, that they are responsible for a lot of conversion of traffic, and inquiry on your site, so what’s the secrets to creating a pop-up that actually works? There’s two!
The first one is to “wait”. Give the user time to build trust on your site so “wait”, don’t serve it up straightaway… build trust. There’s whole video I’ve created about trust but one of them is to just give the user time to experience your site and move around before you start throwing stuff into their face.
The second one is make sure your pop-up is delivered within “context” of the site, so as they move through the content, if they’re engaged in the content, then the pop-up or the offer that you’re giving them needs to connect with that content, and, in fact then it will connect with the user.
So “context” is the key here, so really think about how… what’s your “upsell” and what are you offering?
An example of that is I have a really good blog article covering a particular topic and our the pop-up that comes up after a few seconds of the even 10 seconds of the user scrolling down the page it’s offering an e-book or a white paper download that’s reinforcement of the that they’re reading. That’s context.
Or, if I’m on a product page then an offer of a 10% discount for a first purchase, just fill in your details in the pop-up, again another “context”, it’s adding value to the user experience, not distracting from the user experience.
It’s really critical that you think about that experience on the page and you’ll have a much better user engagement and your bounce rates will be a lot lower.