So, do you love poppeteers?

No, I don't mean those cute and cheeky handmade crochet critters.

I'm talking about people that bombard you with pop-ups the moment you are on their website.

People usually say they don’t like pop-ups and there are many pop-up blockers out there.. But did you know pop-ups are very effective?  If we use them the right way.

What is a pop-up?

A pop-up is a window that appears while browsing a website. Marketers mainly use pop-ups for advertising and generating leads. 

Are pop-ups still effective today?

Yes, they do when used the right way as a conversion tool.

A bunch of pop-ups over your site and hoping for the best doesn’t count as a conversion strategy.

A user who’s found nothing interesting on your homepage and decides to leave. If you expect them to suddenly sign up to your newsletter or offer because you make it unnecessarily difficult for them to leave, prepare to be disappointed.

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, except “test, test, and test.” If you decide a pop-up is worth adding, try different time frames for a pop-up to appear. Rely on real data, not on pure assumptions.

Sleeknote analyzed over 1+ billion pop-ups views and their research shows pop-ups that are shown after a visitor scrolled 35 percent of a page convert better than pop-ups that are shown before or after.

How can you get positive results from website pop ups versus annoying the visitor?

Some guidelines when using a pop-up

Don’t welcome your visitors with a pop-up the very moment they place their foot in the door of your site.

Someone has a problem and remembers Google has all the answers, so he searches...

Our blog post comes up as one of the results. Yeah! (we have been working hard for this)

Our visitor clicks our post (yeah again). Just as he starts reading, BAM! We slap him on the face with a gigantic pop-up to sign up for our email list!

Let me ask you this question? Why, why on earth would a person give his email if he has just landed on our site for the first time?

It's rude, and our user experience suffers.

Don’t assume your visitors will just hand you their personal email 3 seconds after they land your site. You have to build trust with your visitors.

Implementation is crucial

Let’s be realistic: slapping a bunch of pop-ups over your site and hoping for the best doesn’t count as a conversion strategy.

Within 10 seconds of closing the pop-up requesting his email, our visitor then has his attention once again drawn away from our blog post by a slide-in.

Deep breath. How do you think our visitor is feeling at this point? Cranky? Grouchy?

So let’s view things through our visitor’s eyes. We have forced him to read a headline about some offer he has no interest in from a person or business he’s not all that familiar with when all he really sought was the specific information he came for.

Be kind, don't give your visitors a guilt trip

Have you ever seen a website pop-up that makes you feel like a bad person for declining? Being rude to you?

An example: 

"Would you like to subscribe to our email to get updates about parenthood?"

"Yes, I love my children!. --or--  No, I don't really care about my children."

What? Just because I don't want to sign up for whatever they're offering doesn't make me a bad parent.

Being kind in your pop-up offer could be the difference between a visitor staying or leaving because of how you've made them feel.

If we use our example again:

"Yes, I love to learn new things about parenthood". --or--  "No thanks, my inbox is already full."

Sounds better, not? 

Google & pop-ups

In May 2021 Google has planned another update where using Page Experience will be rolled out. (mobile friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS Security and intrusive interstitials as core web vitals)

Intrusive interstit...what? Yep, I had to look that one up.

So, what exactly are intrusive interstitials? It is where content is not easily accessible to a user. If a visitor clicks on a search result in Google, but when accessing the page cannot immediately see all the content, then that is because it is obscured by an Intrusive Interstitial. The content is still there, but visitors have to take an action to be able to see it. This is poor user experience.

It is up to you

Pop-ups are ugly, intrusive, and above all, hurt the user experience…

But only if you ignore the best practices I’ve outlined above.

It is up to you if you use a pop-up or not. 

But if you do, I hope this article has given you some insights on how to use them properly.

All the best,

Luc

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