We’ve all seen these… the pop-ups that suddenly appear on web pages, either promoting an offer, or asking for your email address.
When a user arrives at your page, the pop-up appears at a point in time and directs them to sign up for a promotional offer, a lead magnet, or newsletter signup, usually with an incentive to encourage the user to leave their information.
Adopting this approach is proven to increase the rate of sales or email sign-up, converting your users from passive website visitors to engaged subscribers or purchasers. However, you need to be smart in your strategy, and you need to make sure that you are actively engaging your users, without annoying them.
Let’s take a look at how this is done.
Use these 8 tips to get more conversions from your pop-ups, without annoying your website visitors:
Use personalisation to create a relevant pop-up
To be effective, your pop-up needs to be personalised and targeted. It’s not enough to simply adopt a catch-all approach and to hope for the best. Instead, leverage what you already know about your users to deliver tailored popups that truly speak to them.
This is where user segmentation is critical. You will likely have many different users, each with different profiles and different objectives. While it is impossible to personalise the experience for each individual user, you can use segmentation to get as close as possible to this gold standard. For instance, one user segment might be engaged by an ebook that provides additional support, while others may be energised by a special offer for a specific product.
Offer a value-adding lead magnet to give visitors an incentive
Pop-ups should be transactional, and used strategically.
You want your user to provide you with something e.g. their email address, and so you should expect to provide something of value to them in return.
Consider what kinds of lead magnet your users will value. We’ve touched on ebooks and special offers above, and these are certainly effective when used as lead magnets — as long as they are worthwhile. Spend time creating an ebook that shares your expert insight with your users, and provide special offers that make these users take notice. Other types of lead magnet include free video content, value-based webinars, members-only content and other exclusive assets.
Use the right triggers to launch your popup at the right time
You need to make sure that your pop-up is launched at the optimal time.
Generally speaking, this will occur at a time when you believe a user has gathered enough information about your business and your website products and/or services, and are ready to be nudged in the right direction. There are also clever ways of conditionally managing pop-ups, for example using cookies to determine if a user is already signed up to a mailing list, and avoid showing it to those individuals.
Avoid annoying visitors by using proper targeting rules
The email pop-up should be engaging your users, not irritating them.
As mentioned above, you need to make sure that the pop-up is only delivered to those users who haven’t already signed up so they don’t needlessly see it time and time again. In addition to this, it needs to be triggered only when the user arrives on your home page, or on a menu page. If the user has travelled directly to a product page or a specific landing page, they likely have other actions in mind, and you do not need to derail this action with a distracting pop-up.
That said, exit triggered pop-ups can work well if a user who are exiting your website without action – giving you a change to grab their attention!
Work to refine your user profiles as you gain more data. This will help you to target your users better in the future, giving them the email opt-in incentives that they really want to see. This will help to ensure that the email pop-up remains fully relevant and energising to users.
Create a clear headline and Call to Action (CTA)
If the pop-up is confusing your users, it is not going to have the desired effect. To avoid this confusion, make sure you have a clear headline that tells your users quickly what they can expect. Clearly display the benefits as well as information on the lead magnet incentive.
A CTA is also important. After the user has read the headline, they need to know precisely what they should do next. This requires clear and concise messaging that encourages them to sign up rather than closing the pop-up and ignoring its content.
Match your pop-up design with your page
Your pop-up is part of your website, and this should be reflected in its design. Make sure the pop-up retains the same themes that are evident in the design of your page to unify your brand.
This is important, as you need to demonstrate that the pop-up is indeed part of your website strategy. If the user trusts the pop-up and recognises it as part of your website, they are more likely to sign up to your email newsletter.
Experiment with less aggressive pop-up types to maximise conversions
A/B testing is an important part of pop-up strategy. While one type of pop-up might work for some brands and some audiences, a different type of pop-up might be better suited for other businesses.
Experiment with less aggressive pop-ups — those that do not cover the whole page when they are triggered. While this will make the pop-up less immediately obvious for your users, the gentler approach may be more successful in establishing trust and encouraging conversions.
Make it easy, and don’t forget to say thank you!
To maximise your chances of conversion (in addition to a compelling offer), make sure you keep form fields to a minimum. The more information you ask for in your pop-up, the more time it will take a user to fill out and the more they’ll weigh up the time it takes to complete vs. the value on offer. The fewer fields, the more chance the desired action will be completed.
Finally, make sure users are redirected to a thank you page with details as to what will happen next… there’s nothing worse than completing the pop-up request and being met with a blank screen, or no helpful next steps.
Make sure your pop-ups are working for you
Pop-ups are all about getting the right balance. You want your customers to take notice, but you also do not want to bombard them with unwelcome content. Take time to get this balance right, and call upon the experts to help you deploy the perfect email opt-in pop-up campaign.
To learn more, reach out to our team today to get started.
