Wai asked:
Many people use popups and such like to get more people to register.
A new one called Popup Dominator is doing the rounds where some marketers claim that their subscription rates have increased by 2 or 3 fold.
What’s your opinion on using these devices?
There is no simple answer
Pop-ups have a reputation for annoying visitors and leading to an overall decrease in traffic. But some people swear by them and believe that they are a fantastic way to build an e-mail list.
I generally don’t like pop-ups and try to steer clear of them.
But if you decide to try out a pop-up on your website then at the very least make sure you do the following:
Limit the time that the pop-up runs
If you want to experiment with a pop-up on your website then make sure you only do it for a limited amount of time. And the amount time you run it for really depends on your traffic.
For sites with the small amount of traffic you may want to run the pop-up for a week. High traffic websites may only run it for a day.
Frequency
How often is your pop up going to appear on your website?
Some websites have their pop-up appear on every single page that every visitor goes to. So if I go to 10 different pages then I have to close the same pop-up 10 times. I find this very annoying.
Other websites have the pop-up only appear once every five days for a given visitor. I am generally okay with this.
Carefully track opt in rates
Before you place the pop-up on your website you need to determine what your current opt in rate is.
For example: Bob has 10 people sign up for his e-mail list each day (on average).
Once you know what your opt in rate is without a pop-up you can put the pop-up on your website and look at how your opt in rate changes.
With the pop-up did the number of people joining your e-mail list double or triple?
Track your traffic
While you’re running a pop-up to the overall traffic to your website go up, or go down, or stay the same?
If your traffic goes down a lot then it is possible that the pop-up is annoying your visitors.
Ask for feedback
You should post something on your website that explains to visitors you are doing an experiment of the pop-up and ask them for feedback.
Pay very close attention to the feedback you get from your visitors.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
instead of popups you can try drop ins. Although they still interfere with the visitors actions, they are not as annoying as popups. keep them small, so they don't block the whole page.
I once had them on one of my sites for newsletter signups and it worked, because it was in the face advertising for something related to the sites topic.
How much did it help your opt in rate? I find popins somewhat annoying.
They are annoying today, because everyone has them. The bad thing today is that sometimes the pop-in/drop-in cover the whole page or cannot get closed easily.
When I started out with that about 4 years ago it was still some kind of novelty.
Regarding the opt-in rate I was quite happy then. Before, I only had the sign-up form on the left navigation bar and had maybe one sign-up per week. With the drop-in I sometimes had up to 10 (average was 6 per week). With this I mean 100% confirmed double-opt-in. I also had to weed out more of the bogus sign-ups, but that was something I was happy to do because of the positive resutls in general.
Right now I am using the drop-in to divert traffic to a part of my site to generate leads. Again I made the drop-in so that it is easy to close, doesn't take up too much space, loads fast (!!!) and is on topic.
Probably will change it back to newsletter signups soon when my new mailing list software is installed and tested.
If it works for you and your website then more power to you.
In the short run… yes you will get your subscribers significantly increased… but in the long run you will lose so much more if you continue those popups, and any other similar form of taking away the user's natural flow on your page. It's okay to popup once… but on some websites they repeatedly do it, and it annoys the heck out of the users. I'd rather have the user signup naturally on my page, than forcing them to signup for something.
Till then,
Jean
correct:
- only show popup once per session
- don’t stop the natural flow of the visitor too much
- always go for the ‘natural signup’
What i like to test in the future is a scrip showing an exit -popup when the visitor is going to leave your site without interacting on your site before. Iv’e seen this a few times in action, so when you move the mouse to the back button or to the upper right corner to close the window, a popup offering shows up.
I have seen these exit pop-ups but I have to wonder about their effectiveness. If someone gets bored with your site and decides to leave, I'm not sure a pop-up is going to be very effective. But I could be wrong. I readily knowledge that I am biased against pop-ups.
I totally agree. That’s why I have stayed away pop-ups altogether. But who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind in the future.
With more and more people learning about and installing pop-up blockers, it might not be much of an advantage anyway. Some of the latest browsers even come with some sort of pop-up blocker so the user doesn't even have to know about pop-up blockers to be free from viewing pop-ups.
Good thoughts for sure.