3 Things to Help You Make the Best Popups
Here we are going to cover three crucial pieces that will help you make the best popups for your website. Like it or not pop-ups do work, pop-ups allow you to present paramount information to your website’s visitors in a subtle but effective way. Having a pop-up is one thing the next step is creating pop-ups that convert to more form submissions and more link clicks. We are about to embark on a discussion talking about some important pieces to keep in mind while constructing your business’s pop-ups.
Here’s an example: You arrive on a website, catch a glimpse of what you want, and almost immediately a popup explodes in front of you! It takes up the entire screen, obstructing your view, and deeming itself your current adversary. Annoyed, you go to close the popup, but alas, where is the “X”!? This is the last straw and instead of browsing more of the site, you continue your search somewhere else.
Popups like the one I describe above violate three of the most important popup rules. Here are those rules:
Time Your Popup Correctly:
Your popup should not be the first thing a visitor views when they come to your website. They are coming to your website to find an answer or explore products. A popup should give the visitor time to explore before appearing. Here are three reliable times to trigger your popup:
- After the visitor spends a set time on your site
- When a visitor clicks on a specific product page
- After the user scrolls down
However, you choose to wield the power of your popup up, I beg of you, do not set it to display immediately.
Timing may seem like an infantile thing to worry about when dealing with pop-ups. You want to display your best product offering right away, don’t you? WRONG. (Well yes and no but we will talk about that).
A potential new client has just landed on your page, give them time to breathe and take in that beautiful website that you put so much time, money, and effort into. Don’t bombard them immediately with annoying (sorry) discounts, PDF forms, or your amazing products. They are likely on your site because they didn’t get what they were looking for from another competitor’s site or you were the first one they clicked on. Give them time to read some content before you display that first pop-up.
You can even hold back on displaying any pop-ups on your homepage but instead display pop-ups for discounts on your products page. Reason being is that person on your product page is more interested, interested enough in your company at that point in time to continue clicking through your site. Now you should think about pushing some sort of offer towards them.
Here is a great article that talks about timing your pop-up: https://wisepops.com/popup-timing/
Make Your Popup Properly Intrusive
Full-screen pop-ups annoy me and completely disrupt my train of thought. But I cannot argue with the fact that popups help increase conversion rates. So, the question we need to ask is, “are we presenting a popup in the most effective way?”. Is it too intrusive, or is it just intrusive enough? Typically, we stay away from full-screen popups because they have low conversion rates. Instead, we favor more discrete options like a drop-down bar or a small bubble popup.
No matter the importance of the offer you have it is not important enough to completely disrupt your potential client’s train of thought. At all times you want them to be engrossed in your website. A large pop-up that takes up the entirety of their field of view will inevitably disrupt that train of thought. Display pop-ups in a manner that allows them to still view your website behind it. Also projecting your pop-up in a more concentrated area tricks one’s brain into thinking there is less to read, even if the same amount of content is contained, an optical illusion if you must.
Here is an awesome example of intrusive pop-ups and non-intrusive pop-ups, and how Google perceives them: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html.
Don’t Make Your Popup Hard to Close
When you’re ready to close a popup but can’t find that dastardly little “X”- you feel nothing but frustration. No matter how good your offer is, you will force visitors to leave your site if your “X” is not clearly visible. You should almost always have that “X” in an obvious and familiar spot – the upper right-hand corner.
Please don’t force your visitors to leave because they are annoyed with poor design. Design popups right and get them to convert!
That’s it. These are three simple steps to keep in mind when building your popup. Steps like the ones described above are just scratching the surface of the great power that pop-ups hold within them. Be sure to keep these in mind when building your website’s pop-ups!
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