6 Ways to Improve Your Website Popup Conversion Rate

Summary Easy, actionable steps to improve your website popup. More emails mean more traffic which means more sales! This short but detailed guide will require you to stop and think about your user for a second then really build and deliver something that will add value to them. Value, not annoyance is the key to a successful popup!

Why You Need To Update Your Website Popups

A very common question that many website and business owners ask is “How to I grow my email list without spending money on advertising or annoying my visitors”. The good news is, there are hundreds of ways to do this, but we are going to go over the most important one. Using website popups are one of the most common and effective ways to turn a website visitor into an email subscriber. Over the years, the results and methods of collecting emails has become harder and more advanced. Website users are becoming a lot more protective of their email address and to be honest they should be. There are more emails being sent than ever and the internet is full of spam! There are also now ad blockers, Google penalties and privacy concerns to overcome. At this point, you're probably thinking that using popups to collect emails sounds too hard, you can't beat Google!

Don’t Give Up, This Is Why You Still Need Popups

Having worked with many clients to grow their business, time and time again we see that the more successful ones have good email lists. Email is the one audience you can OWN. It is by far one of the most effective ways to generate sales, traffic to your website and engagement. No matter how many people say email is dying we are yet to see another source be as consistent, personal or advanced as email. The conversion rate and profit per user is still higher than most other channels and there is no large controlling entities that are going to change the rules on you overnight. For example, YouTubers lost all their revenue overnight as Google changed the T&C’s for displaying ads on videos or how Facebook or AdWords can shut down your account at any moment if you do something that is not to their liking. An email list you can take with you, you get plenty of warning if you are starting to annoy people and they are recoverable. A banned Facebook account is not.

6 Ways To Improve Your Website Popup

So, let’s get into the valuable stuff now that you know why building an email list is so important. You may already have a popup or form that is collecting you emails but I bet you still want more? Below is a list of small tweaks you can make to your website popups to improve their conversion rates.

1. Frequency and cookie length

Make sure that you are using a service that does not show your pop up again after the user has subscribed. Generally, you want to wait 24-48 hours before showing your pop up again to someone who did not opt-in. If someone has signed up, you never want to show them the same popup again as the popup has done its job.

2. Timing

Your popup needs to show at the right time to avoid annoying your visitors. When will this pop up be relevant to them, when is the right time to ask for their email?

• Immediately?
• After they read some content?
• After they view a product?
• When they're about to leave?

You want to make sure you are adding value first then asking your visitor for something in return. Most of the time we suggest people set their popup when a user is intending to leave. This makes sure to show the popup to everyone but also only shows it once the visitor has finished doing what they came to do. Also, the exit intent popup can be a way to make visitors stay longer. E.g. If a pop up offered a discount on signup that user may sign up then go back to browsing your website to use the coupon. You have then re-engaged that browser instead of them leaving. Potentially even turned them into a customer. If you were to show that popup at the start of the browsing experience you would by saying you are already willing to discount your product before they have even looked at it. Other methods we would suggest are 80% of page scroll or around 10 seconds on site as a study by Quicksprout.com showed this to have the highest conversion rate. They also tested exit intent as a trigger and found that it increased conversions by 46%. In short, if you have the option to use "exit intent" as a popup trigger, USE it!

3. Device

You need to show your popup on the correct device. Stop and go through your website on mobile and desktop as a first-time user. Go on, take a second to go and do that now. If the popup was annoying or hard to opt-into on mobile, consider removing your popup from visitors on mobile. A few common reasons to remove you popup from mobile are:

• website is slow to load on mobile
• you have too much text on the popup
• you have too many form fields
• your popup conflicts with share button or website functionality
• Google is going to start to penalize websites with popups on mobile

The signup process needs to take less than 10 seconds for a visitor to complete.

4. User experience

Improve the experience of the popup, make it easy to signup or close. Limit the amount of required fields (name and email) and have a large close option or a “no thanks” option. A trick here is to have the “no thanks” option make them second guess not signing up. E.g. if we ran a coffee website my popup could say: Pop up pitch - 6 barista approved coffee making tips for better brewing at home! CTA to signup - Send me the tips CTA to close - No thanks, I like horrible coffee

5. The Offer

Using “signup for website updates” is a terrible offer. Please don't use that! People may be interested in your brand and want updates but using this super boring offer is a sure way to decrease your conversion rate. People usually respond better to:

• Incentivization
• Gamification

You need to either incentivize someone to take action or entertain them. So now you are wondering how the “F” do I do that with a pop up? See the gamified popup example we created below (VYPER shameless plug). Ways to incentivize someone to join your mailing list

• Offer knowledge (courses, ebook, case studies)
• Offer solutions (guides, free service or tool)
• Offer a way to save time (templates, lists)
• Offer a way to save money (coupons)

Ways to gamify

• Think outside the box, how can this experience be fun for the user
• See the example above

6. The Copy & Voice

This aspect of your pop up is the one that varies the most from business to business. You need to ask yourself a few things about your website visitors.

• What are common phases they use (industry lingo)?
• What is the voice/tone (serious, funny, laid back)?
• How to include a call to action (sign up vs send me the tips)?
• How aggressive can you make the pitch (buy now vs learn more)?
• What are their pain points?
• What solutions are they looking for?
• Do they respond to saving time or money more?

One of the best ways to really understand your customer is to build a persona of your ideal customer or website visitor. Do some research and find out what the best age, gender, income status etc is and then that will also help you answer the above questions. Once you understand your user it is much easier to write copy that will resonate with them.

Summary

Now that you have all the knowledge to build an awesome popup. Take some time to think and really breakdown your current website popup. Some of these tips will take less than 15min to execute but return better results forever. Do you use popups on your website? If so, what are your tips for maximizing your popup conversion rate? Tell us below in the comments!