INTRODUCTION:
Most people don’t like popups. Most popups increase your signup conversion rate. Which do you want?
VIDEO:
Hello this is Mitch Tarr, President and founder of ZinMarketing.com. Today we are going to talk about pop-ups. A topic that is really emotional for many of you. Most people I talk to don’t like them, but they absolutely work like gangbusters. They absolutely work. If you use them you will get better results, and your list will grow bigger faster, which means more leads, more sales, more of whatever you’re trying to do with your email marketing. You can transfer your distaste for pop-ups to your own website and pass up on the benefits, or you can suck it up, try it, see what it feels like and get way better results.
You will notice a difference in results; and I mean things like doubling, quadrupling the number of people who join your list just from doing this properly. There are ways to do pop-ups poorly; they’re really aggravating and annoying. There are ways to do them so they are nice and clean. I’m going to go through and show you some examples. I’m using some samples from a company called Pop-up Domination, which actually sells pop-up software or license it. Here are some examples of pop-ups.
I’ll go through and talk about these examples so that you can see ways to make your pop-ups better and more effective. It doesn’t matter what page this is on, this is just a sample, not a real one. What’s valuable here is that you can see that this popup is taken out to give you the real estate to explain what you’re doing and why people should pay attention to it.
If you’re going to put this up in front of people you should really should explain yourself; give them some benefits, give them some reasons to join. Put in an incentive here. You’ve inserted yourself in their attention span, so it’s really a good idea to make sure that you have language in there with the benefits that tells people why they should join. That just makes it easier to swallow pop-ups coming at you like this.
The second thing is you can really, when you’re doing pop-ups and you’ve got your copy on there, control when this pop-up comes up and where it comes up. Those are two different points so let’s do the where first. You can set this to come up on every single page of your site, homepage, landing pages, blog pages, so no matter where someone connects with you or shows up on your site they’re going to see a pop-up. You could be more selective, only put it on a blog post, or only on a sales page or landing page, or only put it on your homepage.
You can control where these go so it’s not arbitrary; it’s your choice.
The other thing you can do is set pop-ups so repeat visitors don’t see them. If you’re doing remarketing or retargeting, people come back to your website and suddenly the popup doesn’t show up the second time they’re there. That can be a nice little touch so people have seen it once at their first visit, the second time they don’t see it. Now you might be of the school that if people didn’t sign up the first time you want to remind them and give them a second chance. You might not want to turn that feature on at all. That’s another option.
The third thing I think you should be aware of, and this makes a really big difference, at what point does the pop-up show up? Does it show up immediately in zero seconds so that when you land on the page before you even have a chance to get oriented you’re looking at a pop-up. That can be abrasive and that can be a barrier. That can be a problem. What if you make the pop-up show up at 60 seconds? After 60 seconds all of your bounces have probably taken place. All of the bounces are going to take place in the first 15 seconds or 10 seconds. People have had time in 60 seconds to read a little bit, to get oriented, to go, “yeah, I’m getting this guy. I’d like to stay a little bit long and read a little bit more”. Then the pop-up shows up. You can control how long that time is. You’ll want to time it somewhere along your average time on page.
Look at your statistics, see how long people are on your site and then decide where to put the pop-up in. You’ll discover that if you use different timings you will get different results. You’ll get a different sign up rate at 45 seconds than at 0 seconds. We’ve tested things anywhere from 15-90 seconds and if somewhere along works best for you, try it. Something else you can do with pop-ups these days is make them more interesting.
Put in a video, which again, explains why people should follow up with you, why they should do the thing you want them to do, which is join your list, or whatever the incentive is. You can explain the incentive. Videos are becoming a lot more popular these days, a lot more effective.
This is a really good thing to test on your pop-up window. If you’re really uncomfortable showing a pop-up, you the CEO or president, or owner, could show up and say, “I’m really sorry to jump up in front of you like this, but I wanted to share something with you that is really important. It’s so important that I felt this little video would help you to understand what we do and why you should join our list”. That language is not it, but something like that where you soften the blow a little and explain why.
Just to mention the pop-ups in your head that you really hate and just compare it to the way that we’ve done them, where we’ve put them on select pages, given you the benefits, and some strong copy or maybe a video. We’ve tested different timings so that it doesn’t show up immediately, it can show up after you’ve been on the page awhile longer, you’ve got time to be oriented. We’ve used the right pop-up; there are different styles, sizes, shapes, colors, where they come from.
There’s lots of different ways to do a pop-up. You can make this work for yourself and really that’s the idea – you have to get over the fact that you don’t like them, we don’t like them, nobody really likes them, but they really, really work. If you want to double, quadruple, improve the rate at which people join your list I’d explore this feature and see if it works for you, see if you can make it more effective using these tips. Of course, we do email marketing for people all day long. You can learn more at our website, or you can learn how to do email marketing yourself at http://nospamemailmarketing.com/. We have free training program videos for you.
Thanks very much and we will talk to you next time.