And less annoying, while you’re at it. Some may call them popup windows, pop ups, popups, or even pop-ups, others simply know them as popovers, pop-overs, or interstitials.
But few will deny that unless created right, they can be annoying, and downright spammy.
The good news is that yours don’t have to be. With some simple planning, you can make your popup windows more effective. And tone them down a bit so they are less annoying. Without planning, though, your visitors are just going to see your websites as those spammy or pushy sites.
No one likes these type of websites. Honest.
Fact is that these still work better than most other list building technique. It is wholly reasonable to expect anywhere from a 30-100% increase in subscribers with a strategically placed popup.
So here are 3 ways to make pop up windows more effective:
Delay the pop up
The most obvious strategy, but the most applicable. The most annoying aspect of popup windows is that they come up right as you land on a page (or the homepage), asking you to enter your email to get a report, or take an action to get something in return.
Tactics like this are enough for people not pay attention to what you are offering.
No one wants to be pushed around — less so when being asked to give away their email address. The solution? Delay the pop-up. Have it show, say, 20 seconds after a visitor has been on your website. Your readers want to read what’s on the page, after all.
With this simple trick you can take care of the invasive problem of your pop-ups.
Don’t show pop-ups on every page
You just don’t want them to float up on every single page on your website. In fact, showing popups more than once to a visitor is the right recipe to annoy him or her. Modern solutions allow you to define a set interval of days that must pass before your visitor (or subscriber) sees your pop up again.
A 7 day gap is perfect for most online marketers. But you can get away with breaks of anywhere between 3 days to 30, depending on the type of your website or blog.
Use a scroll triggered box
You may have seen scroll triggered boxes on other websites. This is a refined form of an interstitial, and not exactly a pop-up at all. These only show up when you scroll down a page, usually around the 80% of a webpage, though you can adjust this value at will.
People scroll down a page when they are interested in what they are reading. And if your content engages them, they may also be interested in signing up for your list.
There are a number of WordPress plugins that can help you create and set up a scroll triggered box. By far the best of the lot is this free plugin called Dreamgrow’s Scroll Triggered Box.
This plugin shows the box in the bottom right hand corner of pages instead of the middle of the screen. And the best part is that you can use this box to promote anything, from a Facebook like to video. The slider is robust and highly customizable.
Use it to your advantage.