Four Ways to Hook Your Customers with Pop-Ups

Generating sales through a website is no easy task. Not only do you need to spend a large amount of time promoting your website and getting people to visit it, but once you get them there you need to find a way to grab their attention and convert them into a sale. You don’t want to spend a lot of money and put in a lot of effort generating traffic to your site, only for your visitor to leave after a few seconds.

If you’re looking for a new way to hook your customers, you should consider using a pop-up. Pop-ups are designed to grab your visitors attention and quickly promote something. But simply using a pop up isn’t enough – you have to use them the right way. Here are four ways you can use a pop up to hook your customers and convert them.

Make Your Pop-Ups Noticeable

First, you want your pop-ups to stand out. When your pop up appears on the screen, there should be no avoiding it. Use a pop up that takes up the entire frame. Choose a bold font and colors that work well together. Use images to quickly convey information. Simple things like this can go a long way. If your pop up is boring or doesn’t stand out, your users will just quickly close out of it or scroll on by.

In addition to making the pop-up noticeable, you also need to make the call-to-action noticeable within the pop-up. Your visitors shouldn’t have to spend time trying to figure out what it is you want them to do. Make your CTA clear and noticeable for maximum effectiveness.

Offer Something Valuable

Once you’ve grabbed your visitors attention, you need to keep it. A good pop up provides some value to your site and to your visitors. A pop-up welcome message doesn’t add much to your site. But a pop up that offers a discount if they subscribe to your email list? That does.

Think about what it is you can offer your visitors. A discount on their purchase? An entry into a contest? Valuable information they can’t get elsewhere? A link to test out your new mobile app? If you’re going to pop into someone’s eyesight, you need to have a good reason.

Imagine you’re walking down the street looking for a place to buy paint, and you pass in front of two hardware stores right next to each other. As you pass by, the business owners come outside to talk to you. One owner starts chatting with you and listing all of the products they have inside. The other offers you a discount on paint supplies and mentions the free class they’re offering on how to paint a room. Which store are you more likely to enter?

Don’t Annoy Your Visitors

If you’re going to use a pop up to grab your visitors attention, there’s a fine line you’ll have to walk. Just because you’re offering something valuable doesn’t mean every person will want it. Some will simply want to read the blog post you wrote first or browse through your selection of products.

The line you need to walk is that of grabbing attention and not annoying your visitors. Doing so will help you to increase conversions without lowering customer satisfaction. There are a few simple things you can do to achieve this. First, limit the number of pop-ups. Once someone closes out of your pop up, don’t keep showing them new ones. Second, make your popups easy to close. If your visitor can’t quickly find the X button, they’ll likely grow annoyed and leave your site.

There are several different kinds of pop-ups you can use, so you’ll want to think about which kind best serves your needs without annoying your visitors too much. Your options are:

• A pop up that appears when a user enters the site
• A pop up that appears when a user is about to leave the site
• A pop up that shows after a certain amount of time
• A pop up that appears when the visitor scrolls to a certain point on the page

When trying to decide between an exit pop up, an entry pop up, or any of the other options, there’s no one correct answer. You’ll need to try out different methods and see what works. Which brings us to our last tip, which is…

Try New Things

Finally, you need to try new things. It’s impossible to know what your visitors will respond to on your first go-around. And, even if you find something that works on your first try, you won’t know if it’s the best possible solution without trying other things.

Try out different styles of pop-ups. Go with an entry pop up first, then try an exit pop up. Use different text in your calls to action. Play with different color schemes. If you’re using WordPress, there are some great WordPress plugins that allow you to try out different styles very easily.

The most important thing, however, is to track your results. It’s not enough to simply change things up and see what you like better. You should analyze how one form of pop up performs then compare the stats to another form. The more data you can collect on your different attempts, the better decisions you can make going forward.

For you WordPress users, there are plenty of WordPress A/B testing plugins that you can use to quickly get started. For everyone else, look into split testing software (you should be able to find some free versions to try out).

Take some time to get together with your team and brainstorm ideas. Then develop a plan to put them into place and measure the results. Make this a constant habit so that you are always finding new ways to improve.

Using Pop-Ups to Hook Your Customers

You’ve spent hours creating ad campaigns, developing your blogging strategy, finding the best email marketing software, promoting yourself on social media, and generally promoting your website. Don’t throw all of that away by letting your new visitor leave without a fight. You need to hook them as soon as you can and hopefully convert them into a sale. Pop-ups, when used effectively, are a great way to do this.

The key is to make your pop up noticeable, provide value with it, and to always look for ways to improve. By doing this you should find that you are able to draw people further down your sales funnel, all without annoying them. Take some time to look at examples of real-world pop-ups to see how they can be done right.

Hopefully, this guide was able to shed some light on how to use pop-ups effectively, and before long you’ll have even more customers on your hook.

Author’s Bio:

Dave Schneider is the marketing manager at Albacross, the free B2B lead generation platform. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries.