Pop-up banners are annoying at the best of times. I hate pop-up banners. I’m sure you do too. The primary reason why they are so annoying is that they disrupt your web experience. Moreover, they are irrelevant, well mostly, not always.
The most annoying of them all is the one that pops-up while you are midway in an article. No-one would want pop-ups in their right mind. They are bane. They steal our focus and disrupt our concentration. It ignores what we are trying to do and destroys our train of thought along with whatever we are doing.
One of the most insidious pop-up issue would be where you will be working, typing away furiously while a pop-up banner would pop up (duh!) conveniently at the most inconvenient moment. And, while you are hitting keys away, without looking at the screen some key that represents a correct button for the pop-up gets pressed.
This moment will always invariably resemble the time when we would see a cartoon villain pressing the big red button. We know for sure that something is about to go wrong, and there is simply nothing we can do about it as the button has already been pressed.
To me, this seems like a conspiracy. Because someone somewhere thinks it is a very good idea to steal my focus while I am doing something. Someone thinks it is completely okay to bombard me with pop-ups when I open a website. I guess I’m getting carried away, but I am pretty sure that person hates pop-up banners as much as I do.
Truth About Pop-ups
What I am about to say, might contradict what I have said so far, but this is something of a paradox and the truth.
While popups might seem to be annoying, according to most studies, they are very effective. According to Aweber, a pop-up has the ability to drive up 1375% more signups than a sidebar form.
The science behind this lies in the fact that if your signup is part of the sidebar, most people, even if they love your blog will never sign-up. This may be due to laziness or a simple avoidance because they do not want to receive any emails.
But there’s another fact to consider, engagement rates amongst users who sign-up via pop-ups are much less than others who sign-up via landing pages, static forms, etc. This is probably because most of the visitors who sign-up via pop-up banners are forced to do so.
Smart Marketers Show the Right Way to Use Pop-ups
Using smart marketing automation tools, can help you harness the power of pop-up banners and make it less annoying for your visitors. That would automatically make it more effective. There is no point if we do away with pop-ups, because they clearly have potential.
But what we need to do is define a clear path for it. Tools like marketing automation let you craft pop-up banners that will display information relevant to every visitor. Registered users will not be asked for their email address, and irrelevant pop-ups will be a thing of the past.
With marketing automation, progressive profiling can be extended to pop-up banners too which means you don’t annoy existing subscribers with the same questions.
Also, do not time popups on the basis of time spent on the time, instead configure pop-up banners to show up based on user behaviour on your website- exit intent, pageviews, lead score etc.
Make sure you have mobile-friendly pop-up banners as well because unresponsive banners show up weirdly on mobile devices and ruin visitor experience completely.
Hopefully, pop-ups will become more of a boon than a bane if utilized correctly. Do you use pop-up banners? Share your experience with our readers below.