Pop Ups are an easy to implement conversion tool that when used right, have the potential to skyrocket the conversion rates of a website.
While there is a lot that can be done to optimise your pop up banner campaign, it will not make a lot of difference for poorly designed pop ups.
A website pop up banner is made up of several different elements and in order for your pop up to convert (and not feel spammy), it is important to get these elements right.
For websites related to a certain niche, like for instance eLearning, these elements might be a bit special. So, without wasting any more time, let us look at each of the special elements you need to design converting popup banners:
An Undeniable Offer
The offer is perhaps the most important part of a website pop up banner campaign. No amount of optimisation or design best practices will make up for a bad offer that users are not interested in.
Moreover, it is not enough for the offer to just be great, it also needs to be relevant. For instance, showing someone browsing your product pages a pop up for a free ebook (or any other lead magnet) will make little sense. On the other hand, it is easier to entice the same user with an exclusive discount coupon.
Seamless Design Scheme
Pop ups have a bad rep for being intrusive and disruptive to the user experience. While a great offer does combat this notion, a pop up can further be made non-intrusive if it blends in the rest of your website.
To achieve this, make sure the colours and font that you are using in your pop up are consistent with the colours and font on the rest of the website.
Remarkable, Benefit-Focused Copy
The copy of your pop up is important as it does the job of convincing the user that the pop up is not a waste of their time.
For this reason, your copy needs to be
- Benefit Oriented: Clearly highlight the benefits of clicking through to the user
- Short: Chances are, your website visitor was interrupted by the pop up. If they were unsure about closing it, a long copy will make sure they ignore the pop up.
- Urgent: Creating a sense of urgency is a proven marketing tactic that has helped bring about drastic improvements to conversions.
- Relevant: The importance of relevance was highlighted earlier in the article. When copy is considered, the offer, the tone, the language, should all be relevant to the user.
Action-Oriented, Unmistakable CTA Copy
Any article on the web that talks about conversion tactics will always have at least one mention of call-to-action. The reason? A CTA can literally make or break your conversions.
Make sure your CTA is consistent with the offer and more importantly, does not confuse the user. You can also make use of positive and negative CTAs to replace the close pop up button. This technique has been beautifully used in the following pop up:
Powerful Imagery
An image is worth a thousand words.
That may be an overused line, but in the case of pop ups, it makes absolute sense. When a user is able to see an image of what they will be getting if they give you their email address, they are more likely to be convinced.
However, be careful if you’re using images in the background of the pop up as they may make the text a bit difficult to read.
Conclusion
Before wrapping up, I have one last advice for improving the conversion rates for your website pop ups:
Test, test, and then test some more.
The pointers mentioned in this article are a good point to start but it pays to remember that no matter how good your conversion rate is, it can always be improved. For this reason, it is advisable to test different versions of your pop up to find out what works for your audience.
