A key benefit of popups, of course, is that you can make your site visitors aware of things they wouldn’t have thought of on their own. In online marketing – and in advertising in general – it is well known that we need to guide people to certain actions.
After all, it would be wrong to think that all of your website visitors already know what action you would like to lead them to.
Many website owners first realize this when they create an email list signup popup, and then notice how many more people are suddenly signing up.
Another advantage of using popups is reducing the friction of forcing website visitors from one subpage to another.
In the world of conversion optimization, it’s well known that many users would rather bounce than put up with too many steps on different subpages.
This is where popups are handy: Visitors can stay on the same page and perform the desired actions without unnecessary intermediate steps or long loading times.
The disadvantages of popups are without a doubt on the user side. Because there are very few things these days that annoy site visitors as much as fighting through a jungle of popups.
As Gary Vaynerchuk said: “Marketers ruin everything!”.
To illustrate, let me show you the typical process of first entering a news site or blog:
● First, I have to confirm in a popup box that I agree to the use of cookies, or individually select the particular cookies that I do not accept.
● Then another popup opens, asking me to disable the ad blocker (who likes ads, right?) or I won’t see the content at all.
● After I turn off the adblocker, a popup jumps out at me, asking me to allow push notifications.
● As soon as I politely decline, my attention is drawn to a new popup, asking me to sign up for or download something.
This is a lot.
And this is why I usually leave a website after the second or third point. If I remember the website at all, I mainly remember that it was annoying.
This kind of approach will scare away your users.
The bottom line is that popups are very helpful when used correctly. This means that you shouldn’t overdo it.
Of course, a popup has to visually match the design of the rest of the website and work flawlessly – especially on mobile devices.
This is why I’d like to introduce you to a few tools you can use to do just that