Why Website Pop-Ups Actually Work

Have you ever gone on to a website and were suddenly hit with a pop-up? Being a small business owner, you may have been turned off by the pop-up because it got in the way of your website user experience, but I'm here to tell you that pop-ups are an effective way to grow your email marketing subscriber list.

You see, it all has to do with our reptilian brain or the "Lizard Brain," which is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing-up, and fornication. The two actions that play into pop-up psychology are fight or flight.

When a pop-up appears on a website, it triggers our fight or flight response. Do we engage with this thing that just interrupted our user experience? Should we take the risk of wasting our time and precious clicks? Or do we close out the tab to preserve our overall web session?

It turns out these pop-ups, no matter how annoying or interruptive, actually work in driving email marketing subscriptions. According to a recent Sumo.com study, some pop-ups saw conversion rates as high as 50.2 percent with the average conversion rate landing at 9.28 percent!

To put that into perspective, if you get even 300 visitors per day to your site you’d have 936 signups in a month.

According to that same report, there are 8 bulletproof elements to a top-performing pop-up:

1. Pop-ups With More Context Have Higher Conversion Rates
2. The Highest-Converting Pop-ups Don’t Appear Immediately
3. Being Unclear With Your Headline And Offer Will Sink Your Conversion Rates
4. Personality Creates Interest
5. The Best Pop-ups Offer Something of Value
6. Pop-ups Shouldn’t Appear Immediately After A Visitor Closes Out
7. Calls To Action Need To Match The Offer
8. Exit Pop-ups Need An Overwhelmingly Valuable Offer

Moral of the story: pop-ups are far from dead. In fact, they're alive and kicking. Take a look at this video for 3 real-life examples of Privy pop-ups growing our clients' email lists by thousands of subscribers...

Want to learn more about digital marketing? Subscribe to our new YouTube Channel: Bigger Better Biz