This is a guest blog post by Kaushal Sampat, Product Manager at Digioh. Digioh is a suite of tools to help capture more leads on your website. PostUp has partnered with Digioh to incorporate these tools into your email program. Check out Digioh.com for more information.
Modals not Pop-Ups
Modals are extremely powerful and highly effective in converting your visitors into customers. Wait, this article is about pop-ups, right? Please, keep reading.
The Internet has come a long ways in the last 15 years. It’s exponentially more organized, secure and interactive. Through this evolution, we’ve seen tons of new tools to help developers engage and convert website visitors. That said, we must use these tools wisely. Keep in mind that scars from browsing over the last 15 to 20 years have built up and are still clearly visible to website visitors. If you remind them of a negative experience, they’ll surely make a beeline from your website to a safer place.
So let’s talk pop-ups. Just the word alone makes me wince. Remember that time you clicked on one link and pop-ups launched faster than you could close them? So for the rest of this article, we’re going to refer to pop-ups as modals.
There are a few simple tips and tricks you can use to make sure that your visitors are likely to engage with your modals:
- Make Sure They are Modals and Not Pop-UpsYour modals should be part of the same page the user is on. Pop-ups that open a new browser window are a HUGE mistake! First, all modern browsers will catch them and automatically close them. Also, they are against most advertisers’ terms of service. Lastly, even if they do work, you will almost certainly remind a visitor of a negative experience. So don’t do it unless it’s a modal!
- Target Your Visitors – Make It Related to What They Are Looking atThe second thing you should keep in mind is a visitor’s intent on your website. Make sure you respect your visitor’s choice as they navigate your website, and it will give you more solid data to build modals! Simply put, modals should be related to what visitors are doing on your website.- Make sure your modals are only related to pages a visitor has been on or are currently on
– Create a call-to-action that is related to the page a visitor is currently on
– If they don’t opt in the first time, show them a different offer
- Don’t Overdo It Remember, we’ve almost all been scarred by more pop-ups launching than we can close. Don’t even subtly remind a user of that experience. Modals are great, but try to limit the modal experience to no more than one per page (at most two, if you’re using an exit intent modal) and three total per browsing session. Two rules we live by at Digioh:- Once a modal has been submitted (aka you got an email), never trigger it again
– Every single lightbox should be easy to close and opt out of - Target First-Time Visitors with an Irresistible Offer When people come to your website for the first time, it’s good to welcome them with a modal. Remember that they’ve chosen to visit your website over your competitor’s. You can show visitors that you appreciate them by offering an exclusive incentive for first time visitors. This is also the perfect time to ask for a name and email address in exchange for a token of your appreciation.- Offer first-time visitors an exclusive incentive to show that you appreciate their visit
– Collect a name and email address in exchange for a token of your appreciation
- Don’t Assume: Re-Purpose and Re-Target If a visitor closes a modal, it doesn’t mean the user isn’t interested. Just because a user isn’t hungry now doesn’t mean they won’t work up an appetite as they continue to browse your website. If a user opts out of a modal, create a teaser that is clearly visible at all times as a user visits related pages on your website. If the user clicks the teaser, the modal should appear again.
– After a modal has been closed and not submitted after automatically firing for the first time, create a teaser that allows the visitor to opt back into the modal by a click action
Closing Remarks and Personal Thoughts on Modals
I’ve been working in digital marketing for over 10 years. Every serious digital marketer knows the power of using modals, and we have the most powerful modal builder on the web that allows you to target visitors in real time. Click below to schedule a list growth strategy session where PostUp and Digoh can show you how to grow your subscriber list using modals and more.