Without doubt you have already noticed that the reading or shopping experience on a website is sometimes – or rather often – interrupted by an opt-in pop-up. More in the shape of a light box, just as one that is used to display a picture.
Often these pop-up call-to-actions by digital marketers are seen as a disturbance on the communication line between the reader and the provider of the information. Yet, it has been proven in the meantime that due to these light boxes that pop up, emarketing lists grow five to ten times faster than the traditional input form that is waiting for attention on a website.
Proof
The proof has been delivered by Chris Penn on his own blog ChristopherSPenn.com. He was convinced to remove his pop-up and ditto subscribe form from his blog by way of experiment. The result was astonishing. Below figure shows a cliff straight to the bottom on the moment that he removed the Light box. Within a week he had activated his old pop-up again and the number of new subscriptions increased to the old level again.
So it is useless to hide your form, certainly not in the footer of the web page. There they are waiting in vain on accidental attention. A pop-up works in reverse. There you obviously have to ignore the attention, since the CTA is placed right in front of the reader. It’s just, which strategy should you follow in this method?
Best method
Pop up as soon as the web page gets loaded is something we wouldn’t advise. After all, there is no engagement yet with the incoming reader. On that moment you will irritate the reader rather than do him some good. But there are more moments when a pop-up can be implemented without any risk. A possibility is to wait until the cursor leaves the web page towards the menu of the browser. Then you don’t interrupt the reading process and you will pose your question at the end. This works well for fixed computers, but not on smart devices. There the cursor is an empty term.
You can also choose to let the Light box pop up after a certain depth on the web page or after a certain time of reading. This works on a classic computer as well as on a mobile reading device. The reader will be interrupted, but has sacrificed some time on the offered content. Then the reader is sure whether more may or may not follow via email. Another reader can click away, but maybe didn’t come very far on the page. It is good to experiment in order to find the right pop-up moment.
Classic rules of the game
Of course the classic rules for an opt-in form remain in effect. For the sake of completeness, we will sum them up here. First of all, you should keep the number of fields as low as possible. More information can be requested afterwards or you can add more information by monitoring the click-throughs. More often you see forms where one should settle with the email address. The second big game rule is that you always have to answer this question: “What is in there for me?”. Because it should be a win-win for both parties!
