Why Popup Overlays are Taking Over Lead Generation

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It’s not even an argument anymore.

There are enough sites out there with some form of popup overlay that I can stop arguing about whether or not your business should consider them.

At Wishpond we use entry, exit, scroll and javascript popups throughout our site for lead generation. We’ve increased our blog signup rates by 82% with them, doubled blog subscription, and improved final-stage conversion (on the pricing page) by 22%.

This article will give you the popup overlay strategies we’ve seen revolutionizing the lead generation world.

Looking to add popups to your website? Check out Wishpond’s Free Shopify Popup Builder App and Free WordPress Popup Builder App.


Use Scroll Popups to Build your List


Blog subscription is likely the most common way businesses are using popups, and it’s no surprise why.

A scroll popup (like the one below) is set to be triggered a set distance down your blog article (we’ve found that 30-50% works best).

Scroll popups work because they’re delivered only when your blog readers have already gotten value from your brand. They’re halfway down an awesome article and you ask them if they’d like to receive more content like it.

Prospective leads are never more likely to convert than when they’re already smack dab in the middle of receiving something of value from your business.

Here’s a scroll popup overlay example:

popup overlays

Wishpond just released a massive update to its popup and overlay tool (it made all the popups in this article in about 10 minutes). Learn more, or start a free trial, today!


Use Click Popups to Boost Blog Lead Generation


Click popups are the most influential thing we’ve added to the Wishpond blog in the past couple years. When we switched over from landing pages to click popups, our lead generation conversion rates doubled overnight.

I wrote about that in “How We Doubled Blog Lead Generation with Click Popups” if you’re interested in learning more about it.

Click popups work because you’re not making your blog or site traffic go anywhere to convert.

Your site traffic is lazy. The easier it is for conversion, the higher rate you’ll get.

Think of it like this…

You’re walking down an aisle in a grocery store. A table has been set out and they’re giving away free samples of something awesome – chocolate, beef jerky, Glenlivet, whatever.

You try it, love it, and the young man behind the table tells you “right now this product is on sale, 50% off!”

But then he says, “the only problem is that you have to go to our other branch, which is on the other side of town, to get it.”

A click popup is the equivalent of that young man saying “right now this product is 50% off and you can have the one I’m holding.

Get it?

Here’s an example:

To learn more about using click popups on your blog, check out this Wishpond case study: “How We Doubled Blog Lead Generation with Click Popups.


Use Entry Popups to Frame Ecommerce Buy-ins


Ecommerce purchases are a fickle thing. To optimize for an ecommerce purchase, the price has to be right, the reviews have to be good and, most of all, there can’t be fees at the final stage which the consumer did not anticipate.

The majority of potential purchases which get to the “checkout” stage aren’t completed because of shipping or tax additions – they turn a $30 purchase into a $37 purchase, which makes all the difference.

Entry popups are a proven way to frame the entire process. Give a 10% discount or free shipping to first-time visitors and their entire online shopping experience will be different.

The most common way you see this is through an incentivized subscription, like below:

popup overlays

Again, creating this popup from a Wishpond template took me all of 2 minutes (mostly the finding and uploading of the background image).

Once you’ve created your entry popup, switch over to the “Thank You” part of the editor and drop in a discount code (your ecommerce platform will have a walkthough. Here’s Shopify’s.

Simple as that.


Use Exit Popups to Reduce Bounce Rates


Website optimization is all about little wins: turning a page which converts at 22% to one that converts at 25%. Sure, it doesn’t sound like much, but those little wins go a long way over the course of a year or 100,000 visitors.

Exit popups are an easy way to give you an easy win.

When the rest of your website has failed to capture your traffic’s interest, an exit popup is pretty much your last chance (unless, of course, you’re running a remarketing campaign).
Triggered automatically when a visitor’s cursor indicates that it’s leaving the page, an exit popup should be focused around a value-add. And you should, if anything, ask for less than the page does.

For instance, if I’m running a “5 Free Yoga Sessions” promotion on my yoga studio’s website, the exit popup might look like this:

popup overlays

Recently, Wishpond has been A/B testing the addition of an exit popup on our pricing page – prompting visitors to register for a free VIP demo before deciding whether our software is right, or wrong, for them.

Here’s the results of that A/B test:

exit popup a/b test

Because this is running on our pricing page (an extremely important page within our sales funnel), that 22% increase translates to several thousand dollars a month in increased revenue.

To add an exit popup to your own website in the next 10 minutes, Click Here.


Wrapping it Up


Popups are taking over lead generation because they’re simpler than any alternative. They keep your traffic in one place and they require visitors to engage on some level (as opposed to a sidebar banner, for instance).

For our business, they’re taking over from landing pages (for lead generation, alone) because they’re so much faster to create and faster to test. We can get far more from them far quicker than we could with lead generation landing pages.

To wrap it all up…

  • Use scroll popups at about 40% to generate subscribers from your blog
  • Use click popups in the place of a separate landing page to deliver value-adds to your site.
  • Use entry popups in conjunction with a discount code or free shipping to frame your prospective customer’s experience with your site
  • Use exit popups to maximize your website’s chance at converting a visitor into a lead.

To get a bonus popup strategy involving showing a popup exclusively to people who have shown previous interest in your company by page view or other activity, check out section 5 of my article How to Do More With Your Website Traffic. You can create something like this, and only show it to people who have visited your site before but not converted… —->

Related Reading:

If you have Shopify or use WordPress, check out Wishpond’s Free Shopify Popup Builder App and Free WordPress Popup Builder App.

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