Sweet Website Popups: Turn Visitors Into Delicious Conversions

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This marketing infographic and post is part of KlientBoost’s 25-part series.

Before you go judging the annoyance level of popups, consider this stat:

When Entrepreneur.com added pop-ups to their site, their subscriptions increased by 86% and their sales increased by 162%.

With conversion rates like that, it can’t be that everyone gets super annoyed by popups.

Certain popup types will work better for certain audiences.

Here are six types of popups that you can pick and choose from to use on your site.

Which one works best for your audience?


website popups

Page Specific Popups


Your visitors have already arrived at your page to check out all the good stuff in your content. Make them even happier by offering something related, valuable and tailored to that page.

You can customize your popup offers to the content that’s already residing on specific pages of your site. Offer your visitors even more value with downloadable things like:

  • Checklists
  • List of resources
  • Transcripts of videos, interviews, podcasts
  • Guides
  • Whitepapers
  • Case studies
  • Blog post PDFs

Here’s a Health Ambition example where they went from a generic prompt to subscribe to their newsletter to something more page-specific, like this:

The result? Conversions went from .59% to 3.2%, which is more than a 440% increase.

With page specific popups you can be offer something more relevant to your visitors by tapping into the interests they’ve already expressed.

Timed Popups


Find out if your visitors are more likely to convert if you extend your popup offers after certain periods of time. You can test out various times of activity and inactivity and figure which is the optimal time to trigger your popup.

Will your visitors be more likely to convert if they see your popup after several seconds or immediately upon arriving at your page?

Here’s a general opt-in rate chart provided by AuthorityHacker covering popup trigger times:

To get to the real optimal trigger time for your site, test out different scenarios on different pages to find out what works best for that specific page.

Someone on a pricing page may behave differently than someone on a more exploratory page like the explainer video page.

Click Popups


Click popups allow your visitors to convert without even having to leave your page. If your visitor is interested in your offer and clicks on the opt-in link, image or button, you can trigger a click popup with a simple form or email capture box.

Makes things super easy, convenient and quick.

Here’s an example of a Wishpond CTA link:

Which takes us to this click popup:

This can make lead generation a simpler process by decreasing the number of opt-in steps in comparison to a standard form. Test out your click popup options to see how it compares to the lead gen volume coming in through your forms.

Entry Popups


Another option is to greet your visitors immediately with an entry popup so they have to decide whether or not to convert before even accessing the content on your page.

Consider where your visitors came from and make your entry popup relevant to that traffic source.

Here’s an example of an entry popup for a visitor that clicked to go to Mashable’s site from Facebook:

This entry popup is a way to snatch a quick conversion before your visitor reaches your site content, giving you another chance to connect later via social media.

Here’s another example of an entry popup that’s triggered when arriving at the news-specific page of Affposts:

Tap further into something that you know is of interest to your visitor. Greeting your visitors with your popup offer pushes them to engage immediately before they continue through to your page content.

Scroll Popups


Scrolling popups can be useful for longer content pages like blog posts. You can set your popup trigger for a certain percentage of text read, so test out the different options for the optimal scroll point.

ConversionXL uses a scroll popup about halfway down their blog post page that looks like this:

What has the scrolling triggered popup done for ConversionXL?

They get nearly half of their email subscribers from it.

For visitors who are reading information on your pages you can offer similar content in your scroll popup.

Visitors are already interested in the topics on our page, so educational offers like email or newsletter subscriptions, ebooks and webinars can help you provide your visitors with even more value.

Exit Popups

What about on the way out? You can use exit popups to engage your visitors as they leave your page.

Exit popups are triggered when an exit behavior is detected from certain mouse speeds, directions and cursor placements on your page.

This is where you can address exit-oriented thoughts in your offer and acknowledge certain friction points that someone leaving might have, like:

  • Not sure I found what the value I was looking for. Need more info.
  • I didn’t fully understand the info presented to me. Could use more explanation.
  • I found the info valuable but I’m still unsure. Need more time to consider.
  • I’m not sure about the quality of the offer. Could see more credibility.

For an ecommerce site, you can address these concerns in your exit popup by offering discounts and free shipping. You can even include testimonials to build trust. Here’s an example of an exit popup which taps into testimonials:

  • 63% of consumers indicate they’re more likely to purchase from a site if it has ratings or reviews
  • Customers with free returns had a 357% increase in purchases over a two-year period

Still not convinced?

Larry Kim at Search Engine Land included exit popups on his site and these were his results:

  • Reduced bounce rate by up to 60%
  • Increased time-on-site by more than 50%

Relating specific topics to your visitor’s needs and concerns as they leave your page can help you grab that conversion on their way out. Better yet, exit popups can sometimes change your visitor’s mind and keep them perusing your page for longer.

Custom JavaScript/CSS


You can create custom popups with any image, video or piece of content you like. With JavaScript and CSS coding you can get fancy and target specific criteria, like devices and geographic location.

Develop and customize your popup to your heart’s content.

Why? Because popups make a big impact on your conversions. All that coding may be worth the extra effort.

Foodcraft blogger, Nikki McGonigal tested out a lightbox popup against her sidebar form and discovered after 8 months the popup drove over 7,000 additional subscribers. That translates to 1,375% more subscribers.

Closing Thoughts


As annoying as one may initially think they are, popups can be an effective way to gain conversions. With page specific, click, entry, exit, scroll and even custom popups, you can accumulate quite the number of leads, subscribers and even purchasers.

So long as your popup offer is relevant and valuable to your visitor, the popup can do wonders for your conversions.

Like with everything conversion rate optimization (CRO) related, test everything.

Use popups with caution and to keep the following in mind:

  • Do not remove the corner x that allows visitors to close the popup
  • Do not use more than one popup per page (two if click popup)
  • Do not include more than two form fields in your popup form

Happy popuping.


About the author:

Johnathan Dane is an international speaker and the founder of KlientBoost, a no-nonsense, creative, kick-ass AdWords and landing page agency that hustles for results and ROI. If you think this article’s good, you should see what he’s writing on their PPC and CRO blog.

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