Popup Study #1 - Bernard Burch

DESIGN AUDIT

Popup Etude #1

Brand:

Single Grain

What to know about this:

I arrived at this website by clicking a link on Twitter. All I want to do is read the article; but, before I do that, I must answer 3 questions:

What's my opinion?

This is one of my pet-peeves about how people use popups. Is anyone thinking how or why I’m a new visitor to your site? I’m here to read an article. Could you give me at least a minute or so to figure out if your content is even worth reading?

It’s like when you go into a retail store or restaurant for the first time and you get customer serviced to death before you can take in your environment.

Along the same line, I’m there to read an article. When I click on either popup (excluding the cookies), I’m taken away from the thing I’m on your website to do: read your article.

So what do 99% of people do? “X X Okay.” They click on the Xs to get rid of all the clutter…within seconds of arriving on your website and you lose your marketing opportunity.

What's the solution?

The first thing is to have only one popup. You MUST decide what is most important for your business. If you want to learn more about your visitors and filter them into different “funnels”, then do that. If you want people signing up for your 7-day trial, focus on that. Or, do different things in different parts of your website…but don’t hit me with all your marketing at the same time.

The second suggestion is a timer, or some other way to prevent everything from slapping me all at once. The most common is a trigger just before people are exiting the browser window; but, you could also add a 30-timer or set the popup to appear only half-way through the article/page.

And if you absolutely insist on having two popups, perhaps the second one is only shown to people who have already visited your site and the first one is only for first time visitors.

One way to optimize your marketing efforts is look at how you are using popups from a visitor’s perspective. If in your Google Analytics you are seeing a large Bounce Rate, popups could be contributing to it.