I get many emails a month from people asking how to go about
designing a popup window to extract the maximum number of
opt-ins from visitors to their web site. In this article I
outline the seven essential steps you should take in your design
of a successful popup:
1. PAY your subscriber
Okay, not literally PAY them, but you generally need to give
something back in return for the visitor's name and email
address.
For example, a free course, a free book, a free consultation,
anything that's of VALUE to your visitors and of RELEVANCE to
your web site or business. I see so many popups that just say
'Type in your name and email address here:' without giving
anything in return for these details.
2. Make your headline SELL
The headline of your popup is incredibly important, as it's
often the first part of the popup window that the visitor's eye
is attracted to. If it doesn't interest them, they'll shut down
the popup immediately.
What can you do to improve your headline?
You need to focus strongly on the BENEFIT to the potential
subscriber - tell them exactly how are they going to BENEFIT
from giving you their name and email address. For example, the
following are all headlines suitable for my own site that offer
a clear benefit to the reader:
"Boost your Subscribers by 535%" "Discover Secret PopUp
Techniques" "FREE Report: Exit PopUp Boosts Sales 110%"
You could emulate this type of benefit-laden headline for your
own site.
3. Make it load QUICK
A slow loading popup is going to be a quickly closed popup! No
visitor to your web site is going to sit around while your
elaborate popup loads all your fancy graphics, they're just
going to close it straight away - it's your job to CAPTURE THEIR
INTEREST as soon as possible, and thereby prevent closure of the
window before you've made your offer, and hopefully get them to
type in their details.
Some graphics are usually more effective than none, but minimize
your use of them, and optimize the graphics files before
uploading to your server.
4. Use an effective TITLE
I see many popups where the title of the popup window (i.e., in
the title bar, set by the HTML title tags) is completely
inappropriate. For example, 'popup page' or 'popup1'. At best,
this looks unprofessional, so try to make your title relevant to
the offer you are making to the visitor, and mirror your
headline in some way.
5. BALANCE the popup page
The page you display in the popup window should at the very
least look pleasing to the eye. This means the fonts on the page
should be consistent and not look out of place, the colors
should provide high contrast and make it easy to read, and the
alignment of the text and any images on the page should not make
any element look out of place.
6. Offer a way to CLOSE the popup window
You can easily add a button or a link to your popup page that
allows visitors to close the popup window if they wish. You can
do this easily by adding the code onclick="self.close();return
false;" to your link or button tag.
7. KEEP IT SIMPLE
Overall, the best rule you can follow is just to keep to the
point and Keep It Simple - this way you can capture the
attention of your visitor quickly and easily and not distract
their attention from your main aim which is to get their name
and email address. And of course, once you've got their email
address, treat it well and keep their interest.
By following these seven essential tips, you'll definitely have
all the basics in place. The trick then is to keep on tweaking
and testing your popup to try and optimize on your results.
About the author:
Steve Shaw is the author of The PopUp Masters Course available
for FREE from http://popupmaster.com/?a12 - Discover the PopUp
Secrets of Pros like Marlon Sanders and Terry Dean, and boost
your opt-ins by 535%
