The pop-up seems like a good idea, there’s no doubt about that. One of the most integral goals behind a website is to convert interested users into buyers, while also keeping your existing customers loyal with interesting content and engaging newsletters.
The newsletters, specifically, are a key goal for many website owners. According to a recent report, marketers who use mailing lists increase email opening rates by 40%, with segmented mailing lists increasing revenue by 760%. To get people to sign up for mailing lists, however, there are at least two clicks they have to make.
The first click is the internet user clicking onto your website, and the second click is them navigating to the ‘Sign Up’ page. Removing a click from your website design will always increase engagement time, so it makes sense that a pop-up that appears as soon as the user enters will make it more likely that they’ll sign up for the mailing list.
Except, it doesn’t. Below, we explain why the mailing list ‘pop-up’ is a failed experiment, and why you as a website owner need to ‘pop’ it at your first opportunity.
1. Starting With a Negative Interaction
You might think that including a mailing list pop-up technically gets rid of a click, but this is incorrect. For starters, users haven’t even had a chance to explore your website yet. Before agreeing to sign up to a mailing list, it’s normal that users have the opportunity to navigate the site, understand who you are, what you offer, and why signing up to the mailing list will be a good idea.
With an immediate pop-up, they don’t have the chance to do that, and so the chances of them signing up right out of the gate are low. So what do they have to do? Click off the mailing list pop-up, thus adding an extra click to the website design. What makes this even worse is that this click is a negative click.
The first thing a user does when they enter your website is react negatively to a pop-up, which converts an interested attitude to a disinterested one. Even if they’re still willing to explore what your site has to offer, they’re going to be doing so following a negative interaction, and this puts you on the wrong foot before you’ve even had a chance to reel them in.
2. Non-Engaged Subscribers
But let’s say you get lucky. Let’s say a new user clicks on your website and immediately signs up for your mailing list. What if they then explore the website and decide your products or services are not for them? The likelihood is that they won’t immediately unsubscribe.
How many spam-like newsletter emails have you got in your inbox that you keep meaning to unsubscribe to, but haven’t got around to it yet? We’re willing to bet it’s a few. A lot of the time, users either don’t see the unsubscribe option, or they can’t be bothered making multiple clicks – which are often required – just to unsubscribe to a subscription they didn’t want in the first place.
This is a bad thing for you, however, because it means you’ll have a lot of ‘subscribers’ who simply aren’t engaged with your content. This makes it far harder to segment an audience – which, as we’ve already noted, can increase your email marketing revenue by 760% – and find the right kind of personalisation to engage them. It’s far better to utilise your mail list and scale your website knowing users have looked through your site and actively clicked on the page to subscribe.
3. Bounce Rates and SEO Penalties
If you take a quick look on Google, you’ll find varying opinions on whether pop-ups increase bounce rates or decrease them. It seems that the answer really depends on how you use them and how they affect the overall user experience.
Here at XIST2, we’re not saying that pop-ups are fundamentally a bad thing, but they have to be curated for the right thing. That is to say, using a mailing list pop-up risks a higher bounce rate than a pop-up that makes sense in the context of the user journey.
It’s also worth mentioning that search engines like Google often penalise pop-ups that affect the user’s ability to access content, which can affect your website rankings and visibility online – but even if it doesn’t block the user from accessing the rest of the website, it still interferes with their line of view and asks them to interact with it.
With this in mind, it’s important to really consider whether you need a pop-up for this sort of thing – and, even more importantly, whether you’re willing to take the risk associated with it.
