Capturing your customer’s email address is an important part of any marketing strategy. It helps you to keep in contact with them, if they want you to, and work on sending them offers and info that will be genuinely valuable to them.
An email address is a golden nugget for businesses – it gives you permission and the opportunity to engage with potential leads and customers. Pop-ups and banners can help you do this, but they can also capture data about browsing behaviour and preferences through surveys.
It’s safe to say that users do find pop-ups quite annoying –people will hit the cross straight away or even leave a site altogether, but you can use pop-ups in a responsible, non-invasive way for your business. Here’s how:
Timing
Facing a glaring pop-up as soon as you enter a site isn’t good user design. This can put people off your brand almost immediately. Getting the timing of pop-ups right is key. Around 30 seconds is an optimal time to deliver a pop-up, as users will have had time to do some initial browsing and flick through a website. It’s not as in your face as a pop-up that bombards a customer straight away.
Context
Using pop-ups is about context too. Ask yourself before you include one – do we really need this here? Including relevant pop-ups in the user journey means that you need to be strategic and think about when the best time is to ask your customers a specific question or request something. Make sure that your content is hyper-relevant.
For example, if someone is abandoning a shopping cart online, you can include a pop-up to remind them of the items in their basket and also offer an incentive to follow-through with a purchase i.e free shipping or a discount code. Or another example is giving real-time pop-ups that offer updates about a product’s availability – you can show someone how much of a product is left to incentivise them to buy it while they can.
Design
Garish, loud pop-ups might be unavoidable and impossible to miss but they also create a poor user experience for customers. Keep your pop-ups simple, straight-forward and in keeping with your overall brand image.
Concise copy that clearly lets users know what you’re asking, and crucially, how they can exit the pop-up is important. If someone exits then you can also turn a pop-up into a banner, so it stays on the page, but lets users browse – meaning they can come back to your request if they want to. You could refrain from using pop-ups at all and stick to banners to make a user’s browsing experience as uninterrupted as possible, it’s up to you.
Strategic data capturing is a way for your business to learn about your customers, keep in touch with them and build engagement. You can also work on creating more personalised messaging and communications to users and improve their overall customer experience with your business.
For more advice and help with pop-ups and website user design, contact DOWO.