If you are a visitor to this website you likely noticed an experiment I was running throughout the month of November – aWeber popups asking you to subscribe to the GetANewBrowser email newsletter…
Why did I implement this? Well when we added the email newsletter feature I wanted to test some opt-in internet marketing tactics. Rather than writing a post about the email newsletter I went with a delayed modal popup asking the readers to subscribe. I did this for a couple reasons. I wanted to see the effectiveness of this method without broadcasting it – so that the numbers would not be skewed by visitors from the RSS feed.
Secondly, I wanted to verify the effectiveness of popover requests… And guess what – it works as advertised. aWeber featured a post stating a 1000% increase in subscriptions using this method. ProBlogger wrote a post regarding the ridiculous increase in subscribers to his photography blog using this method.
Others have doubled their conversion rates using popovers.
Did it work at GetANewBrowser? Yes, it sure did – conversions skyrocketed. So why did I remove the pop-up? Well, honestly, I hate them as a user :-). I think it impairs the user experience and has the potential to increase bounce rates – especially from search traffic. Although bounce rates did not increase there is still a high annoyance level. Adam Singer recenlty wrote a post called “No-Permission Pop-up Subscriptions Are A Bad Idea”. Even though all the numbers point to why you should adopt this opt-in technique, he makes great points that ring true to my personal experience with these popups…
A few reasons why you shouldn’t use unanticipated pop-ups:
- Shows a lack of respect to your visitors
- Pop-ups are push, not pull
- Gives a bad first impression
- People actively despise unexpected popups
- Feels like spam
- Increases bounce rates of search traffic
- Content should be first
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Thats pretty interesting Andy.