Why You Should Add Pop-Up to Your Website for Lead Generation and Service Promotion

Ever visited a website, and a small window suddenly appeared with an attention-grabbing message or call to action? These graphical overlays, known as pop-ups or popups, can be an effective marketing tool. Whether you are looking to generate leads, boost sales or encourage impatient visitors to continue browsing, there are good reasons to add pop-ups to your website.

Some may consider pop-ups annoying, but according to Wisepops research, the average conversion rate of top-performing pop-ups is as high as 23%. By leveraging various pop-up features, you can create eye-catching offers, convey important information and engage website visitors. But how do you get started? What are the different types of pop-ups available? How can you implement them effectively? Keep reading to find out. 

Key highlights

• Pop-ups are an effective marketing tool that website owners can use to grab attention and convince visitors to take business-focused actions.
• Pop-ups can be disruptive and annoying, but strategic placement and proper timing can make them valuable assets for driving engagements and conversions.
• By customizing pop-ups to trigger based on specific user behavior or demographics, you can deliver personalized content and relevant offers for better marketing outcomes.

What is a promotional pop-up?

A pop-up is a graphical display that suddenly appears on a website and overlays the existing content. The way pop-ups appear from nowhere and push the content the reader is viewing to the background makes them effective at grabbing attention. 

Unsurprisingly, many marketers create popups, and they do that using a variety of available marketing platforms (e.g., HubSpot) and software (e.g., OptiMonk). Primarily, they use pop-ups to showcase top-selling products, promote time-limited offers or display important updates and messages. 

Although pop-ups can be useful, they can also be intrusive and cause a high bounce rate if not placed strategically. In worst cases, pop-ups interrupt the user experience and require manual interaction to dismiss. However, it is easy to improve user satisfaction and use pop-ups more effectively as a marketing tool.

Top advantages of using promotional pop-ups

A website popup can be a powerful tool for achieving your brand’s sales and engagement objectives in the following ways. 

• A simple popup with a promotional message and an action button can grab attention and nudge website visitors to take a specific action.
• You can leverage popups to recover abandoned carts by offering special discounts and incentives to persuade site visitors to complete their purchases. 
• Popups can include forms for users to enter contact information, which is effective for generating leads and growing your list of email subscribers.
• Time-sensitive popup ads can help increase sales by encouraging visitors to take immediate action on an offer before the opportunity expires. 
• You can create popups to trigger based on specific user behavior or demographics, allowing you to deliver personalized content and relevant offers for better marketing outcomes.

5 types of pop-ups for small businesses

Different pop-ups serve different purposes. You must choose the right one to help you reach your brand objectives and ensure their effectiveness. Here are five common types of pop-ups small businesses can use as a valuable addition to their marketing strategy. 

1. Entry pop-up

This type of pop-up appears immediately when a visitor lands on a site or visits a specific web page. You can create an entry pop-up to display as a fixed banner at the top or as a smaller window that overlays the background content. 

Because of how quickly they trigger, especially when the visitor is yet to explore the site, entry pop-ups are tricky to use. However, they can be wildly effective when used in the proper context to highlight important brand updates, promote special deals or offer freebies.

2. Click pop-up

As the name implies, click pop-ups are triggered when visitors click on a specific website element like a button, link or image. You can use them to collect lead information, offer incentives or showcase special deals. 

Due to its activation method, a click popup allows you to display offers relevant to what the user has shown interest in based on their clicks. So for businesses with online stores that serve multiple audience segments, click pop-ups can ensure you promote the right offer to the right person. 

3. Pop-up form

A pop-up form is a popup type with input fields where visitors can enter their details, such as name, email address and contact information. Pop-up forms are particularly effective for building a list of email or newsletter subscribers. However, you can use them for other purposes like event registrations, feedback collection or surveys.

It helps to offer incentives alongside your pop-up forms to entice visitors to fill them out. And to further improve the effectiveness of your pop-ups, you can enhance them with interactive features built using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Discounts pop-up

Updates pop-up

Membership pop-up

4. Exit intent pop-up

These pop-ups activate when visitors intend to leave your site or bounce out of a page. They are activated by exit-intent software that tracks a user’s cursor motions and detects when they move to close the page or hit the back button. 

By displaying a pop-up banner with a compelling offer precisely when visitors are about to leave, you can reduce bounce rates and turn leaving visitors into leads and customers. 

Note that for this pop-up to be effective, you have to offer something that is hard to resist. You can ensure this by presenting highly-relevant incentives that customers will value. 

5. Sticky Pop-up

Sticky pop-ups appear at the top or bottom of the main page, remaining fixed as the user scrolls through the website. You can also set a sticky pop-up to disappear after several seconds or enable users to easily close it themselves.

While sticky pop-ups are less intrusive than full-screen popups, they are visible and persistent, making them still effective at capturing visitors’ attention. 

Sticky pop-ups are particularly useful when you have an important site-wide update, announcement or promotion you want customers to be aware of. To foster trust and credibility, you can also use this type of pop-up to display social proof with real-time notifications of recent purchases or positive customer reviews. 

How to add popup to website effectively: 5 best practices

As you now know, pop-ups can be an effective marketing tool. However, if website users find them annoying, they may leave your website and go elsewhere, leading to decreased site traffic and lost sales opportunities. 

Here are some best practices to help you avoid the negative consequences of a poor pop-up strategy. 

1. Keep it simple

You must avoid making pop-ups cluttered, wordy or difficult to understand. Instead, aim to convey your message with simplicity. For example, if you want visitors to enter their details, keep the form as minimal as possible to reduce friction. 

It is also important to be mindful of the design. Avoid using overly bright colors or animations that can be overwhelming, and opt for a clean and unobtrusive design. Remember, a simple pop-up with a non-offensive background color is less likely to annoy users. 

2. Make your offer compelling

If you’re going to disrupt a visitor’s browsing experience with a promotional popup, you better make it worth their while. For example, the standard 10% discount, newsletter subscription and free e-book download offers may be ineffective as visitors have grown used to seeing them on other websites. 

To make your pop-ups more effective, get creative and offer something unique or exclusive that users will find irresistible. Also, ensure your pop-up has a captivating headline and persuasive copy that clearly communicates the benefit of what you’re offering. 

3. Use them in the right context

Imagine you are visiting a website for the first time. All of a sudden, you are greeted with a lengthy pop-up survey. This can be a frustrating and annoying experience for many users. 

Instead of displaying pop-ups without warning, it is better to strategically place them where they align with the visitor’s journey and intent.

Here are some pop-up examples used in the proper context:

• A cart-recovery pop-up that triggers when visitors add items to their cart but do not complete the purchase. 
• An incentive pop-up that encourages visitors to stay when they are about to exit the site or a page. 
• Timed pop-ups that offer related content or resources while visitors are reading a blog article.

4. Pay attention to timing

Timing is critical when it comes to how you use pop-ups. This ties in with the earlier point regarding context. If pop-ups appear too soon, visitors may be irritated and leave. Instead, allow visitors some time to explore your site before promotional pop-ups trigger. 

For example, you can trigger popups when visitors show interest or engagement by scrolling past a certain point on a page. This approach offers a more natural and contextually relevant timing, enhancing the reception of your offer and providing a positive user experience.

5. Design for mobile

Ensuring your pop-ups work well on smaller screens is something to consider with the increasing use of mobile devices. Popups shouldn’t take up the full screen space, open in a new tab or obstruct navigation, or there is a good chance that your visitors will not only not become valuable leads but ignore your messages and leave your site altogether.

Also, note that if visitors choose not to engage with your pop-up, they should be able to easily dismiss it. To ensure your pop-ups work well on all screen sizes, implement a mobile-responsive design that automatically adjusts the layout, size and formatting.

WAcademy Web Services: Promotion Pop-ups

It’s time to give your website a boost with captivating pop-ups. At WAcademy, we can help you implement effective pop-ups to maximize engagement and conversion rates on your website. 

If you already own a website designed by WAcademy interns, our team offers additional web services at competitive rates, for example:

• Pop-up integration to capture visitors’ attention and drive conversions.
• Google Analytics integration to gain valuable insights into your website’s performance.
• Meta Pixel integration to enhance the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising campaigns.
• GDPR cookie banner integration to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations.
• Automated invoicing system setup for ecommerce websites to ensure error-free and efficient invoicing.
• Social media feed integration to assist in directing traffic to social media accounts from your website.
• Live chat integration to enhance communication with customers and increase customer satisfaction.
• Online booking system setup to help optimize increase customer engagement.

If you do not own a business or ecommerce website yet, we’ve got you covered. We provide fully customized, high-quality websites for small businesses at no cost. Too good to be true? Fortunately, not in this case!

We can offer 100% free web design services because of an efficient internship program that supports aspiring website designers and enables them to gain hands-on experience. To date, our interns have designed over 30,000 websites for small businesses for free, and we are gearing up to offer growth opportunities for even more companies in the years to come.

Interested? Contact us today to see how we can help you maximize your brand presence online.