You open a website and are suddenly bombarded with pop-ups and pinging sounds. You close one, and another comes up. You’re annoyed, but you close it.
And then another one comes up with another ping. That sounds annoying, right? That’s how visitors feel when they open your website.
If you have too many pop-ups on your website, you might lose visitors. In this article, learn about why this annoys your visitors so much and what you can do to annoy your visitors less and still keep the pop-ups.
Why do Brands Use Pop-Ups?
Most websites that you come across want you to take action, such as signing up for their email list or making a purchase of their latest products.
Another reason why pop-ups appear is when brands encourage you to sign up for their new deals. For instance, Xfinity offers promotions and deals for their services every once in a while.
And that appears whenever you visit Xfinity websites, encouraging you to sign up for their deals by applying directly or calling the Xfinity customer service number.
Despite internet users complaining about annoying pop-ups, they are still very effective tools.
In fact, there was an average conversion rate of 11.09% because of pop-ups, as shown from the data collected back in 2021, while generally, a good conversion rate is between 2 and 5 percent.
Why Brands Shouldn’t Use Pop-Ups?
Sure, we all agree that pop-ups may have a good conversion rate, but they aren’t always worth it. Following are some of the reasons why we think you shouldn’t use pop-ups for your websites:
Visitors Get Annoyed
Running a website means that you don’t just a one-time visitor. You want them to keep coming back to your website again.
This means you should create a visitor experience that they like enough to keep visiting your website again.
But using the pop-up technique is annoying and not something your visitors want to return to your website again for.
Increase in Bounce Rates
Every time a pop-up appears, your frustrated visitor is forced to click away. That can be shown as an increase in bounce rate in your website analytics.
But behind all this analysis, you don’t know which one of these visitors might have enjoyed visiting your website and come back again.
Visitors Think You Don’t Care How They Feel
When you’re weighing your visitor’s annoyance versus pop-up conversions and choose to go for the latter, you’re actually sending out a message that your visitor’s experience on your website is less important than your website analytics goals.
And your visitors know that you know they don’t enjoy being bombarded with pop-ups on your website. Hence, that is how they know that they don’t matter to you.
Strategies for Using Pop-Ups Without Annoying Your Visitors
As we have already established, visitors will get annoyed whenever they receive a pop-up while visiting your website.
On the other hand, there have been reports by many businesses that claim that the pop-ups on their websites convert them enough to make up for increasing bounce rates and visitor frustrations that they would otherwise cause.
If that is your reason for wanting to keep pop-ups on your website, then you need to adopt strategies to make them appear less intrusive and less of a bother to your visitors.
One Pop-Up Per Page is Enough
We have all been on websites where another appears as soon as you close one pop-up! If the first one didn’t drive the visitors away, the second one definitely will.
Your visitors will be more forgiving if it’s just one pop-up per page, maybe two even. But try not to go for three pop-ups per page.
Improve the Mobile Experience
Pop-ups are very annoying when you load a website on your laptop or PC.
But when you use to load a website on a smartphone that has already a very small screen to start with, it can completely wreck the visitor’s experience on your website.
Mobile internet usage is becoming more prevalent than desktop, so a lot of internet users will be loading your website on small screens.
To enable pop-ups for your website, you need to ensure that it is easy to navigate through a smartphone.
One annoyance while dealing with pop-ups on smartphone screens is that it can be difficult to find the X button, i.e., the X button to close the pop-up.
Hence, you need to ensure that opening your website on a smartphone doesn’t annoy your visitors too much.
The X Button
We have all come across pop-ups where we couldn’t find the X button to close it.
It’s usually because the X button isn’t at its usual place, i.e., the upper right corner instead of the left or bottom, or it is the same color as the background.
That doesn’t give a very good impression of the website. Because if any visitor comes to your website, prepared to trust you, and comes across pop-up buttons that aren’t easy to close, he starts to lose his trust in the website.
Make sure to put a clear and obvious X on the top right corner of the pop-up bar where your visitor expects to see it.
You should ensure that your website stays reputable by making it easy for your visitors to opt out of something they don’t want to see on your website.
Final Thoughts
Introducing pop-ups on your website can be such a dilemma: your visitors don’t want to see them, but you still need to integrate them for your benefit.
If you want to keep the pop-ups on your website, ensure they don’t appear sleazy or too annoying, keeping the whole visitor’s experience in mind.
