How To Avoid These 3 Common Mistakes While Designing A Popup Ad

There was a time when popups were considered a risky marketing technique but not anymore! Well, you don’t have to take my word for that: Google “Popups for ecommerce” and you will find many articles all telling you the same thing–how popups can help your ecommerce business. But, if you’ve been struggling to increase email signups, decrease your cart abandonment rates, or collect more information about your visitors even after using popups, it’s possible that you are not using them correctly.

“Popups are the most hated advertising technique, but when used effectively they have unique potential to drive conversions.”

Now that you know popups work extremely well but are not working for your site. Let me tell you what you are doing wrong.

Here are three such reasons that are preventing your popups from generating a good response.

You Are Showing Too Many Popups On A Single Page

It’s no secret that pop-ups can be used for many purposes: you can use them to increase your email subscriptions, to instantly recover your abandoned carts, or to capture feedback. But showing more than one popup on a single page is a recipe for disaster. It will force visitors to leave your site without taking any action.

Here is an example

Showing two popups at a time can confuse your visitors as to which action should they take. It can hurt your conversions, as when in confusion people prefer not to take an action.

Your Popup Is Not Well Targeted

Targeting everyone with the same popup means targeting no one at all. In fact, it’s very annoying if you ask someone to do what they’ve already done like in the example given below:

A clear case of one-size-fits-all blunder – this retailer is showing a “sign-up” popup to a registered & logged in customer. You can check my name on the top of the screen shot.

An “Opt-in Popup” is undoubtedly the most common popup that almost every e-commerce company is using to capture the email addresses of their visitors.

These entrance email capture popups are highly annoying when not targeted correctly; still, almost every ecommerce site is doing it wrong. Popups are very effective for list building but showing them to subscribers who are already on your list should be a criminal offense (just kidding). No, seriously not at least when the person is already logged in. 

You Are Showing Popups On The Wrong Page Or Time

Too often, a marketer only focusses on popup design and offer but forgets to pay any attention to the pages the popup will display and the timing. They forget that not all popups fit on every page. Here is an example:

The popup is neat in design with a clearly highlighted offer, but they showed this on their unsubscribe page!! Opt-in on the unsubscribe page…. seriously!

The reason people unsubscribe is when they are not interested in receiving emails from that particular site, not because they need a discount. So, instead of offering them a discount at that point of time, you should try to collect their thoughts on why they’re leaving your site. Or you can show them your social channels and encourage them to stay connected with you.

Regardless of how good your popup copy is or how well designed your popups are or how good your offer is, you need to make sure you’re not making any of these mistakes. If you don’t avoid these errors, you’ll continue to get poor results. Finally, don’t forget to A/B test your popups to see what’s working and what’s not working in your popups. 

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.