Today, there are many different types of popups; they all work really well in generating new leads for online businesses. Back when online businesses had just started booming, entrepreneurs didn't exactly have a soft spot for the web popup.
There was a debate in the online community about whether to use web popups or not. It was partly due to their shabby, and often spammy implementation.
In the early days of online marketing, several websites deployed the annoying entry web popup. It covered the entire screen before the website visitor could even read the website content. Visitors would turn away without seeing the website; valuable traffic was lost because of entry popups. This led to reluctance in deploying web popups.
If done right, the advantages of web popups far outweigh their shortcomings. Here is a detailed article about how web popups work and why you should use them as part of your inbound marketing.
Sales is a complicated, often long stretched-out process. It’s pretty rare for a customer to make a purchase on their first website visit. To continue engagement after the first website visit, we use email marketing.
Research shows Email Marketing is the second most effective B2B lead generation technique, right after the company website itself.
As we can see, email marketing is more than 80% effective in generating leads.
In today’s world of information saturation, the attention span of website visitors has reduced considerably. Also, buying patterns have changed. Customers now prefer hunting for their own product; they want to control how they buy products and services.
Customers (or leads) are not easy to persuade these days, the nature of lead generation has changed from a “transaction” to a long, multi-phase “conversation” between the leads and the business owners. As shown in the above graphic, email is clearly one of the best ways to have an effective conversation with the prospective customers after their first website visit
There are some fantastic reasons to try web popups. All of them are related to conversions. After an analysis of 2 Billion web popups, Sumo found out that:
It is possible to achieve a conversion rate as high as 9% with web popups. Conversion rates rarely go above 3%. To give an academic analogy, a 9% conversion rate is equivalent to a student getting an A+.Of course, these rates are not typical. A lot of work goes into creating web popups that deliver such high conversion rates. However, web popups are still a great way to convert website traffic into engaged leads. If you drop web popups from your inbound marketing strategy, it's going to be tough to grow your email list.
Do you have an e-commerce website and you are struggling to drive sales? There are at least a couple of ways popups can help you improve sales.
First, you can use a popup when the customer is about to abandon the page (called an “exit popup”). In this type of web popup, you can offer a discount coupon, provide free shipping, or inform the leads about a sale period. The call-to-action (CTA) button on the popup redirects the website visitor to the offer page. A potential customer who was about to leave the website can be pulled back in by using the web popup.
This is a clinical saving of the potential lead that could have been lost without the use of web popups.
Secondly, even with the existing customers, you can use marketing analytics to gather insights about each customer’s behavior and their buying patterns. You can then use web popups to cross-sell and upsell your products/services to them.
These tactics are best used on e-commerce webpages. However, you can also use them for blogs or landing pages.
A customer is prompted with an exit popup showing a countdown. This is a good use case of “scarcity marketing” to create the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) or illusion of limited stocks. This drives the customer to follow the CTA.
After the website visitor clicks the CTA button, they're shown a discount code. Sometimes, the code and CTA both may be shown in the web popup, but the core element is still the FOMO-inducing countdown. If you add the discount code in the web popup itself, the popup still works the same way, just involving a lower number of steps for the customer to grab the offer.
This code is applicable only if the customer buys before the countdown hits zero.
The incentive for buying can be anything: a discount code on the current or the next purchase and/or free shipping.
Given that 70% of the e-commerce product carts get abandoned, web popups are a powerful way to reduce your cart abandonment numbers.
Customer feedback popups require the customer to answer a few quick, multiple-choice questions. It can also be a single, direct question about the customer's buying experience or support chat experience. These web popups can be used as a quick survey at the end of customer service chat sessions or on your company's product or support page. You can also use the feedback popup on the click of a “Cancel” button to collect exit feedback.
If placed correctly, this web popup can collect valuable insights without disrupting the customer's buying experience, window shopping experience, or service/chat experience. Make sure that you don't go overboard with the number of survey questions. A long questionnaire can make your customers close the website.
That brings us to our next chapter. In the last chapter of our web popups resource, we share interesting tips and tricks for you to make the most of web popups, so keep reading.
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