6 Essentials to Unleash High Conversion Popups

Here are six essentials that will make you a popup hero, giving you the power to turbo-charge your conversion rates to as high as 9-10%!

Let’s Crush It

The highest converting popups on the web are the best because they hit all six of these essentials, and they do it well.

The Creation Process

As an example, we’re going to create a popup campaign using Exit Intent, which is available in our Core Bundle. We’ll start with nothing and use these six essentials in a step-by-step process to create a high conversion popup.

Understand Your Goals First

Our goals for the popup campaign are simple: more subscribers and more sales.

Now that we understand our goals, we can dive into the essentials!

Essential #1: Relevant Offer with Value

Relevancy

Simply put, our offer needs to be relevant. We’re not going to offer a free ebook on baking bread when we’re in the popup making business.

Has Value

This seems like common sense, but is actually a frequently overlooked essential for high converting popups. Value can be a relative term – one man’s trash is another man’s… – but when it comes to our e-commerce, value lies in cash money and knowledge.

Offering unique knowledge is big business, given its scarcity. If you’re not offering knowledge, that’s okay, offering monetary savings absolutely has lots of value.

As you can see in the popup below, you can create enticing offers and generate more sales by simply offering monetary savings:

This popup does a couple of other things really well, such as present exclusivity and time-sensitive information. Both of these factors have strong effects on users and presenting them correctly is part of creating high conversion popups.

Our Campaign

We’re going to offer an instant discount similar to the popup above, but also supply knowledge on how to create high conversion popups.

Now that we know the goals of our popup, and we know what we’re offering our users, we can formulate our content around these ideas, which is segues into

Essential #2: Quality Copy

Headline

The first step in preventing the user from going straight for the close button is catching them with a nice headline. Just like every other piece of copy you’ve ever done, the same rules apply here.

Clear, concise, and powerful (this means use power words!) A quick google search will net you hundreds of power words to choose from. Let’s take a look at the 5 most persuasive words in the English language:

• You
• Free
• Because
• Instantly
• New

We can’t argue with any of those, and this is just what we need in our headline! However, before we get to our headline, what do you think of the headline in the popup below?

Not bad, right? Actually, it doesn’t contain a power word, so even though hundreds of thousands of people read their blog, they could probably increase your conversion rate by incorporating a power word or two.

If we could split test this, it would be interesting to see what kind of results “Get Our Premium Marketing Content” versus “Get Our Proven Marketing Content” would reveal. Which would you rather have: Premium Marketing Content, or Proven Marketing Content?

Our Campaign

Our headline is going to read: “Get 15% Off Instantly”. Power word count: 1.

Body of Content

Our Campaign

As mentioned, we could just roll with our 15% discount, but we want to go for the Moon. To empower this popup, we’re going to add knowledge on creating high conversion popups as part of the offer. To present this offer, we’re going to add a bulleted list under our headline:

• Plus, learn how to:
• Generate Amazing Popup Content
• Create Sensational Popup Themes
• And Use Proven Techniques to Destroy Old Conversion Rates
• All for free!

The double-down of a monetary value and knowledge offering has a twofold effect. First, it takes an already good value and makes it a fantastic value. Second, even if the user had no intention at all of spending a dime, they are now much more likely to subscribe due to the offering of free knowledge.

Power word count: 7.

Here is a popup that doesn’t use a list at all, but gets the job done by tickling our emotional bones with profound word choice.

The Almighty CTA

The button users click to sign up is an equally important component in all this scientific popup stuff. The biggest point of emphasis in optimizing your button’s copy is that you should not sound like a drill sergeant giving orders to lesser humans. “Submit” may be the worst offender of all.

Our Campaign

As such, when you submit to our will, you won’t know it because the button you click is going to read: “Join Our Community”.

The thinking here is that we want the user to feel like they are a part of something. Plus, there is a sense of safety within a community. Even these words will add to our overall value, as being a part of a community has value to some.

The Anti-CTA

What your “no thanks” button says can be just as important as what your “yes please” button says. To us, it’s pretty devious, but at it’s core, it’s simply human psychology. The goal, as bad as this sounds, is to make the user feel guilty for saying no, or at the very least, make them feel like they are missing out on something.

Which, if they don’t opt-in, they will be – this much is true – but we’re taking it to the next level by letting them know all about it, thus inducing that feeling of guilt or remorse.

As far as the process goes, this is basically a last-ditch effort to suck the user back in. If they’re reading the “no thanks” button, they’re already halfway out the door anyway, so we have to reach into our bag of tricks to get them back.

Our Campaign

In this case, our Anti-CTA is going to read: “No, I don’t want savings and conversions”.

Don’t Make The Mistakes Seen Here

In the popup below, we see simple yes and no buttons – does this make you feel inspired? Does it speak to you?

Essential #3: Website Analytics

Analytics is great tool to find where your strengths lie. By understanding your most popular content, you can formulate the content of your popup around your most popular site content.

In doing our research in Google Analytics, we’ve found that people love to learn about increasing conversion rates on their popups. This makes perfect sense because more conversions equals more money.

As you can see by our popup body copy, all the incentives for signing up revolve around creating high conversion popups, which is also our most popular content:

• Plus, learn how to:
• Generate Amazing Popup Content
• Create Sensational Popup Themes
• And Use Proven Techniques to Destroy Old Conversion Rates
• All for free!

Essential #4: User Persona

Developing a user persona is detailed and sometimes tedious work, but it’s important to understand who you’re doing business with so you can better serve them.

In a nutshell, a user persona is your hypothetical, ideal customer that you’ve built yourself through research and interviews with your customers.

In our case, we need to provide solutions for all things popups, and do it in an intelligent and efficient manner. Our clients’ problems range from technical to results-based issues.

In our popup body copy, we cover both of these almost inherently because each bullet point can overlap between technical or results-based, especially:

• Generate Amazing Popup Content
• Create Sensational Popup Themes

Essential #5: Testing

On the surface, it looks like this popup is going to be a bombshell, but maybe we could actually make it better.

The key is understanding that, at this point, the core of campaign is in place. Moving forward, we’re probably not going to be changing much of anything, but it’s actually amazing at what some subtle differences can make.

For example, a privacy statement (check box) stating we will never share your information with anyone is completely optional. It may increase our conversion rate, or it may make it worse. To start this campaign, we’re going sans privacy statement.

However, we will never know which way is better if we don’t test. If you’re not testing different button copy and content copy, then you can’t make your popup convert at a higher rate.

It could shift in the opposite direction – perhaps instead of finding something that does work, you might find something that definitely does not work.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Discovering what doesn’t work can be just as important as discovering what does work.” quote=”Discovering what doesn’t work can be just as important as discovering what does work.”]

Essential #6: Imagery, Theme, Colors

Do you need this stuff? No. You can get by without it, but do you want a popup that converts at 2%, or high conversion popup topping out at eight-plus percent?

The direction you choose is ultimately up to you, but if you keep it relevant and blend it in with your site’s theme, you can’t go wrong.

Our Final Product

After taking all of our data into consideration, here is what our final product looks like:

Quick Hits Analysis

Now that we have something to look at, notice the smart use of underlines to emphasize instant gratification and the no cost factor. We also used a contrasting color (green) to show you’re joining a community (button), getting three pieces of valuable knowledge (bullet points), and that it costs nothing (free).

We also decided to add a subheader to indicate users will receive a discount code instantly through e-mail – we felt there needed to be a little clarification for our users on exactly how the discount would be handled. Even this sentence has two power words – can you guess which ones?

To keep this popup clean and clutterless, we excluded any imagery. There is a neat little accent in the top left corner that adds a little flavor, but that is all. We felt the content does all the necessary work and that adding an image could devalue it.

Last, our “no thanks” button is simple text that is much less noticeable than the join button.

The Wrap-Up

If you nail all six of these high conversion popup essentials, then you can see conversion rates as high as 5% and up! Good luck out there!