One of the most important aspects of your website – User Experience (UX) – is also the part that is most often neglected. The truth is, a mediocre user experience will likely lead to higher bounce rates, less conversions, and a poorly-performing website overall.

Fortunately, user experience is something you can easily fix with the right tools. Once it’s improved, you’ll not only experience better returns (in the form of conversions), but also improved user engagement and increased web traffic.

In this post, we’ll introduce the use of popups as a beneficial tool for enhancing the user’s experience. Then we’ll discuss several ways you can use popups to improve your website, and explain how Popup Maker and its various extensions can help. Let’s get started!

Why Popups Are Beneficial to User Experience

Apple Homepage
With a smooth design and easily navigable site, Apple is one company that takes website UX very seriously.

User experience is a somewhat general term encompassing a few different variables. In essence, it’s a term that describes how well a visitor can interact with your website, and how it makes them feel.

There are a few different techniques commonly used that relate to UX, including breadcrumb navigation and web caching. However, another element that is becoming more popular across the web are popups. After all, they offer many benefits for both you and your visitors, such as:

  1. Letting you easily display valuable, relevant, and important content to your visitors.
  2. Enabling you to alert visitors when changes occur (such as a password reset, or personal data update), or protect them from accidentally leaving the site.

Aside from the above benefits, popups also offer an additional opportunity for website visitors to engage with your website. Without popups, this interaction would not be possible.

3 Ways Popups Can Enhance Your Users’ Experience

As highlighted above, there are many positives offered by the use of popups. To get started with any of these extensions, you’ll need to download, install, and activate both the Popup Maker plugin and the extension in question. Let’s take a look at three ways you can implement these benefits on your own site.

1. You Can Display Important Notifications Such as Cookie Consents

A Cookies Notice
Cookie notices are legally required in the European Union, but they’re also a good idea to add to your site no matter where you live.

Simply put, cookie notices inform readers what information your website collects – in this case, cookies. For some, this is an optional notice. However, if you reside in the European Union (or target a predominantly European customer base), displaying cookie notices is actually a legal requirement. Regardless of the legal status, they can also offer transparency to your users by enabling them to opt in or out of data collection. As a result, this can improve trust with your visitors, and indirectly impact conversions.

Terms and Conditions Popups is a Popup Maker extension enabling you to easily add notices, consents, and similar forms to your site. Because they’re popups, they’re going to be hard for a visitor to miss.

Popup Maker'S Terms And Conditions Popups Extension

To create this type of popup, go to Popup Maker > Add Popup in your WordPress dashboard. From here, you’ll find yourself in the Popup Editor, where you can customize the look and function of each one on your site. Scroll down to Terms & Conditions Popups Settings and place a check in the box next to Enable T&C Popup:

The Terms And Conditions Extension Enable Button

A spread of options will be available to you, including the option to force the user to agree before continuing, the text you’d like to display, and time settings (i.e. how long between notice displays for each user). These settings help to further customize the experience for your users.

2. You Can Offer Prominent Sign-Up and Contact Forms

A Subscription Popup On Popup Maker'S Website
A subscription popup – such as the one above from our own website – is a great way to grab attention and boost conversions.

Sign-up and contact forms should be integrated correctly throughout your site, and displaying them prominently can be just as important as the form itself. The greatest benefit – both to you and your site visitors – is that a popup form cannot be missed. Unlike forms that hide out in sidebars and footers, a popup form can be front and center.

Using Popup Maker’s Scroll Triggered Popups extension, you can provide users with a prominent form, ensuring they don’t miss out on important content and offers.

Popup Maker'S Scroll Triggered Popups ExtensionTo set up scroll triggered popups, head back to Popup Maker > Add Popup. Scroll to Triggers and select your chosen style (Click Open, Auto Open, or Scroll) from the drop-down menu. A popup menu will appear with these options:

Popup Maker Scroll Trigger Settings

As you can see, you have full control over how and when the popup will display on your site. This includes choosing when the popup is triggered, and whether to let the popup to disappear upon scrolling back up (and reappear when scrolling back down to the trigger point).

3. Popups Enable You to Target Specific Groups of Users

Zoom Analytics Targeted Popup
Popups that target users based on search terms – such as the one above on Zoom Analytics – can significantly improve user experience.

When users visit your website, they bring along with them a trail of information. This includes their referrer (where they came from), browser, and location. You can then use this information to your (and your visitors’ benefit) by targeting your content to their exact needs. For example, you can make location-based offers or deliver up referrer-based content.

Advanced Targeting Conditions is one of Popup Maker’s more robust extensions. In simplest terms, it enables you to target your website visitors based upon different conditions.

Popup Maker'S Advanced Targeting Conditions Extension

There are a variety of conditions to choose from, and each can be customized to better target specific groups of users. To get started, go to Popup Maker > Add Popup. To the right of the editor, you’ll see a box titled Conditions:

The Popup Maker Conditions SettingsYou can pick from a number of different conditions, including URL, referrer, browser, and device. There’s even a custom conditions option that enables you to create a new function. Once you’ve selected the condition you’d like and you’ve optimized it for use, click Publish and begin using it!

Conclusion

The experience of your users can play a key role in the success (or failure) of your website. Positive user experiences can improve engagement, boost conversions, drive traffic, and even reduce bounce rates. Fortunately, Popup Maker (and its extensions) is an easy-to-use tool that enables you to easily enhance the user’s experience with popups.

In this post, we’ve introduced the importance of popups for enhancing user experience, and explained three ways they can do so. For example:

  1. You can display important notifications such as cookie notices.
  2. You can offer prominent sign-up and contact forms.
  3. You can target specific groups of users.

Do you have any questions about popups and how you can use them to improve user experience? Let us know in the comments section below!

Image credit: Pixabay.