5 Common Mistakes That Might Ruin Your Popups

When creating popups, businesses tend to make common mistakes. Read this article to find out about popular errors and ways of avoiding them! – Popups are a highly efficient way of informing clients about promotional offers or asking them to share their contacts with you. When creating popups, you should make sure they won’t annoy your customers. In this article, we’ll list the five most popular mistakes that businesses tend to make when using popups. Plus, you’ll find recommendations on how to fix these errors and make the most of this type of display area.

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Request Too Much Information In The Popup

An ideal popup has only two fields that the user needs to fill in: name and email. It should take your client just a couple of seconds to submit this data to you — and then, they should be able to access valuable content.

You should avoid adding three or more fill-in forms in your popup for the following reasons:

It would take users too much time to type in the information
They might get stressed
People might be reluctant to share too many confidential details with you for safety and privacy reasons
For businesses, excessive form fields reduce conversion rates

However, there is an exception to this rule. Some popups require activation — that is, the user needs to click to see the popup. In this case, it’s ok to add up to four fields to the form. If the person confirms their agreement to see the popup, extra forms shouldn’t disturb them too much.

There’s No Clear Way To Exit Your Popup

Businesses that try to force visitors to sign up at any cost might hide the exit button on their popups. Or, they might make it appear in a few seconds after the client opens the popup. That’s a bad strategy because it annoys people and undermines their trust in that business.

If a user fails to understand how to exit a popup, they might exit the page and never come back. No matter how precious the information that you spread with the help of popups, most people perceive this type of display area as a nuisance. You should enable your clients to exit the popup by clicking any other part of the page. Or, even better, you can place a clearly visible ‘X’ button at the upper right corner of your popup.

The Popup Features An Irrelevant Offer

For businesses, the primary value of popups consists in the fact that they can help them to generate more leads. From a client’s viewpoint, a popup should deliver some useful information. For instance, it might be a personalized discount or an invitation to a members-only sale.

The offers that popups display should be relevant to the current needs of each customer. Let’s imagine that you run a small local online store that sells organic food and cosmetics, candles, kid’s clothes, and accessories. A sixteen-year-old boy opens the candles section of your catalog. A popup appears in the right lower corner of the page, informing the boy about a 15% discount on clothes for kids aged from three to five. This piece of news is irrelevant to the customer and will be likely to turn them off. Instead, you might want to offer them a discount for candles.

You Chose Wrong Timing For Your Popup

There is no one-fits-all answer to the question “When should I show a popup to my clients?”. It all depends on the specifics of your business, the structure of your website and the type of the popup.

Here are a few rules that you might want to remember:

Popups that start with “If you like this content…” shouldn’t appear in a few seconds after a person opens your website. People should have time to browse your content and realize whether they like it indeed.
If you’re planning to offer a discount to a client, you might want to do so once they spend half a minute on one of the pages of your catalog. If the person remains on the same page for over thirty seconds, this means they’re probably interested in this type of goods. The exact time might vary depending on what you sell and whether this person is your loyal customer or not. People who visit your site frequently might need less time to choose a product.
If the page features text content, it would be reasonable to trigger a popup once the client has read 60% or 70% of the text. Again, this serves as proof that the person is genuinely interested in the information that you offer.

Apart from good timing, your popup should offer a lucrative deal to your customer. For instance, it might be free shipping or a “Buy 3, pay for 2” offer.

Substandard Design Of The Popup

When people open your website, the first thing they pay attention to is the design and not content. The same can be said about popups. If the design is substandard, customers might leave before checking the content. They might feel offended because you don’t care about them — and that would tarnish your brand’s reputation.

An ideal popup should fit the overall aesthetics and color scheme of your website. To make sure it produces a good impression on your clients, you might want to use a popup builder with a collection of customizable templates. Popups that feature an image of a person motivate users to share their emails with businesses more efficiently than those that lack human images.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this article came in handy and now you better understand how to avoid the five most common mistakes of using popups. You should make sure your popups have an aesthetically pleasing design and choose the right timing for them.

The message that you try to deliver should seem relevant to your customers. People should clearly understand how to exit your popups. If you ask your clients to share their private details with you, it would be wise to use only two fill-in forms: name and email address. Thanks to these rules, you should be able to make the most of your popups!