If you’re a affiliate or generate leads for any other business, you’ll know that you want to generate as many leads as you can while creating a great experience for the visitors to your site.

There are plenty of ways to maximise the amount of leads you generate, and one that has emerged in the last few years is via pop-up forms. But the use of these forms has also sparked debate.

Some pop-ups don’t bother us too much, like Digiday’s blog that encourages you to sign up before you click off the page:

But others are so intrusive that it distracts away from the content on the page. Even Google penalises pages where the pop-ups are just too much.

So should you be using pop-up forms in your marketing? We’ll try to uncover the issue here.

What are pop-up forms?

Pop-ups are almost as old as the internet. Most of them were from third-party advertisers, and usually flashed up on your screen telling you you’d won a prize.

But then, web browsers and visitors started ignoring pop-ups, so third-party advertisers stopped using them. Until marketers started using them instead.

There are 4 main types of pop-up that marketers use today:

  • Welcome mats – Full screen pop-ups that appear over the page content
  • Overlay modals – Screen pop-ups that appear in the centre on top of page content
  • Top banners – Small banners that fit right at the top of the page
  • Slide-in boxes – Small boxes that slide in from the side of a page or up from the bottom

Hubspot made a handy graphic to show what these different pop-ups look like:

These days, there are different triggers that prompt a pop-up to appear. These triggers include:

  • Page entrance: Appears when a visitor first enters the page
  • Page scroll: Appears when a user scrolls down to a specific point on the page
  • Element interaction: Appears when a visitor clicks on or hovers over an element on the page
  • Time on page: Appears when a user has been on the page for a certain amount of time
  • Exit intent: Appears when a visitor goes to leave the page

So do pop-up forms work and should marketers be using them?

Is it worth using pop-up forms?

Aweber did an experiment to see if using pop-up forms is better than traditional forms. They found that pop-up forms converted 1375% better than traditional forms for driving blog subscriptions. And Sumo found that the top performing 10% of pop-up forms convert at 9.3%. That’s huge!

So pop-up forms work, but you must be careful that you don’t sacrifice user experience for them. So make sure that your pop-up forms are user-friendly and look great.

So take a look at our 4 tips for creating great-looking pop-up forms that enhance the user experience.

4 Tips for creating pop-up forms that work

1. Consider how visitors engage with your pages

Make sure you don’t have your pop-up appear at the wrong time. This will just annoy your visitors. So think about the best trigger point for your pop-up. If you’ve got article content on your site, your visitors will be the most engaged when they’re halfway through reading your article. So think about including a pop-up form then.

2. Ensure you offer value to your visitors

Visitors just get annoyed if you add pop-ups that don’t offer them anything valuable. So make sure the reward that your visitors will get for filling out your form is something they actually want.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post on how to find the best conservatory installer, you could add a pop-up form encouraging the visitor to fill out their details to get quotes for a new conservatory. This is a great tip for affiliates – try it and see if it works.

3. Get your copy just right

You don’t have much copy to work with, so you’ve got to make sure you use specific, actionable and human language:

  • Specific: Tell the visitor exactly what they will get if they click on your pop-up. Don’t just say ‘Sign up to our newsletter’. Tell them that they can get x amount of articles per week delivered to their inbox.
  • Actionable: Tell your visitors want you want them to do. Don’t just say ‘Click here’; try ‘Get my free e-book’.
  • Human: Don’t forget to remind visitors that there’s a human behind your marketing. Try using colloquial language to make them more casual and friendly. What about ‘Enjoying this article?’ instead of ‘Subscribe to our Blog’?

4. Make sure your pop-ups are mobile-friendly

Google announced last year that they would penalise websites with intrusive pop-ups, and this extends to mobile. Make sure your site is still user-friendly on mobile to avoid being penalised by reducing the size of the pop-ups to fit a small part of the page rather than the full width.

So as long as you get pop-up forms right, they can be a great tool for your inbound marketing strategy. Find out whether your marketing can make you money with us.