What's So Great About Pop-Ups (Plus an Advanced Tip...)
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- Pop-ups can be a great way of boosting conversions because they include bite-sized resources.
- By making your own offers that align with your most popular blog posts, you can double your email opt-in rate.
There are two types of people in this world: people who use pop-ups on their website and people who don't. I'm going talk to you about both sides. If you fall into the category of people who use pop-ups on your website to grow your email list, then I'm going to show you one advanced tip for how to double your email opt-in rate.
Hey everyone and welcome to another edition of 10-Minute Matt Hacks. I say 10 minutes only because I am aiming for five minutes, but I can't seem to get there yet. Let's see if I can do it today, because the problem that we're talking about today is if there’s an easy way to grow your email list.
It seems that everyone and their grandma has heard about pop-ups at this point. That’s why I would say these should be your starting point for growing your email list.
For Those Against Pop-Ups
Now, I do understand that some people don't like them.
People have their reasons for that, too. I mean, you can just look at your own experience when you visit a website and you arrive there and you're trying to read something and then, "oh, a pop-up comes up."
"Oh, do you want our free newsletter? Do you want this? Do you want that?" Some people find that very annoying. In practice, we're so desensitized to it that we expect it on half the sites that we even go to at this point.
Second of all, you know, you might look on different blog posts, you might look on people commenting on blog posts or in different forums, and people might say, "oh my god, it's like Armageddon if I see a pop-up when I'm on a page, and I personally will just hate that page and that brand on that website if I ever see a pop-up."
I mean, that's what people say, but in practice people don't really care, because people understand that these websites are out there as extensions of businesses to make money. Part of how they do that is to get people to be part of their audience by joining their newsletter.
For Those Who Love Pop-Ups
I wouldn't be worried about branding. In fact, I think, if you believe in what you're offering people in terms of the content and sales offers that you're going to make them, then you should be using pop-ups because it's really going to have a massive impact on growing and retaining your audience.
Let me give you some stats to try to show you what I mean by that, and why you should love pop-ups, too.
Here's the cumulative conversions report from the current pop-up that we're testing. Then here's what that pop-up actually looks like. It says "Do you want my 11-point perfect sales funnel checklist for free?"
Now, this converts pretty well, first because checklists are a bite-size resource, so it's a low-commitment barrier for people to decide, "do I actually want to sign up for this first?" versus something that might take a bit more of a commitment, like a multi-day course.
So, we have a pretty high conversion rate on this, and we're offering it for free. A lot of people coming to our website are searching for sales funnels and related resources. This converts pretty well because it's relevant in that way.
We've tested different pop-ups and we're still testing different offers as we go along. Just looking at the last 10 months alone though, we brought in over 6,000 subscribers, and I'm adding in some of the other numbers down here from other offers we've tested. Over 6,000 subscribers have come from our pop-ups. Six thousand! That is approximately half of the more than 12,000 active subscribers that we currently have on our email list. Half.
So if you're on the fence about using pop-ups, this should really help to get you off that fence because this is our number one source.
I've consistently heard this from many other people as well, there's a ton of case studies out there if you Google them. Most people say the same thing, that pop-ups are their number one source for email subscribers. Here are some case studies if you want to read more: OptiMonk, Picreel and Ambitionally.
Let me just give you an idea of the overall conversion rate for this as well. What you're going to see here is more of a cumulative conversion report. You see, the line is pretty steady, but trending down just a little bit.
This is in part because we were testing different offers. This is also because people respond very strongly to a new offer when it's first out there and less so when they see it again or in a similar view. So, with pop-ups in general, like any type of ad-related tool, people become more desensitized to it over time.
In addition, I would suspect that this is trending down just a little bit, where we're converting now about between 4% and 5% on average. That's because our traffic is growing very quickly and we have almost 29,000 visits, something that I'll talk more about in the upcoming weeks (and how we actually got to that number). In general though, the more traffic you drive, the less effective the same offer will be when people see the pop-up because people are going to be coming to your website for all different kinds of reasons. So, that's why that is like that and that's why you should love pop-ups.
For Those on the Fence
If you're on the fence about pop-ups, it’s time to get off the fence and at least consider testing them, because this is going to grow your traffic and your email list, as well as help you retain those people so that you can form a relationship with them over time and eventually, maybe they'll buy something from you. At the very least, they’ll offer you more traffic by sharing your content.
Here is an advanced tip for those of you who are already using pop-ups. If you do it right, this tip can easily double or triple your conversion rate when it comes to pop-ups and collecting more email subscribers.
Here's what it is: go into your Google Analytics and pick your top five blog posts in terms of the amount of traffic you're getting. You can see here that I picked some of our best sales funnel tools, a post about how to get 100,000 organic Facebook likes and 20 of our best lead magnet examples. These are blog posts that are getting a lot of organic traffic.
As I mentioned with pop-ups, if you're giving the same offer across all your pages, that will have an immediate impact for you where you can go like we did. We went from from practically zero to a very high conversion rate in terms of amount of daily subscribers that we're bringing in.
You are going to plateau after a certain time, and even if you're A/B testing that offer, you're going to plateau with that as well.
So what's the solution to that? Well, it's this: find those top blog posts or landing pages and come up with a more relevant offer to present to the people who are arriving on those specific pages. A/B test those against the existing offer you currently have on the page.
You want to get it to a point where you are at least 95% confident. Whichever software you use will tell you the confidence rate.
For example, on this page where you see the 20 best lead magnet examples, say we're offering the sales funnel checklist as the lead magnet there. Well, instead of offering the sales funnel checklist, what I could offer is a different lead magnet that's more in line with people who are reading this article. We could offer our lead magnet checklist instead, for instance.
We could even A/B test something else because we have a variety of lead magnets, which is similar to my video from earlier this week where I talked about read-later widgets. You could offer people a copy of the article that they're looking at right now with some bonus tips included.
One Action to Take
Here’s one action to take for today: I want you to go into your Google Analytics and find those top five blog posts that are performing really well.
Then, I want you to come up with a unique offer for each of those pages because it's usually, in my experience, very easy to move the needle on pages that are getting a lot of traffic, whereas the offer that you're using in your pop-up across your website may not be so relevant.
So, to end this post, here’s a quick story. I was working with a client last year who is receiving well over 200,000 visits to his website. Because he was getting so much traffic, people were coming to his site for all kinds of reasons. They were in the travel space.
Their main offer of opting in for a newsletter was only converting about 1% and 2%, which is not a very high conversion rate on average. Again, keep in mind that people were coming to his site for all sorts of reasons. What we did was take his highest-trafficked blog post and come up with offers for the pop-up that were unique to the intention for people who were arriving on those pages. We were able to grow his conversion rate by 300% as a result.
Do the same thing on your pages, and implement an A/B test so you know for sure and you have that peace of mind where you know that it's working better than the original offer. That's the one action for this week.
If you're ready to take it to the next level, you should subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube or click on the free newsletter link that is directly below this video. If you're watching this on our blog, there's a link directly below this video in the yellow box for you as well.
Tune in next time when we cover sales conversions. Remember, every week, the Growbo Funnel Framework at the top is getting more traffic. The next level, which is this week, we're going over email list building. Next week will be sales conversions and how we drive more sales volume. Then the following week is all about upsells, down-sales and maximizing the lifetime value of a customer.
Until next time, my name is Matt Ackerson, and I’m delivering you your daily dose of Matt Hacks. Keep hustling, stay focused and I will see you next week. Peace.
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