Knowing When Pop-Ups Can Harm Sales

By Albert
In Internet Marketing
10/08/09 at 08:02
0 Comments

Knowing When Pop-Ups Can Harm Sales

There are 3 reasons why I like using pop-ups, and 3 reasons why I don’t like to use pop-ups. Currently, you might have seen that our blog use a Wordpress plugin called the Action pop-up, personally, I don’t really like it. To be honest, who likes pop-ups anyways right? If it weren’t for the purpose of increasing sales, leads, I would have deactivated that plugin like it was no other. (seriously) Pop-ups are like those pop-up Christmas cards I get every year. They are only for a one time use to only surprise the other person for the first time, but after that, it can be overly annoying when visiting your favorite web page even if it is just a click of a ‘X’ button.

The Reasons Why I Like Pop-Ups

Increase audience focus on a particular page.
Increase sales and conversions.
Gives readers something to look at when first entering a page.

The Reasons Why I Don’t like Pop-Ups

They can be annoying if your a returning viewer.
Webmasters sometimes use them to the “excessive” point.
It looks ugly. (My preference)

However, in the end, pop-ups really out weigh my dislikes about them. Simply because not only do they offer straight cut content for your new readers to read, it generally sparks sales and leads once you have some killer content already set up for your newer audience. I’ll start to talk about when pop-ups begin to harm sales.

Knowing When Pop-Ups Can Harm Sales

Once you have your first pop-up installed and you begin to think to use even more add-on pop-ups like under pop-ups, tab pop-ups, peel aways, whatever, that is really when you are starting to dilute your site’s reputation. Of course pop-ups can be really cool with their flashy sales pitch, however, the most pop-ups that I believe a general Blogger should use is about 1, and that can still be annoying already to viewers. Having your visitors to press about 3 ‘X’ buttons the moment they visit a page, is not really the way to go, and probably doesn’t fit Google’s idea of quality in their guidelines either.

In my opinion, Internet marketers and sales pages have a different stance on cleverly incorporating pop-ups to their advantage. They have a wide range of pop-ups that they can use at one time, without it really seeming “spammy.”

Exit pop-ups
Talk to a live speaker pop-up
Normal pop-ups
Peel Away Ads

But that is just my opinion on sales pitches and blogs. What do you guys think is the “excessive” point for a blog and a sales pitch in terms of using how many pop-ups? Think of John Chow’s blog for an example of a blog using more than one pop-up. Do you think it is overly aggressive or is it just perfect?