Skyrocketing your conversion rate isn’t achievable by taking a single-pronged approach. Our series on increasing your conversions shows you the steps you need to take. If you haven’t yet set your goals, find out how in our previous blog post. In this post, we’re delving into the next step: identifying the right type of popup to use to display content to your users, and when to utilise it to get the best results.

Delivering the Right Message at the Right Time

For more than a decade now, Bouncezap has consistently delivered great success to business owners and website administrators. During this time, we’ve seen the success businesses can have by displaying a popup with the right message at the right time. Without a doubt, popups capture a visitor’s attention. But, without the proper messaging and perfect timing, users won’t take any notice, and you’ll find more users clicking the dreaded “X”. By achieving both, more people will be paying close attention to your popup, which means a greater chance of getting them to convert.

The Most Common Mistake You’re Making

Many businesses think that they can slap a popup onto their website and watch the increased conversions roll in. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen.

The most common mistake we see website owners make is having the same popup message across their entire site. Not only is it bad practice, but it’s the primary reason why most business owners fail with their online marketing strategies.

It’s irrational to consider that all website visitors are the same. So why would you treat them as such? Each one of us is unique in the way we perceive and analyse things; each one of us has different interests and desires.

Taking advantage of this fact makes the vital difference between visitors bouncing from your site, or converting into loyal customers and brand advocates.

The Unique Principle in Action

Treating people as individuals is a foundation of successful selling. We’ve become immune to tired tactics, cold calls, and impersonal hard-sells. Our brains react subconsciously, and we fall for things only when they appear beneficial and align with our values and desires.

A good salesman will make us feel that he considers our needs. He might even offer an irresistible deal that suits our preferences. It’s this evaluation of our situation and behaviour, and the personalised offer that follows, that leads us to making a purchase. The entire process takes place on a psychological level: above all, we want to be understood and feel valued. If a salesman, or on a larger scale, a business, can make you trust them and relate to them, you’re much more likely to want to deal with them.

You might be wondering, how can this work online? Granted, it is more difficult to make that personal connection with a visitor to your site when you’re not directly in front of them. But it’s not impossible. By addressing the copy on your website that makes that initial impression, and using targeted popups to deliver a unique user experience, you can just as easily demonstrate to your visitors that you understand them — not as a faceless browser, but as an individual.

Understanding the User Journey

When delving into Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), it’s easy to lose focus by focusing too specifically on a certain element of your website. When you’re concerned this might be the case, it’s important to sit back and look at the overall picture. When a visitor lands on your website, they are at the start of a journey — and it’s your responsibility to guide them down the right path (the path that will lead them to take your desired action).

The behaviours users demonstrate will help you determine not only their intention of visiting your website, but also their future actions.

The “Win-Win” Situation

By analysing your visitors’ actions, you can predict what they’ll do next, which means you can serve them with the right recommendations and offers. By doing this, you’re giving users what they want, sometimes before a user even realises it’s what they’re after! Remember when we were talking about sales taking place on a psychological level? In addition to giving your visitors exactly what they want, you’re also increasing your conversion rate — a win-win!

Maximise Your Strategy with Technology — Behaviour Analysis Technology

At Bouncezap, we’ve taken everything we’ve learned and implemented over the past ten years to build the Behaviour Analysis Technology tool.

This tool is designed to monitor visitor behaviours and predict future actions, which will help you develop the right popup message and deliver it to users at the right time.

It’s important to remember that just because a visitor intends to leave your site, it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn anything from the session. The Behaviour Analysis Technology tool is an important development in conversion rate optimisation, so let’s have a look at specifically what it can do.

Time Well Spent

Knowing how long visitors are spending on your website, or on a specific webpage, is a useful metric that can help you determine whether or not you’re actively engaging users and have the right content to keep them on your site.

While it varies widely depending on the product or service that you’re offering, a user’s average session duration varies between two and three minutes. It may not seem like a long time, but on the internet, where there’s a constant distraction and attention spans become short, even keeping a user on your site for a minute is a big achievement. It indicates that visitors are interested in you, and haven’t yet got bored or confused. It’s important to take advantage of this to convert users before they bounce — try rolling out some exciting promotions or an irresistible offer that will increase your chance of securing that all important conversion.

Not only does Bouncezap track this, but it also helps you identify how far a user has scrolled down your webpage. Knowing where people are, quite literally, dropping off the page, is an important factor. If you’re hiding all of your best, conversion-grabbing content at the bottom of your page, and people aren’t navigating far enough to see it, then you’re missing out on a huge number of potential conversions.

Preventing Cart Abandonment

We also spoke about how our Behaviour Analysis Technology tool can predict a user’s next action. One of the biggest threats to conversion rate is cart abandonment: when a visitor adds items to their cart but leaves the website before completely checking out. This can happen at any time in the funnel, either while the user is still browsing for additional products, or while they’re filling in their payment details. Knowing where users are leaving can help you identify whether there’s a fundamental issue with your checkout process, or whether users are being tempted to browse elsewhere before committing to a purchase. Bouncezap helps you pinpoint when there’s the threat of abandonment so that it can deliver a message to tempt users away from exiting. Anticipating what a user is looking for and what they’re going to do is the primary method of gaining valuable conversions — and this is where Bouncezap excels.

Capturing a Visitor’s Attention

Your conversion success hinges on capturing a visitor’s attention. But it’s important to do this in the right way — and make sure that you’re engaging, rather than annoying, visitors.

Studies have revealed that our attention spans are decreasing, and with the role of smartphones and other technology in our everyday lives, this is of little surprise.

Because of this, popups on your website need to be engaging and eye-catching. But what sort of popup should you go for?

Popup Types

At Bouncezap, we allow you to build every popup type. But the best one for your business will depend on your needs and intentions.

1. Lightbox: These are also known as modal popups. This means the main window (or background) is disabled, and users must interact with the popup (or new window). A lightbox is often a form that the user is asked to fill in. The background of the website darkens when this popup appears so that it clearly stands out against the rest of your website (hence the name).
2. Bumper: Bumper popups are forms that appear from the right side of the screen, and typically slide in from the corner of the page. You may opt for a bumper popup where you want to be less intrusive, and don’t want to distract users from the main content on your website.
3. Fullscreen Takeovers / Welcome Mats: These types of popup primarily blanket the whole screen. You can use these to ask your visitor to sign up for your newsletter or download a lead magnet (such as a free checklist, ebook, or course). While both similar, the difference between them lies in when they are displayed. Welcome mats are best used during page load delays to keep users on your website. However, they can also be used to convey a sense of urgency. A welcome mat acts as a gate that users must interact with — either by providing their information or closing the popup — before they can access a website. If you have pressing information you want to share, a welcome mat popup is worth considering. A full-screen popup can be used for the same purposes but can be triggered at any point you choose during a session.
4. Bar: Bar popups are a narrow band that sits either across the top or the bottom of a user’s screen, and are usually set to stay for the entire duration of a visit. While they follow users as they scroll and navigate different pages, they are less intrusive than a popup, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t effective. You might use a bar popup to display a countdown timer, to entice users to make a purchase with an exclusive discount code, or as a permanent reminder to users that they can subscribe to your newsletter.

Choosing the right popup type will help you communicate with your visitor in the most effective way. If you feel spoiled for choice, don’t worry. Let’s take a look at some real-life examples of these popups in action.

Identifying the Right Type of Popup for Your Strategy

Just because you can use multiple popups, doesn’t mean you should. While popups do need to be eye-catching, using the wrong type of pop-up for your offer or promotion could have a disastrous effect on its success.

As we’ve discussed, most websites use bar popups to display a countdown, to indicate either when a specific promotion or access to exclusive content will expire. As it constantly sits on the page, even if users are paying attention to another element of the site, the offer is always in the user’s peripheral vision. With a modal popup, users might forget your promotion once they click off it — with a bar popup, it’s always there, meaning you can consistently promote your core offer to drive conversions.

In this example by Gordon & Co, the bar popup encourages users to take a specific action: to get a free, instant property valuation. This bar is present on every page a user navigates to, and the benefit statement (free and instant) indicates that the process is quick and easy, making users more likely to take advantage of the offer. The result is that this business has a higher chance of collecting valuable contact information that they can use to remarket their service.

Lightbox popups occupy the middle section of the screen for maximum visibility and to easily catch a user’s attention. These typically contain a short message to emphasise their intent and the offer available. These are most effective when used to welcome users and to prevent visitors from leaving the website without taking action. At Bouncezap, we use a lightbox popup to demonstrate abandonment (when a user leaves the site), which pops up at the moment that a visitor is about to exit. At this point, we remind users to sign up for their free account, in addition to offering them a special bonus.

Full-screen popups (or takeovers) and welcome mats are used to completely capture a visitor’s attention.

With popups of this type, there’s nothing in the background to distract the user, so it’s an efficient way of conveying important information that you want your visitor to see.

It’s important to take note that when using this popup, you should have a highly-targeted and compelling offer. Without this, you may annoy your visitor, which will likely result in them immediately bouncing. If you’re seeing a drop in conversion rate while using this type of popup, then it’s worth looking at your core offer and making sure it’s enticing enough.

In this example on Jeff Goins’ blog, the full-screen popup encourages users to leave their email address in exchange for a free guide. The offer, which shows visitors how to take their readership to 100,000, is engaging and proves irresistible to many. It’s because of magnets and popups like this that Jeff Goins has become an authority on building an email list.

Bumper popups are an effective way of drawing the user’s attention, especially when used with an animation. Bumper popups can slide in from the side or the bottom of the screen so that the eye is naturally drawn to the offer. Our bumper popup encourages users to download their free copy of Bouncezap’s guide to increasing conversions.

Helping You Decide Which Popup Type Is Best for Your Business

If you aren’t sure which popup is right for you, our team of in-house CRO professionals is on hand to help. Our concierge service team will speak with you about the best solutions for your website and guide you through the entire process, from installing Bouncezap on your site to implementing your first popup.

If you’d rather do this yourself, the first step is to sign up for your free account (no credit card required). Bouncezap works by installing a small piece of code to your site, after which you can create a campaign and choose your popup and entry effect. Bouncezap works dynamically so that you can see exactly how your popup will appear to visitors in a live preview.

Ready to get started? Sign up for your freemium account today and take advantage of increased conversions in less than five minutes!