A LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP THAT DELIVERS HAPPY OUTCOMES FOR E-COMMERCE STORES
They can be perceived as plain aggravating or be received as valued offers. But no matter what, pop-ups have an instant effect on those who visit an ecommerce store.
And they work: By all accounts, sites with pop-ups get more conversions than those without. According to survey results released by Sumo (1) last year, the average conversion rate for 1.75 billion pop-ups studied was 3 percent. For the top 10-percent pop-ups, the average rate reached 9.28 percent.
CONCLUSION: POP-UPS ARE EFFECTIVE SALES TOOLS!
In fact, their effect goes beyond the conscious mind. According to a ScienceDaily (2) story on a research study published in Springer‘s Cognitive Processing journal (3) last year, pop-ups physically effect how a person’s brain works.
The change triggered will differ according to people’s personalities, prompting some to take action and others to delay. “If the subject is more ‘approach’ oriented, the changes in the asymmetry index might reflect growing activity in the left brain hemisphere,” explained Izabela Rejer who conducted the research with Jarosław Jankowski.
“If, on the other hand, the subject is more ‘withdraw’ oriented, these changes might reflect the growing activity in the right hemisphere.
In other words, pop-ups will prompt to act those who are usually eager to do so, and will incite to delay those who tend to weigh their decisions. This may incite an e-commerce store owner to take into consideration the personality type of his/her usual customer when planning pop-ups.
Anyone who has seen pop-ups is aware of what might annoy an ecommerce
visitor: full-screen pop-ups that abruptly
Regarding the look of a pop-up, one should experiment with pop-up shapes and sizes, locations on the screen, text wording, design, font and colors to test what works best.
HERE ARE A FEW THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND:
➜ To make it easy to read on both mobile and laptop screens, the text should be fairly brief, to the point and written in a font big enough to be readable no matter one’s screen size.
➜ If the pop-up invites people to share their e-mail addresses, it must make it worth their while. This can be anything from offering a personalized catalog of what a visitor has just browsed through, to putting him/her on the store’s email list for pre-launch sales, flash sales, holiday sales or coupon offers—people as a whole don’t want mailings unless they will truly benefit from them.
interrupt one’s browsing; offers that are not really relevant to one’s shopping at that moment; or difficulty to close the pop-up.
However, research conducted by the Nielsen
Norman Group last year in the United States showed that people do appreciate pop-ups when they relate to what they are doing—such as browsing through an e-commerce catalog—do not obstruct their whole screen, and give them the option of closing it.
So when dealing with these powerful sales triggers, it’s a matter of having them carry offers that potential customers will welcome
➜ Since free shipping is one of the most compelling arguments driving sales—potential customers resent additional costs such as shipping or taxes that increase an item’s price—offering free shipping on the pop-up should be welcome news.
As for when to make a pop-up appear, people in the field seem to agree that having them come up too early may irritate people. So an e-commerce store should let people browse through the site and catalog, and bring up the pop-up about 60 seconds into their visit. The delay could be longer but no more than 120 seconds not to risk having people leave one’s site.
