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6 Best Practices to Create Highly Converting Email Popups

Posted by Akshy Anbu on  June 16, 2019  in Conversion Rate Optimization


We’ve been speaking about WordPress popups for a while now! Right from what is Optinly to how to choose the best WordPress popup plugin for your website, we’ve been speaking a lot!

And maybe a few of you would have understood (or be highly influenced) by what we’ve been trying to convey all this time and would have installed a popup plugin and started trying out.

Is that it then? All settled?

No, it doesn’t stop there. You’ve got to ask yourself these questions.

  • Have my popups been working out well lately?
  • Were they able to drive a massive conversion ratio and build my email list?
  • Do my users find my email popups attractive or annoying?

These questions aren’t much difficult. You’ll eventually get to know the answer.

If your popups are working out good for you, completely fine!

But, if not, you end up losing more than you could imagine – a huge base of audience, potential visitors and all those fancy sales numbers!

Which is why, today we’ll be seeing the top 7 important factors that you should be looking after if you want to create highly converting email popups.

Don’t let your visitors turn their backs on you anymore! (that’s one of our taglines. Punchy ain’t it?).

Why Creating Highly Converting Email Popups is Important?

We’ll cut to the chase.

Email popups help you get subscribers, increase sales, promote products, grow your email list and more.


To put it together in a compelling phrase,

“Popups Help You Supercharge Your Email Marketing Campaign!”

And that’s why you just can’t let go off this free source of grabbing potential email leads (if you haven’t been using email popups till date, you are missing out some serious customer retention techniques).

Top 6 Best Email Popup Practices

  1. Effective & Actionable Headlines
  2. Clear Subtle Call-to-Action
  3. Appealing Designs & Layout
  4. Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse
  5. Create Responsive Popups
  6. Make it Easier for Them to Close

The above mentioned is what we’ll be discussing today, with a bit of examples here and there, illustrations, stats if needed (the fun factor comes by default).

1. Effective & Actionable Headline

Take a look at this blog copy’s title once. They convey the message clearly don’t they?

And that’s how your popup’s headline should be, effective, actionable and should convey the message clearly.

Remember, your popups are no place to show off your fancy writing skills nor pose riddles to customers. They are your pathway to scale up growth. The best example is exit intent popups, the deliver the message right to the point.

So make sure you know what your popup is going to convey to your customer. Below is one ideal example of how a popup headline should be…

Example for best email popup
Image Source: Aeolidia

2. Clear Subtle Call-to-Action

What’s a popup without a call-to-action button? (Pass!)

The ultimate goal of any email signup popup is to capture emails by making website visitors opt in and gradually increase your email list (which clearly will not happen if there’s no call-to-action in your popup).

Now, don’t rush to keep a call-to-action button just for the sake of keeping one. It just doesn’t work like that!

Your call-to-action button should be clearly defined and purpose driven (the popup example above has a good headline but a bad call-to-action button). Remember that you’ve already interrupted your user by displaying a popup. And if your popup doesn’t work fine, chances are high that your visitor might leave your site and never come back!

Try having a bold call-to-action button with some contrast colors and catchy text like this popup here…

Example for good CTA button
Image Source: Persuasion Nation

Doing it this way will make it hard for users to ignore your popups and this will increase your conversion rates.

3. Appealing Designs & Layout

Design & layout is another thing that decides how successful your popup is about to be. Experts say that popups which have a clean structured simple layout and are eye catching have more conversion rates than the ones that are fancy.

It’s because popups that are more fancy tend to distract the users by giving them more, failing to do what’s essential.

Let’s consider the example above. The popup is clean, visually appealing, good combination of colors (black & white works most of the time) and a call-to-action button that clearly indicates what he/she will get!

Tailoring one such popup is quite important if you want things to work out for your business and increase your email subscriptions.

Here’s a Pro Tip: Colors have the power to influence the minds of your readers. For instance, the color blue has a calm serene effect on your readers whereas the colour purple is known for wealth and royalty.

Define your target audience. If your website focuses mainly on women, go for popups with light colors (soft colors) and if it’s for men, go with brighter colors.

4. Make Offers They Can’t Refuse

People love free stuff! For instance, we give you Optinly for free in exchange for your email address.

Would you resist? No right?

That’s how it works.

Offering something lucrative heightens the trust factor between you and your audience. It could be anything – a free ebook, a free video tutorial, a coupon code, free shipping or anything that pushes your audience to give their email address.

Here’s an example of a discount popup…

Example for a Discount Popup
Image Source: WisePops

Here, Fulton & Roark has come out with a minimalist discount popup that gives you a 10% discount on your next order. And the touch point strategy to be noticed here is, the popup assures that he/she can unsubscribe any time. It’s a clean win!

5. Create Responsive Popups

We’ve already discussed how important it is to create responsive WordPress popups. But still, a quick recap!

Creating email sign up popups that are not responsive, especially when it comes to mobiles can sabotage your user experience to a great extent. In fact websites that did not look into this factor and gave a hard time to the users were severely penalized by Google.

So, its wise that you check multiple times that what you’ve got with you are mobile responsive popups.

6. Make Popups Easier to Be Closed

How nice it would be if your visitors cannot close your popups?

He/she will have no other way but to read what the popup says. Nice, but cruel (trust us, we won’t be doing that to you)!

Remember that popups are already annoying. It becomes more annoying if people find it hard to close. You are literally driving your visitors mad, forcing them to abandon your website. And no one is to be blamed but you!

You should start giving users their space. If he/she is not interested in what you are offering, that’s okay!

You’ll still be getting impressions which is also important. Websites that have made user experience as their top priority witnessed more recurring visitors over a period of time.

So, make sure you keep a visible close icon, not too large not too tiny, just the right size that would seem appropriate.

The Bottomline…

A survey stated that the top 10 percent of the highest performing popups had an average conversion rate of 9.28%.

We understand that it’ll be hard to get into the leaderboards. But that doesn’t matter! All you have to do is make sure that your popups follow the above mentioned guidelines and you’ll get to see the results eventually!

There’s one thing you should never forget.

“Email Popups Are Either a Yes or No! There’s No Middle Ground in Between.”

It’s just a fraction of seconds before your visitor decides whether he/she should be opting in or not.

So make sure that you make every second count by creating really nice popups for your potential customers and audience. And speaking of which, we wanted to show you how a good popup should be!

Click this particular phrase to see a modal popup

Pretty Enough?

Now that you’ve got a pretty good idea about how popups should be, why don’t you start designing one on your own and see how things work out for you!

Sounds cool eh? Go for it then!

Happy Conversion Month Folks!


Author Bio
Akshy Anbu 
Akshy Anbu
Akshy is a Content and Growth Marketer who loves to peddle dreams across the globe. And he specializes in the eCommerce Sector. His blogs are mainly focused on the E-commerce sector, Content Marketing, Growth Marketing and Growth Hacking Techniques. When not glued to his notebook, Akshy loves to watch movies, cook, read and explore the wilderness all by himself!

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