To pop or not to pop? my test with pop ups

I have now finished my pop up testing on this blog, “yey!” say some of you

Using those overlay pop ups to get people on to your list is a touchy subject. Some people absolutely hate them! and others are ok with them.

which are you?

My opinion

Personally, I don’t like them. The always interrupt my reading and whenever I see them I make a mental ‘arrgh’ sound and can even go so far as to not visit the site any more.

But, everyone says they get more people on your list and my experience has been that it actually has got more people on my list.

but, what kind of people? people that spend perhaps?

The test

I’ve seen a few people swear by a plugin called WP Subscribers so I went and bought it and set it up to show the traffic ebook opt in for most categories and some other ‘free report’ type opt ins related to other categories.

Now, to be fair it did have a dramatic effect on the amount of people opting in to my list.

Most days it had over 100 people a day subscribing.

Success! … or was it?

The Results

After going giddy for a few days seeing so many people stream on to my lists I decided to see how many of those new subscribers converted in to sales.

It turns out that it made zero difference to the amount of conversions except now I had to pay aweber more money for having more people to send emails to.

A lot of the new subscribers are bots or other things that see a form and add their details so they can reply with offers of their own every time they get an email off you.

I added tracking codes to all subscribers that added their details to a pop up form and as yet, none of them have converted on a sale. Not one!

Plus, there’s a thing called email reputation. Google, yahoo, msn and most major players in the web based email game take part in it and they’ll score you on how many undeliverables you send and other things that you’d rather not know about if you send to lots of ‘invisible’ peoples email addresses. The

worse that your reputation gets, the less chance that your emails will get delivered.

Sometimes gmail and others don’t even spam them, they just kill them before they even get near someones inbox (legitimate people that used to get your emails will no longer get them once you get tarred with a bad reputation score).

I learned this from John Benson on his 3x conversion course that I won (2 grand course!) and it’s something I’ve seen repeated by serious email marketers and I’m willing to believe it.

Is WP Subscribers worth it?

For me, no. For you? perhaps, it’s a personal choice and it will of course depend on what niche your blog is in and how you market to your subscribers.

I suspect all the glowing reviews are based on how many subscribers they got from using it and not how much money they made from those subscribers. Maybe I’m wrong or I went about it in the wrong way, that’s always a possibility but for me, I wont be using those kind of pop ups on this blog.

If no pop ups then what to use?

I’ve switched back to using Premium list magnet as it can do slide-ins rather than ‘can’t do anything till you close it’ pop ups. The slide-ins don’t prevent the user from continuing to read the article and I feel better about that!

I like the slide ins, sort of. Kind of a necessary evil, plus you can use them to do ads too so you don’t always have to show opt in forms, you can show promotions on a post by post basis (except if you have w3 total cache due to it causing old versions of pages to be shown instead of a fresh one so whatever ad was showing on the page when it was cached will show to new visitors)

I recommend

I personally recommend Premium List Magnet because it’s not so intrusive and it allows you to do things other than opt in forms.

here’s my affiliate link >> Premium List Magnet

I don’t know, maybe I’ll see about doing some shenanigans with a new promotion for it. It all depends on the comments, so..

Let me know your opinion

let me know what you think.

to pop up or not to pop up? (or slide instead).