Using a Pop-Over Form To Collect Subscriptions – Is It OK?

I have said it before and will continue to say it – if you’re not building up a mailing list on your website, you’re wasting time. A mailing list is invaluable for any Internet entrepreneur.

Obviously, once you have a list, you want to maximize the number of people who sign up for that list. This means that, within reason, you want to put efforts into converting as many of your site’s visitors into subscribers as you can.

Aweber (the email service I use and recommend highly) offers many kinds of forms to collect subscriptions, but one of them is the pop-over form. This form will appear several seconds after the page loads, and will hover over the rest of the site. It is like a pop-up, but isn’t actually a pop-up.

Obviously, the first concern is pissing off your visitors. I’ll admit straight up – I personally find pop-overs a bit annoying. However, I understand why site owners use them – THEY WORK.

Several months ago, I used a slide-down form which worked similar to Aweber’s pop-over. I ended up removing it because (1) it appeared too soon and therefore some sites which take screenshots of my site would have this big glaring pop-over sitting in the screenshot, and (2) I was concerned it was pissing off my readers.

Interestingly, I got VERY few complaints about the form. The only complaints I got (albeit rare) was that it appeared too often. But, also important are the results. My daily subscription rate dropped by close to 90% as I removed that pop-over! That’s HUGE! And, silly me, rather than put it back, I talked myself into eating the loss because it was best for my readers.

It is a silly conclusion. My weekly newsletter is valuable. Yes, I have a financial interest in building the list, but at the end of the day, the content is valuable and I shouldn’t feel the least bit guilty about trying to get people to subscribe.

When using a pop-over, you need to respect your reader’s Internet experience. The one limiter you definitely DO want to put on your pop-over is to make sure it cookies the user and doesn’t display it to them every time they visit the site. I am going to test this to optimum effectiveness, but I am currently testing a 7 day cookie. So, once a user visits my site, they’ll not see the form for a week. I’m hesitant to cookie them forever simply because of the age-old marketing rule: repetition.

Secondly, when designing a pop-over form, be sure to theme the content of the pop-over so that it is clear it is coming from YOUR site. If it looks like an ad, it can have the reverse effect that you want. In my case, I made sure to put my site’s logo into the pop-over.

Since the Aweber pop-over looks and acts differently than the prior one I used, I cannot compare the results. However, if it even matches the results of the prior version, I should see a drastic increase in my daily subscription rate.

Results to come later.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.