What is a pop-up form

An email pop-up is a window with form fields that appears on a website. It prompts the visitor to enter their email address, allowing the website owner to communicate with them via email.

Pop Up forms are highly effective

Email pop-ups are among the most widely used and effective email list-building strategies. App company Sumo analysed 1.7 billion pop-ups and found an average conversion rate of 3.09%. Static inline forms only have a 0.58% conversion rate. Pop-up forms are 5 times more effective!

This means that if you get 100 daily website visitors, you will build your list by an additional 92 subscribers using a pop-up form each month.

Pop-up form best practice

Choosing a time to display your pop-up form

It is annoying for users to get immediately presented with a pop-up form when they arrive on your site. Instead, wait an appropriate time to show your message, allowing your visitors to engage with your content.

A good rule of thumb is to display your form at around 50% of the average time users spend on a page. For example, if visitors spend an average of 2 minutes on your page, show your pop-up form after 60 seconds. This means you will get your call to action in front of engaged visitors who are more likely to sign up.

You can obtain your average time on page in Google Analytics. It can be found in Behaviour report > Site Content > All Pages.

Offer something of value to visitors

Users are bombarded with requests for email on every site they visit. Offering an incentive to sign up will markedly increase your conversion rate. Incentive include:

Make it easy for visitors to close the pop-up form

The best way to annoy your website visitors is by blocking the content they were viewing with a pop-up form that cannot be closed. To avoid a negative customer experience, make it easy for visitors to close your pop-up form.

Make sure your pop-up form is mobile-friendly

Mobile traffic accounts for over 50% of global website traffic. Therefore, it is vitally important to ensure your form is mobile-friendly.

A mobile-friendly pop-up form best practice:

• Easy to exit. The close button should be prominent so mobile browsers can return to the website quickly.
• Keep form fields to a minimum. The fewer fields, the less space the pop-up form takes up on a mobile screen.
• Large call to action button. This makes it easy for potential subscribers to give their contact details and sign up.

Pop Up form Design

Limit the number of fields in your form

More fields will make your form more difficult to fill, leading to fewer conversions. After analysing one million pop-ups, Sleeknote found that more fields in your form resulted in the following drop in conversion rate:

When building your pop-up form, only ask for the information you need. You can always ask people for more information once they become subscribers via a survey.

Asking for a name in addition to an email is usually a good idea, as a name will enable you to personalise your future emails.

This example from Backlinko is a good example of a simple signup form with a single field.

Include images in your form

Sleeknote also found that forms with images convert almost 84% better than forms without images.

Optimise your call-to-action

Your CTA button asks customers to sign up for your list. It is a small part of your form but greatly influences conversion rate.

Best practices for improving conversion rate

The Trends signup form contains a call to action with all the above points. The red button stands out, the text begins with the word ‘Get’, and it explains what the user is signing up for.