How Popups Can Actually Improve User Experience

How Popups Can Actually Improve User Experience

Many marketers are afraid of annoying their visitors with popups. This apprehension prevents them from maximizing their conversion rates.

This isn’t an unfounded fear though. User experience, customer retention, and loyalty are all incredibly important to brands. 

Hence, finding the right balance between building a great user experience and maximizing conversion rates is a challenge most marketers face. 

But the idea that you have to choose between conversions and user experience is, in fact, a huge misconception. 

The truth is: you don’t need to compromise because popups don’t need to be annoying. And if you use them correctly, popups can actually improve the user experience.

Let’s see how!

1. Delivering a WOW offer

There’s no single message that creates value for every single customer. 

Instead, if you want to deliver a WOW offer, you need to create multiple popup campaigns for different user segments that focus on their specific needs. 

So creating more popups can help you minimize how much you annoy your visitors—by only showing them relevant popups that they want to see.

2. Simplification

Usually, marketers want to communicate more than one message to their visitors. 

For example, you may want to encourage people to buy right away, but you also want to gain more email subscribers at the same time. 

Cramming both these messages (and their associated calls-to-actions) onto the same page creates an overloaded and confusing user experience. 

Instead, you should focus on one message for the homepage (i.e. Buy now) and then use a popup to deliver your secondary message (i.e. Subscribe now).

This strategy will decrease the amount of content on your webpages and deliver your messages sequentially rather than simultaneously. 

This will also help improve the user experience and give them enough time to digest each message.

3. Personalization

Personalizing content is one of the best ways to improve user experience. And popups are great assets for delivering personalized messages. 

It’s possible to personalize your entire webpage; however, it’s both technically challenging and expensive. Especially when you consider that it takes a couple of seconds to load personalized blocks of content. This forces you to choose between delaying your website’s loading time or having personalized content appear after it loads.

The latter solution might not slow down your site, but it does cause “flickering” (when the original content appears briefly before being replaced by new content). 

Since popups load asynchronously and don’t need to appear right away, they don’t slow down your load time. You can also set them to appear based on your users’ onsite behavior and display content that truly creates value for them at that moment.

4. Speed decrease

It’s a common popup myth that they slow down your website (some popups might do, but not OptiMonk popups). 

But your website will actually load faster if you simplify your main page and communicate your personalized messages on popups.

Your Experienced Page Load Time (EPT) will also come down.

As a result, popups won’t interfere with your website’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This is one of the most important metrics in Web Vitals (an initiative by Google that delivers guidance for quality signals that indicate a “great” site experience).

Summing up

As you can see, popups can be great tools in your marketing arsenal. 

When you deploy them effectively, they can improve the user experience, boost your conversion rates, deliver important messages to particular customer segments, and create “wow” moments for your customers. 

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