Question on Popup Program

I think the admin changed the popup to no video. There was a video there a while back.

It's in the thread I linked to, really: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post4985800

I think they very commonly drive people away from the site, overall.

Not so many opt in at their first visits, but many come back soon and will opt in at their second or third visits. Unless they've seen a pop-up at their first visit, in which case some will never return at all.

This is why it's possible for pop-ups to gain some opt-ins from the first-time visitors, but to lose money overall.

I think they're probably very wise, but perhaps the best answer is to split-test it for yourself? If you do that, though, make sure you monitor the proportion of returning traffic with/without the pop-up, as well as the opt-ins, because that's where the damage can be done.

I've always found (with all my own testing, which I've done by comparing "incomes from the lists built" over a 6-month period) that smaller lists tend to product bigger incomes. It seems paradoxical at first, but actually there are good and valid and reliable reasons for it, I think: the things that concentrate on the opt-in rate only and "appeal to the lowest common denominator" of the traffic demographics tend to be the very same things that drive away the more upmarket, educated, affluent visitors who are exactly the ones likely to become the best customers, if sensitively handled. I haven't tested pop-ups of this kind, though: there would be no point for me, because I wouldn't myself be willing to use them even if my results appeared beneficial.

As for video, there are huge numbers of visitors for whom video - especially autoplay video - is inconvenient and/or inappropriate, for a large number of different reasons. It's one of these things about which some marketers (who are perhaps, collectively, not too keen on split-testing for themselves but happy to make assumptions about whether or not "things work" on the self-fulfilling and illogical basis of the numbers of people using them) are enthusiastic. Customers/visitors ... not so much.

This thread's quite interesting: it shows that even many marketers dislike video and many of its widespread uses pretty strongly: http://www.warriorforum.com/off-topi...o-content.html

Bear in mind, as Nate wisely mentions above, that just because you see something on someone's website, that doesn't mean it's necessarily "working" for them. It doesn't even mean that they necessarily think it's working for them: they may be testing it and it might be gone in a month. Or (more commonly) they might just have "decided" to use it, rather naively, because they assume (very often mistakenly) that "these things 'must' work, otherwise so many people wouldn't be using them". And you wouldn't want to run your own business by copying people with that sort of "logic"?