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Opt In Popup For Blog: Footer or Lightbox?

by SeanyG
13 replies
Hey guys,

What do you find gets better opt-in rates:

- Middle of the page light box (greys out the rest of the screen) that pops up

or

- Footer pop up bar that pops up.

The footer pop up bar seems less annoying which is ideal for a blog. I don't want to piss off visitors.

Does less annoying mean less optins?

Which box do you prefer?

Looking forward to your thoughts!

~Sean
#blog #footer #lightbox #opt #popup
  • Profile picture of the author impact-productions
    Personally, I find the footer bar more annoying than the pop up. It's because it's so hard to hide most of the footer bars and they eat into the screen real estate.

    I will qualify that though. You do have to be able to set the pop up so it only appears occasionally (I'll give you an example, I use one on my blog and only set it to appear once a week).

    Just my thoughts. I've got no definitive split testing to compare it against.

    Thom
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    • Profile picture of the author SeanyG
      Great feedback Tom. Your answer surprises me. I prefer a well design small footer pop up!

      Anyone else?
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  • Profile picture of the author Plish
    This might be a bit of a hijack. But I've heard peel away ads work the best for opt ins. I haven't played around with them yet. Can anyone confirm?
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  • Profile picture of the author James Dyson
    In all my tests, lightbox popups outconvert inline optin boxes, including sidebar and centralized optin boxes. I haven't tested footer ads, although I suspect lightboxes will beat those also.

    The main problem with lightboxes is that they are very intrusive. As Alexa demonstrates, they will put some people off coming back to your blog. I'm currently testing out a new lightbox on my IM blog and have noticed a large increase in optins (as expected) but it is very difficult to track the effect this lightbox is having on returning visitor numbers.

    I would always say if you're going to have a lightbox, ensure it's set to only appear once in a while (mine is set to appear once then disappear unless someone deletes all cookies and cache).

    I'm using a new plugin called Popup Domination and that is pretty damn good for creating new looking lightboxes that don't make your blog look super ugly

    ~James Dyson
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    • Profile picture of the author tigerwar
      Originally Posted by James Dyson View Post

      In all my tests, lightbox popups outconvert inline optin boxes, including sidebar and centralized optin boxes. I haven't tested footer ads, although I suspect lightboxes will beat those also.

      The main problem with lightboxes is that they are very intrusive. As Alexa demonstrates, they will put some people off coming back to your blog. I'm currently testing out a new lightbox on my IM blog and have noticed a large increase in optins (as expected) but it is very difficult to track the effect this lightbox is having on returning visitor numbers.

      I would always say if you're going to have a lightbox, ensure it's set to only appear once in a while (mine is set to appear once then disappear unless someone deletes all cookies and cache).

      I'm using a new plugin called Popup Domination and that is pretty damn good for creating new looking lightboxes that don't make your blog look super ugly

      ~James Dyson

      Nice opt-in plug-in James

      Thanks
      Tigerwar
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  • Profile picture of the author techvic
    I've tried both lightbox popups and inline (such as Instant Slide Up) on our blog. Both converted well, but right now we are focusing on using the lightbox popup approach. The copy on the popup is very important and I'm currently using Brian Terry's Optin Pop plugin for Wordpress. It displays the popup content in an iframe and I'm using Optimizer to split test the popup copy. So far it's worked great and allowed me to determine what popup copy converts the best. I'm a big fan of split testing and haven't found a way to split test copy on a slideup. If someone knows how I'd be very interested to hear how you did it.
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Here's some pure user opinion...

      I don't care for slide-ins - most have just enough delay that they interrupt what I'm reading/viewing.

      I don't mind the footer ads, as long as they are either very short or the close button is obvious (like an 'X' or 'Close' in the corner). Poorly executed footer ads are a turnoff more because of the execution than the format.

      I don't mid lightbox ads, either, if they're done well. I don't want to see it more than once per visit. Showing it to me on every page view is too distracting, and most of the sites that use one aren't compelling enough to put up with the annoyance factor.

      I recently ran across a blog that used a lightbox as an exit pop. The gist of the text was "Thanks for stopping by. Before we send you on, we'd like to offer you a deal. Fill in your email address, and we'll send you [stuff]." I wanted the stuff, so I filled in an email.

      There was no success page - clicking submit closed the lightbox and sent me on to my next page.

      The confirmation email basically said "Here's the stuff we promised you. If you want more stuff like it, along with hearing from us when we have something of value to share with you, click the link to join our mailing list. If you don't think we offer you value for your time, click the link at the bottom of every message we send. We'll part ways as friends. Fair enough?"

      This is in a non-IM/MMO niche.
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  • Profile picture of the author Loren Woirhaye
    The footers really annoyed me when I first started seeing them
    but now they don't.

    The modal pop-ups didn't annoy me much at first, but now they
    do. I'd rather they let me read the blog for awhile before showing
    me the popup.
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  • Profile picture of the author Deepak Media
    I use light box popups. Opt in rate increased by 400% really!

    See Indian Motorcycle Reviews & Bike News - BikeAdvice.in by Deepak Raj (wait 10-20 seconds for the box to show up)
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    @ Bangalore, India.
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  • Profile picture of the author clansullivan
    does anyone know how one actually buys popup domination?? The website does not have a buy link and neither does the follow up video page!
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  • Profile picture of the author sunseven
    it depends on the site and the content on the page. If the page is jumbled with tons of content then a middle of the page lightbox may work best if not a footer may work best, but i test everything you'll be surprised when you get very different results for 2 different sites.
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  • Profile picture of the author Dylan K
    Id go for an unblockable lightbox, 100%
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