List Building. Don't Believe the Lie!

Are you really, as you suggest, measuring what you're basing your conclusions and advice on from the numbers of people opting in and the bounce rate, Melanie?

Or have you split-tested the income derived from the two different lists built over an extended period? I've always found that people who haven't tested that but are judging it by the numbers opting in and the bounce rate tend to believe what you believe, and say what you're advising people above; whereas people who have gone a lot further and tested that, too, tend to believe the exact opposite.

I think there are reasons for that - and although I see you're rather free with the word "lie", I think they're actually very good and very valid reasons, and they're also typically based on more significant and realistic parameters than the ones to which you refer above.

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post6087171

It's hard to find someone who writes more engagingly than this guy.

Yet, as he found to his annoyance, popups simply work.

I see he has removed it. But, it's not because it doesn't work. It's a principle thing for some people.

Yes.

Not my experience at all.

I've always found that the better the content, the more likely they are to want "more of the same" (which is what I'm offering them, really, in exchange for their email address).

I don't want to test pop-ups on my own sites, but when I split-tested squeeze-pages against content-rich sites, I found that I built bigger lists (in every case) from the squeeze-pages but earned less money from those lists over the following 6-month period. But I'm digressing here, of course, and talking about my own experience on a slightly different subject, which wasn't what I was referring to above. I think the principle is perhaps comparable, though - the commonality being, of course, that high quality content is precisely what encourages the people who are going to turn into paying customers to opt in.

Higher opt-in numbers, yes ... but sometimes (often?) less money.

One shouldn't assume that "the biggest list made from the traffic" equates with "the biggest income made from the traffic". This is my point. It's a point I've split-tested (four times, always with the same answer, on which I've commented repeatedly in other threads); and with pop-ups in particular it's a point which three people I know (actually former clients, when I was writing for others) have also tested with the same results: less money, overall.

There's a problem with this reasoning, Melanie: it's ignoring the fact that many people who don't opt in at their first visit to the site will come back and opt in at a later stage unless they're put off by a pop-up.

You seem to be assuming that without a pop-up, people who leave will never come back. I find that kind of ironic - the testing I have seen (albeit not on my own sites) suggests the opposite. Many will come back, if the site's pop-up-free.

You might notice, in plenty of the discussions here about pop-ups, the large numbers of people saying "I won't go back to a site that had a pop-up". They're not alone!

Again, nobody's disputing your observation about your own bounce rate. I seek simply to make the point that (as you've agreed), there there are other things you haven't tested: some of which commonly give the opposite conclusions to the advice you're offering. That said, of course I wish you nothing but good fortunes with your pop-up.

I'm confusseled:confused:.

I don't know why having a pop-up would result in less money.

You'd have the opt-ins from the pop-up + the ones who opted in from the normal way.

Does having an pop-up mean the people who opt-in from a normal channel less likely to buy from you?:confused:

If anything, I would have thought you would still have the same success from the people who opted in to a normal opt-in box (can you not switch off pop-ups for people who have signed up).

Then you would have extra people on your list from the pop-up and maybe turn a tiny percent into buyers.

Which would mean more sales, if only a small amount.

Personally, I think everyone should test it.

I think this is definitely a possibility, but that points to a major problem with questions like this.

You can't tell anyone "use popups" with any kind of reasoning behind it, because you just plain don't know what will happen.

What works for you in your niche may not work for me in mine.

I mean, if I put a picture of a camera in front of my users and said "learn to use it," they would go "WTF" and hit the close button.

Agreed.

I set mine to show just once. Not once a month. Just once.

But the focus of a squeeze page is usually some kind of free incentive already. Putting an exit pop there... what will its nature be? "Are you ABSOLUTELY SURRRRRRRRE you don't want my freebie?!?" Or would it actually consist of MORE free stuff thrown in as incentives potentially undermining the value of the original offer and ultimately exacerbating the "anything, if it's free!" mentality of potential new subscribers?

I certainly agree that if it's linked to a blog, then it's a very different thing. And the testing I've seen bears that out.

I'm not convinced that an exit pop-up from a squeeze page would opt in many people, because apart from opting in, exiting (by closing the window or clicking "back") is the only way to leave a squeeze-page anyway: a squeeze-page has the sole purpose of opting people in, so if they've already "said no" to that, it's perhaps not so easy to imagine that an exit pop-up would catch them? One could test it, of course. (After extensive split-testing, I don't use squeeze pages myself, in any of my niches, for all the reasons explained in this post: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5832719 - the bottom line was that my split-testing proved that, across a range of niches, squeeze pages were losing me money even though I built bigger lists with them).

On a blog, certainly, exit pop-ups inhibit some people (who otherwise would have done so) from returning: this is both self-evident and easily verifiable.

Same here, exit pop-ups are quite annoying to me, I want to leave the site, let me leave!

I agree that it's difficult to 'know' anything for certain, especially across different niches.

However, it's easy to disagree without giving an alternative strategy.

So, what works better for you, helisell?