1. Pop-up must come out when our visitors will truly appreciate it.

Think in your user’s experience (UX). It could be ruined by pop-ups. But if you pay attention to this point, pop-ups could enhance your UX.

Here's a little story:

Let’s put ourselves in our visitor’s shoes. Let’s imagine our future visitor frowning at a problem. He immediately remembers Google and does a search. Our blog post comes up as one of the results, yeah (we have been working hard for this).

Our visitor clicks our post (yeah again). Just as he starts reading, BAM! We slap him on the face with a gigantic welcome gate! It may sound funny but UX is starting to suffer. Did you know pop-ups are rude?

Our visitor escapes the welcome gate, reads three lines of our blog post and here comes another pop-up asking for his email. Let’s stop here. Why, why on earth would he give his email if he has just landed on our site?

A parenthesis here: we want to have happy readers but maybe we haven't put ourselves in our readers shoes:

There may be a few cases where even though we haven’t been treating our visitors well, they may still give us their email. Just in case you may be wondering, taking their attention away from what they came to read is “the opposite of treating our visitors well”.

But even though we may collect a few emails, in most cases, visitors would be annoyed and some may even exit our site. So the general balance concerning conversion would show red numbers instead of green.

Back to our little story:

Within 10 seconds of closing the popup requesting his email, our visitor then has his attention once again drawn away from our blog post by a slide-in.

Deep breath. How do you think our visitor is feeling at this point? Cranky? Grouchy?

So let’s view things through our visitor’s eyes. He has been forced to read a headline about some offer he has no interest in from a person or business he’s not all that familiar with when all he really sought was the specific information he came for.

Hmm… do you think our pop-ups are being effective?

I think our pop-ups are doing the opposite of what they should be doing. We have been putting our visitor into a stressful situation, forcing him to switch tasks and make decisions before we’ve even provided him any value. We’re distracting him and creating a negative impression of our site. And we’re reducing the probabilities that he’ll stick around or come back.

In the best case, our visitor has been around the Internet for a while, and has conditioned himself to ignore popups or welcome gates entirely and to click out of them as quickly as possible. The result may just be a slight annoyance for our visitor, but it still it’s not availing anything for our business. We want to drive conversions to our site and we’re not creating conditions for our visitor to want to engage with us.

How can we make our pop-ups come out when our visitors will truly appreciate them?

Fixing the timing. As many other things in life, timing is all when it comes to pop-ups, welcome gates, and slide-ins.

We want our pop-ups to be triggered when they’ll be less intrusive and most likely to convert.

Here are 3 ways to make our pop-ups less intrusive:

a.) That the pop-up may be triggered when our visitor has spent a specific period of time on our page: please don’t set this to 3 seconds, LOL. It would be advisable to estimate how long it would take our visitor to read up to 70 to 80% of our post, and make the window pop up there. We could also configure it to pop up to a certain scroll amount.

b.) We could even configure our pop-up to jump after our visitor has spent a certain amount of time on our website (not only on our page). This gives our visitor time to get familiar with us. And alternative to this could be establishing an amount of pages visited on our site as criteria for the pop-up to come (let’s say 3 pages or posts).

c.) We could set our pop-up to jump out when our visitor shows exit-intent: this means when our visitor is about to leave our site. This is very easy to set on our website. Our visitor is about to leave anyway, and most likely will abandon our site forever unless we get his attention.

This is the arrangement I like the most. We have nothing to lose. We could win him forever with a captivating headline collecting his email. And if our pop-up annoys him on his way out we’re no worse off than we were before.