How to Design a PopUp Window to Boost Opt-Ins

By Steve Shaw
Posted Friday, June 25, 2004

I get many emails a month from people asking how to go about designing a popup window to extract the maximum number of opt-ins from visitors to their web site. In this article I outline the seven essential steps you should take in your design of a successful popup:

1. PAY your subscriber

Okay, not literally PAY them, but you generally need to give something back in return for the visitor's name and email address.

For example, a free course, a free book, a free consultation, anything that's of VALUE to your visitors and of RELEVANCE to your web site or business. I see so many popups that just say 'Type in your name and email address here:' without giving anything in return for these details.

2. Make your headline SELL

The headline of your popup is incredibly important, as it's often the first part of the popup window that the visitor's eye is attracted to. If it doesn't interest them, they'll shut down the popup immediately.

What can you do to improve your headline?

You need to focus strongly on the BENEFIT to the potential subscriber - tell them exactly how are they going to BENEFIT from giving you their name and email address. For example, the following are all headlines suitable for my own site that offer a clear benefit to the reader:

"Boost your Subscribers by 535%"
"Discover Secret PopUp Techniques"
"FREE Report: Exit PopUp Boosts Sales 110%"

You could emulate this type of benefit-laden headline for your own site.

3. Make it load QUICK

A slow loading popup is going to be a quickly closed popup! No visitor to your web site is going to sit around while your elaborate popup loads all your fancy graphics, they're just going to close it straight away - it's your job to CAPTURE THEIR INTEREST as soon as possible, and thereby prevent closure of the window before you've made your offer, and hopefully get them to type in their details.

Some graphics are usually more effective than none, but minimize your use of them, and optimize the graphics files before uploading to your server.

4. Use an effective TITLE

I see many popups where the title of the popup window (i.e., in the title bar, set by the HTML title tags) is completely inappropriate. For example, 'popup page' or 'popup1'. At best, this looks unprofessional, so try to make your title relevant to the offer you are making to the visitor, and mirror your headline in some way.

5. BALANCE the popup page

The page you display in the popup window should at the very least look pleasing to the eye. This means the fonts on the page should be consistent and not look out of place, the colors should provide high contrast and make it easy to read, and the alignment of the text and any images on the page should not make any element look out of place.

6. Offer a way to CLOSE the popup window

You can easily add a button or a link to your popup page that allows visitors to close the popup window if they wish. You can do this easily by adding the code onclick="self.close();return false;" to your link or button tag.

7. KEEP IT SIMPLE

Overall, the best rule you can follow is just to keep to the point and Keep It Simple - this way you can capture the attention of your visitor quickly and easily and not distract their attention from your main aim which is to get their name and email address. And of course, once you've got their email address, treat it well and keep their interest.

By following these seven essential tips, you'll definitely have all the basics in place. The trick then is to keep on tweaking and testing your popup to try and optimize on your results.

About the Author
Steve Shaw is the author of The PopUp Masters Course available for FREE from (http://popupmaster.com/?a12) - Discover the PopUp Secrets of Pros like Marlon Sanders and Terry Dean, and boost your opt-ins by 535%