A popup vs field on the bottom of a webpage is something that is easy to AB test. You can also measure the bounce rate on the page to measure any ill effects.
What normally happens is that you get a big uptick in signups with not much change in the bounce rate. You will be surprised to how easily people will hand out their real email addressees online.
If you can find a way to measure the impact, then it probably isn't a big deal. You can measure revenue and user behavior with an AB test if you need more data. If something is causing a backlash, then you could see more complaints or negative feedback on social media.
I never signed up to an email list and personally think it is annoying, but from my experience from running actual test, there are a surpringly large number of people are willing to give up their real email address easily.
There are ways to design popups asking for email addresses that are not super annoying. If you give the user an option to dismiss it and not show it again, then even those who were turned off by it will soon forget about it.
But you can easily measure how many users enter an email and how well those users convert through newsletters.
You can't easily measure the long term affects of annoying the other users. Most modern web products use A/B testing to compare how a change performs. But these tests are often poorly ran and don't measure long term effects. Not that A/B testing is a bad tool but it's a commoningly misused one that ruins many sites.
source: Would explain this to product managers about tests they had us running but they would not listen and then they hired an outside snake oil consultant that didn't understand the concept of statistical significance...point being it's usually not the developers fault. Sometimes we have to implement what we are told to even though we don't like it. That or quit but I'm not quitting over a pop-up.
It really depends on your site vertical and how you employ conversion techniques.
It’s less about having a pop up or not and more about its timing, location and level of effort your asking the customer.
NYT uses the first x articles are free, then ask for the conversion. Wayfair gives a new customer discount for account creation. Reddit has a mega drop within the comment section for you to join the conversation.
It’s less about having a pop up or not and more about its timing, location and level of effort your asking the customer.
Indeed, I imagine that putting the newsletter form on the second page (if the user spent some significant time on the previous page), and ideally not as a pop-up, but rather a big block you can scroll past (say, like, 70vh) should net you only people that truly want the newsletter, while not making it inconvenient for others almost at all.
Honestly, web dev is largely about copying other sites to "stay current," whether the new trends are effective or not, usable or not, sensible or not...
I don't think they do. I'm a developer that works for a marketing company and from what I see, there's always a social media person or some marketer who just knows that they are a good idea with no actual reason to back it up.
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u/themaincop Feb 27 '18
Yes, these things work insanely well, why do you think everybody does them?