7 Tips to Get More Leads From Your Pop-Up Box

Do you already have a personal trainer website? If yes, you may have integrated various marketing gadgets to build your audience, like Sumo-Me and Get Site Control. Tools that enable you to create pop ups, share buttons and contact forms for your website.
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Today, we're going to talk about pop ups. A promotional pop-up box message is a marketing tool that you can use to encourage website visitors to engage with your business, subscribe to updates, download a lead magnet or sign up for a trial.

I see personal trainers fall in to one of two camps when it comes to pop ups:

1. the ones who want to set up a pop-up message from the get go on all pages,
   
2. and the ones who think they are so annoying that they wouldn't want to use them at all.

My stance is somewhere between the two. While the Nielson Norman Group, one of the leading user experience researchers says pop ups are one of the most annoying advertising strategies, One of the biggest pop-up hosts, Sumo has recently published an article based on their statistics and confirmed that pop-ups are not dead according to the success rate of their users.

Bias? Maybe. But after analysing data of about 1.75 billion (!) pop-ups created on their platform, experts at Sumo found that the average conversion rate for all pop-ups was 3.09%.

Only the top 10% performing pop-up messages had a 9.3% conversion rate and typically the more traffic a pop-up registered, the lower the conversion rate was. However, if your website has tens or hundreds of thousand of visitors per month, that will translate into a significant amount of engagement so long your pop-up converts.

So traffic on your personal trainer website is very important, but if your pop-up message content and set-up doesn't appeal to or annoys the reader, no leads.

To help make sure that you do get leads from your pop up, here are 7 tips to get more leads from your pop-up box.

1. Context

Context is what makes a pop up infinitely more effective. If the pop-up message doesn't relate to the content of the page your visitor is reading, they will likely just close the box or even worse, leave your personal trainer website.

In brief, the action your pop up is trying promote (subscribe, contact, etc) should compliment the context of the blog the website visitor is reading.

For example, our My PT Website Blog page you will see a lead magnet CTA in the header and sidebar while reading the latest article on marketing methods and systems. 
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After you had the chance to read into the blog post, a slide-in pop-up will ask you if you wanted to get access to the free guide. If so, you can enter your email to download it. If not, you have the option to see other free resources.

2. Delay

Think of your online marketing strategy like you were having a conversation with a potential client in person.

Say, you are on the gym floor and a member approaches you to ask a simple question like: "What's the best way to get rid of my bingo wings?"

Imagine, that instead of trying to find out more about that person, the problem and why it bothers her to build trust, you immediately reply with a statement like this: "I want to sell you my fat burning package so you can start working on it now!"
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What do you think the answer to that will be? The potential client would get confused and leave. While, if you dig a little deeper and give her a few tips, she may even ask you about your services.

It is very similar when promoting online. The only difference is that you don't see the person face-to-face, so you're better setting up your online interactions in a similar way.

Callanan Fitclub's pop-up message on their blog follows the same principle as ours. It also appears 15-20 seconds after a reader landed on the blog or article page and asks whether the person wants more in a casual and conversational way. Not promotional.
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3. Clarity

This includes clear headlines and where/if needed clear description of what exactly expected from the subscriber and what they will get in return.

Keep the message short and sharp. Also make sure it has all the info for the reader to make a decision. If it's an offer, state all important information: what they get, what the value is, when it expires and what happens next.

If you have an online store and you'd like to offer coupons or vouchers via a pop-up box promotion, a few words will suffice, since the context is already strong. "Want to have access to coupons?"

If you fail to be clear with your message, your conversion rate will be poor, guaranteed. Check out what our client, Aidan D'Arcy did with his pop-up message to promote his eBook below!
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4. Personality

It's imperative that you don't use unprofessional slang or swearing in your promo copy (unless your niche requires it). However, people relate to people and if your offer is something where you could shine your personality or connect to your target market based on their personal preferences, then you should!

May that be a reference to their favourite sportsperson, news-jacking a recent event that would spark their interest or something as simple as admitting that you know how annoying spamming is, in order to explain your best intentions to provide value in everything you send them.

​Feel free to think outside of the box, just make sure it doesn't feel forced, but rather natural and personal.

5. Value

For a pop-up message to be successful, there should be adequate explanations about the benefits the visitor will receive if he/she clicks a link, submits a form or shares the page on social media.

This aligns nicely with the clarity aspect. Find a way to clearly communicate in what way your promotion adds value to your reader's life.

Sumo splits value into two main groups based on how they relate to the content of the page on which they appear:
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• Contextual value uses the bond you already built with creating trust via your content, like articles and resources to encourage the reader to subscribe to your updates.
  
• Inherent value builds on the fact that your prospect leads would get access to upgraded content only after they submitted their email address via the pop-up box. Think about an eBook download, webinar or podcast access.
  

6. Frequency

How often should your pop-up appear to your readers?

If the website visitor is ready to engage, your pop-up hosting service should have a feature to make sure they will not see the same message again after they have acted upon the CTA.

If the website visitor clicks out, there should be a time frame set for when the pop-up should appear to that reader again. Imagine that wherever you click on a website you see the same pop-up message even though you clicked the 'X'.

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​That's a sure recipe for chasing your readers away. Make sure you give at least a day to your personal trainer website visitors before your pop-up appears again if they said 'no'.

7. Matching CTA

The wording of the CTA (call to action) button should always match the offer description. People won't even consider to take action if the overall message of the pop-up is not clear (see point #3).

Are you promising regular blog updates? Use the word "Subscribe" or "Get Tips". Would they get something for free? Say something like "Get My Freebie" or "Access Free Trial". Are you offering a download? "Get my eBook" will be an appropriate wording. If the purpose of the pop-up is to encourage the reader to get in touch, use words like "Send" like Chris Wong did below.
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