No-Permission Pop-up Subscriptions Are A Bad Idea

Thanks (or not so much) in part to some meta bloggers, pop-ups have crept their way into the blogosphere. I am seeing more pop-ups on blogs, especially in the marketing, tech and social media niches.  Pop-ups are a dated tactic that were thrown out by many design and usability conscious marketers years ago for good reason – they interrupt a positive user experience on a website and are not permission based.

Unexpected pop-ups or prompts that come up when users enter or even leave a website are always a bad idea, and are not used by the most respected web publications.  I would be surprised if you could even find a single top 100 blogger that uses subscription pop-ups, and none of the top 20 use them.  That in itself speaks volumes.

A few reasons why you shouldn’t use unanticipated pop-ups:

Pop-ups show a lack of respect for your site visitors

Face it – pop-ups are annoying and disrupt a positive user experience with any website, especially a blog.  If you respect your visitors time and want them to have a hassle-free experience on your site, you won’t throw windows in their face reminding them to subscribe.

Pop-ups are push, not pull

Think about this for a second:  you are asking someone to subscribe to your content before they have a chance to engage with it.  Say someone walks into a coffee shop, and before they actually get coffee, the restaurateur blocks their route to the register and asks them to sign up for a membership card.  Yes, a percentage of people might blindly take the membership card, but personally I would prefer to try the coffee first and make my decision on the card later.  By immediately getting in someone’s face and forcing them to make a decision (subscribe, or close this window) you are effectively telling people to sign up for your membership card before they have tried the coffee.  Attention is a scarce commodity, far more valuable than a coffee membership card.  It actually isn’t a light decision for busy people to opt-into a newsletter or mailing list.  Don’t get in people’s faces about this, if they want to opt in, they will.

First impressions count

If my first impression on your website is a pop-up window, immediately I will make the assumption (even if it isn’t true) that you are going to push other things to me in a hard sell manner.  That’s my reaction to it – yours may be different.  But you only get one first impression – wouldn’t you rather it be your content or a landing page you created, not an attempt to capture an email address?

No one actually likes unexpected pop-ups…in fact, people actively dispise them

Why would you ever add a feature to your site that people dislike?  DailyBlogTips ran a poll asking users “Would one pop-up offering you a newsletter subscription be enough to make you stop visiting a website? The results are as follows:

64% (or 101 people) answered “no,” meaning that a pop-up would not make them stop visiting a website. On the other side 36% (or 57 people) answered “yes,” meaning that a pop-up would make them stop visiting the website.

The results might seem encouraging to people that want to try out pop-ups, but are they really? Even if 64% of people wouldn’t mind your pop-ups, there is a whole bunch of them that would. I would think twice before using something that would annoy even 30% of my readers.

A few people left some comments over there that are worth highlighting:

David Airy:

I’d think twice about using a tool that annoyed 1% of my readers, let alone 30%. It’s been interesting to see how effective pop-ups are for sign-up rates, particularly on ProBlogger, but for me, I’ll leave them out.

The-How-To-Geek:

Pop-ups are forever tied to spam websites

The 90’s brought an almost comedic rise to the use of pop-up advertisements and subscription options.  This was an era where site owners weren’t concerned with aesthetics/complicating the lives of site visitors and carelessly put barriers in the way at every point.  It was an annoying and obnoxious time for the web, something you should not want your site reminiscent of.  Those of us who went through this era are not going to shake the idea that pop-ups are forever associated with spam.  And they are, we didn’t ask for them.  I’d be interested in what modern web developers think of interrupting users in this manner.

Consider search traffic

People searching Google want answers fast and Google gives us a plethora of good options during queries.  A pop-up can quickly scare off good traffic that may have spent more time on your site.  It’s pretty easy to hit the “back” button if a web page you found through search if the resulting page puts a barrier between you and content.  Even if you capture a small percentage of them up front, I would rather not risk scaring off even a single user from search channels.  You could be scaring off a reporter looking to reference your blog in a story, a Digg power user seeking fresh content or someone interested in your niche who would have emailed a post on your site to all their friends.  Not worth the risk.

There is no shortage of sites to visit

People have an insane amount of choice of where they get content.  And people generally choose the path of least resistance.  Don’t create extra resistance for site visitors.

Consider your bounce rate

I don’t have the statistics on this, but you potentially harm your bounce rate with pop-ups.  Especially with social media traffic, where users want content at a fast pace.  Also, some have argued that a higher bounce rate can hurt your Google search traffic.  You should never do anything which can potentially increase your bounce rate.

Put content, not subscription options first

If you present your site in this order:   subscribe >>> content you are doing it backwards.  You should go content>>>subscribe.  If your content is good, people will come back – even if they don’t subscribe during the first visit, they will on a return trip.  And when they do, you will have effectively built permission with them and forged a stronger relationship than using no-permission pop-up subscription forms before they’ve even had a chance to interact.  Check out Get Rich Slowly if you haven’t.  Simple design, no pop-ups and 67,000 subscribers.  All you have to do is put your subscription options in a clear place above the fold and people will see them.

Pop-ups are the equivalent to those old magazine subscription cards inside print magazines

Remember reading your favorite print magazine in the 80’s/90’s before the popularization of blogs and RSS feeds?  Remember how a subscription card would randomly fall out of it as you were enjoying the content?  What was your next step after this?  You had to throw the card out.  Just like now you have to close a pop-up prompt or window when a web publication pops up with a subscription window.  People know how to subscribe to a magazine, and users know they can subscribe to your blog via email/RSS if you’ve made it clear and above the fold on the page.  If your site is too complicated that this isn’t clear, it is time to clean things up, not add more clutter via pop-ups.  If anything, they actually make me want to subscribe less because they show that you’re more interested in collecting users than providing content.  If you were more interested in providing content, you’d put that first.

Conclusion

Browsing the web should be a fluid experience, one in which the user is in control and able to make navigation decisions on their own.  From my perspective, for content-based sites to put any barriers between visitors and content is a mistake.  Great content sells itself, and placing the actions you’d like users to take above the fold is a better choice for gaining subscribers than to throw pop-ups in their face while they are trying to access your content.  It makes a bad first impression, potentially scares off new site visitors, hurts your chances of being shared in social media, and is viewed negatively by a high number of users.