A couple of weeks ago Darren Rowse posted an article where he shared a technique that increased his newsletter subscription rate by over 700{da0bf9cd17a63b06d0145198c6e4d1da153467364e5d59fe12aeae2db138af5a}, from an average of 40 news subscribers per day to 350!
He probably could not have foreseen the mass effect that the post would trigger!
After that post, in fact, dozens of bloggers started using pop-ups to promote their newsletters, from John Chow to Shoemoney and many smaller bloggers, too.
The trend is so noticeable that I often find those pop-ups coming up on random sites that I am visiting over the day.
So what happened to the “pop-ups are the ultimate evil” motto that we had going on around the Internet?
I think it is starting to get questioned (which is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you).
Basically Darren found out by testing that the increase in the conversion rate of his newsletter was huge, while the drawbacks of adding the pop-ups were not so big. A couple of people emailed him complaining about the intrusiveness, but that was pretty much it.
Of course we need to take into consideration the people that got annoyed with the pop-ups and quit the site to never come back again, without letting Darren know about it. But will this effect be eve noticeable on his traffic trends?
Pop-ups remain one of the most intrusive and annoying promotion forms, but are they capable of hurting your traffic tangibly if you provide quality content?
Here is a question for our poll: would one pop-up offering you a newsletter subscription be enough to make you stop visiting a website? Assume you would see the pop-up only once, and not on every visit at that site. (RSS and email subscribers might need to visit the site to see the poll)
