6.4 billion and counting. Any guesses? These are the number of smartphone users worldwide. Nearly half of the online traffic comes from mobile devices. Catching the point here?
Businesses that invest in delivering a delightful mobile browsing experience are the ones that witness a significant rise in conversions and sales. A mobile popup is part of that experience.
Let’s say you are browsing a website to buy some flowers, and suddenly you get hit with a popup on your screen, asking you to take part in a survey or subscribe to a newsletter. Well, you are definitely uninterested in doing any of that and you can’t find a way to close the popup.
This is one of the many complaints from mobile users. If your popup disrupts the reading or browsing experience, it might lead to high bounce rates and lower conversions. On the contrary, popups are pretty excellent when it comes to increasing your leads and conversions.
The catch here is simple. You need to effectively strategize your mobile popup marketing strategy and follow the best practices.
What is a Mobile Popup
A mobile popup is simply an overlay/interface that takes over a certain part of the users’ screen when they are browsing a website. While many elements can trigger popups on desktops and laptops, that’s not the case with mobile phones. So, how do mobile pop ups work?
A mobile popup is often triggered using Javascript. When the visitor is trying to click the back button or is scrolling through your web pages or might have spent some time on your website, you can display them a popup. An ideal-sized popup should fit in the mobile browser/screen of the visitors’ mobile device.
If there are issues with your mobile phone pop ups like their timing, display placement, or anything else, check out why you need to optimize your popups right away!
Why Optimize Mobile Popups
People are glued to their mobile phones all the time. As we earlier mentioned, more than half of the web traffic comes from mobile devices. So, why would anyone want to miss out on this opportunity?
That’s the number one reason why marketers are focused on delivering an exceptional mobile experience for their visitors and shoppers. Let’s see another important reason to optimize mobile popups.
In 2017, Google updated its mobile algorithm. After the update, web pages with intrusive mobile interstitials may not rank as high on the search engine. In simple terms, anything on your website that makes content less accessible to users might result in a penalty. So, if your popup covers the entire screen as soon as the visitors land on your web page, that’s a problem.
Also, while browsing, the popups should not interfere with the user experience, and there should be enough space in the background to close the popup window. These factors can contribute to poor rankings and other penalties.
Now, getting to mobile popups optimization! It is super easy, and there’s literally no reason for you to ignore it. There’s a lot of potential revenue on the table from mobile users, and optimizing their experience should be a top priority.
Let’s get to the 11 proven mobile popups best practices to ensure quick business growth.
11 Mobile Popup Best Practices
The following tips and best practices will help you create high-converting mobile popups to grow your business.
#1 – Choose a Compliant Design
The Google policies might have got you all worried. Firstly, these rules and penalties on search ranking apply only to mobile devices. So, you are free to target your desktop visitors with different popup designs. Next, for mobile devices, you need to choose a compliant design that is non-intrusive and doesn’t affect the user experience.
Go with a popup design that covers only a certain part of the mobile screen. These include short popups, nanobars, alert bars, etc. If your popup covers around 40-50% of the page and your background content is still easily accessible, then it’s a good mobile popup design. Just remember to scale the dimensions of your overlays to fit a phone.
#2 – Create an Eye-catching Teaser
If you don’t want to risk any penalties and have decided to go with bars or slide-ins, then you need to work on your teaser copy. A teaser is basically a bar that will trigger the popup only when the visitor clicks on it. So, you need to design a compelling copy with limited content to grab visitors’ attention instantly.
Make sure to include the value of your offer like “Here’s 50$ off on your next purchase” or “Grab your free e-book now”, etc. You can also use questions such as “Ready to grab an exclusive deal?” or “Want to win tickets to Paris?”, etc. These are good headlines, and you can place these at the top or bottom of your landing page.
#3 – Write Short & Crisp Copy
A rule that goes for both mobile and desktop popups. You need to present your offer using a short, simple, and crisp content copy. Visitors don’t have all day to read big stories. Moreover, you get less space on mobile devices to deliver your offer. If the visitors are compelled to scroll the popup to get your message, it’s not good for conversions. So, you should be creative with your copy and content placement.
Pen down the most relevant information that you feel should be included in the copy. The three main elements to consider are – a catchy headline, an easy-to-understand offer, and a compelling CTA copy. Play with the font, size, color, alignment, and so on to match the content copy and popup with your brand’s style.
#4 – Use Minimum Visuals (Or Don’t Use)
If you have read our other articles like popup best practices to drive conversions, you know that we usually advise using images and videos in popups. Well, that’s not the case with mobile phones. As images consume a lot of space, that leaves very little room to insert your message, form fields, and CTA.
For desktop popups, images help in visualizing the offer to grab visitors’ attention. So, you will have to work with a creative background design using eye-catching font styles and colors to make your mobile popup equally appealing to the visitors. Keep in mind that your CTA plus headline should capture the attention rather than the background and design, or else the background might overshadow your offer.
#5 – Create a Crystal Clear Call to Action (CTA)
According to your offer and goal, make sure that your CTA aligns with that. It should be an obvious prompt and should guide the visitor to take action. If it is not clear and visitors feel confused about your offer, they’ll just close the popup.
We are not only talking about the CTA content but also the design. It should be outstanding. Use a button that is large enough to click, and make sure to use contrasting colors and fonts. While writing the CTA content, use action words such as Get, Submit, Sign-up, Grab, Complete, Use, Claim, View, Shop, Subscribe, Apply, and so on.
#6 – Include Minimum Input Fields
As businesses often try to convert their desktop popup designs into mobile popups, they keep the same number of fields. Well, it is not a best practice. Firstly, there is not much space to accommodate three or more fields. Secondly, most of the visitors like to keep things fast and won’t be filling long forms.
So, you should restrict the input fields in your mobile popups. Ask for the most relevant information that can get the job done. Mostly, you would want to capture email addresses or phone numbers along with the names of the visitors. So, limit the number of fields to one or two. If you want to include more than two fields, try using a multi-step popup. In the first step, you will be just giving the teaser of your offer. In the next popup windows, you will be using the space for multiple input fields.
#7 – Pick the Right Incentive
In the case of desktop, there are so many elements to track visitors’ movement to present them with the right popup. For mobile visitors, you can mainly play with the webpage they are on. The incentive should be relevant to the landing page. For example, you definitely won’t be showing a newsletter subscription popup on your product page.
Give your visitors a good reason to go through your popup. Here are some relevant and proven incentives for different web pages:
- For product pages: Discount coupons, countdown timer deals, or flash sales.
- For blog pages: Newsletter signup form, free guide, giveaway contest, or any other lead magnet.
- For other landing pages: Welcome mat with first-time discount, free shipping, or gifts.
- For checkout page: Exit offers, discount codes, personalized offers, or up-sell/cross-sell popups.
#8 – Accurately Segment Your Visitors
Image Source: Convince and Convert
Every mobile visitor has a unique preference. So, you should not display the same message to every visitor. Shoppers expect a personalized experience, and you don’t want to be running around displaying a new user welcome popup to your existing visitors. That is why smart segmentation is necessary.
There can be different categories of visitors such as first-time visitors, existing customers, shoppers who abandoned their cart, frequent buyers, visitors coming from your social media, location-specific visitors, and so on. Depending on the category the visitors fall in, you can create and display the most relevant mobile popups to them.
#9 – Smartly Set Trigger Rules
Timing is everything when it comes to displaying popups. Welcome popups are good for first-time visitors, but even these should wait for a few seconds. Using the trigger options, you can choose when to display popups.
Trigger rules are all about visitors’ behavior on your website. There are different triggers like how far they have scrolled, which pages they visited, which links they clicked, or if they are trying to switch tabs or exit your website. If you don’t want to annoy your visitors with normal, frequent popups, then you should use exit-intent overlays. Whenever the visitor shows exit intent, the popup gets triggered. So, based on your audience, you can smartly set the trigger rules.
#10 – Gamify Your Popups
The classic popups with the same old design template might be boring, especially if you run an eCommerce store. So, do something unique with your popups from time to time. There are certain popup templates like a spin to win popup, countdown timer popup, quiz popup, etc. to add fun to your forms.
By spicing up things, the chances of engagement also increase. Make sure that you do not shoot such popups right when the visitors enter your store. Once they start exploring your products, add fun and discount popups to their experience. Make sure to use an appealing color combination to make an impression at the first glance.
#11 – Constantly Test Your Popups
Popup marketing is all about making improvements by assessing the previous results. Using A/B testing, you can create different versions of mobile popups to check your conversions. Make changes to different elements, but one at a time. See what works the best for your audience.
Also, you need to test different pop ups on mobile devices of different sizes. It is helpful in ensuring a great user experience on all devices. You can use Google Analytics to check which mobile devices are mostly used by visitors. Figure out the devices, design popup campaigns, test different variations, and improve your conversion rates.
How Picreel Helps You Deliver a Delightful Mobile Popup Experience
To follow the best practices, you need the right tool to assist you in popup marketing ventures. And for mobile popups, you won’t find a more user-friendly popup builder than Picreel. It is the best solution that lets you delightfully create mobile pop up ads.
Picreel comes with a huge library of 100+ customizable popup templates and a lot of mobile pop up examples to get you started in no time. You can select the mobile device option as well to optimize your popups right from the beginning.
With a set of smart, advanced trigger and targeting options, you can run high-converting mobile popup campaigns from an intuitive dashboard. What’s more? You get real-time analytics and an in-built A/B testing engine to assess the performance of your overlays.
The captured leads are transferred to your Picreel account in real-time and with support for over 700 integrations, you can automatically send the leads to your favorite sales, CRM, and marketing software. Surely, a great companion for both desktop and mobile popups!
Let’s Skyrocket the Conversions!
Now that you know the best practices for mobile popup conversions and the right tool to get the job done, rapid business growth is not far away. Keep all of these points in mind and start targeting your mobile visitors with inch-perfect mobile popups.
Never avoid Google’s guidelines, or you might land in trouble, and always put your customers’ experience first. Once you find your winning mantra for getting maximum conversions from mobile traffic, keep on improving it by testing changes.
Let’s pop up the mobile conversions and sales!
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