Pop-up Advertising: effective or annoying?

We have all experienced visiting a website to find a pop up screen either trying to sell us something or to get us to register with the website. But are these pop-ups an effective way of marketing or just plain annoying?

As with almost all types of marketing, it is not the medium that either produces a good or bad response it is how it is used. The viewers of your website are generally there because they have an interest in your practice or a service your practice is providing. They may have arrived at your site through an organic Google search or via some pay per click advertising you are doing on a search engine or Facebook. If they are greeted with a pop-up that enhances their experience, which gives them something they are looking for quickly or provides them with a benefit, then this pop-up can be highly effective. If however, the pop-up promotes a totally different subject matter to what the viewer is interested in, or is just a blatant advert, the chances are it will be turned off.

So, if pop-ups can annoy people why even consider using them at all? Well, when they are incorporated into your site properly they can provide astonishing results. If you have a blog or a regular eNewsletter, using a pop-up to promote these can easily double your subscription rate. Entrepreneur.com increased their on-line subscriptions sales by 162% by introducing a Pop-up.

The Pop-ups we find annoying are usually intrusive and interrupt our enjoyment of the website that we are visiting. For instance, let’s say you use a pop-up to promote your fantastically interesting monthly eNewsletter, but the Pop-up appears the moment someone visits your site. This is too early, they have not engaged with your site yet and they will certainly click out of the Pop-up and could even decide to leave your site. But, if the same viewer goes to your blog page and a Pop-up appears saying “Finding our articles interesting? Register to receive our monthly eNewsletter”, then you have a much greater chance of them registering and in turn you have another person in the community knowing about your practice and receiving regular information about the great service you provide.

You can expand this approach to the finance page and the emergency page of your site. If someone visits the finance page having a pop-up that says “We offer comprehensive treatment plans starting from just $59 a week – register for a free quote” or if someone is on the emergency page a Pop-up that says “In Pain? – we want to see you today – register here and we will call you straight away”. You can apply this type of logic to almost every aspect of your website.

Another common mistake web developers make when using pop-ups is to use technology that freezes the page when the Pop-up appears. This technology insists that the viewer reads the pop-up and either closes it or interacts with it – this is far too intrusive for a dental website. I would recommend that you use pop-ups that simply float over the text of your site, but still allow the viewer to navigate the site. The viewer then has three options, close the pop-up, interact with it if the message is appealing or simply navigate the site as they would normally. Giving the viewer these options reduces the chance of annoyance and if you have your marketing message correct, massively increasing your chance of interaction with this person.

It costs a lot of money these days to build traffic to a dental website, so converting more viewers to enquires with techniques like pop-ups is certainly worth considering.

If you need any advice on this topic, reach us on 02 9211 1477 or e-mail us on info@idm.com.au and we would be delighted to give you a deeper insight into highly effective on-line strategies.