A Guide to Email Popups: Best Practices & How to Create

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your target audience. However, building an email list for your email marketing campaigns can be difficult. Email popups are among the most effective ways to generate more leads and increase your email subscriber list. In this guide, we will discuss what an email popup is, some best practices for using it and how you can create one to suit your specific needs.

Table of contents

• What is an email popup?

• 7 Email popup best practices

  • 1. Keep your email popup simple
  • 2. Offer something irresistible
  • 3. Time it right
  • 4. Write quality copies
  • 5. Test and optimize your popups
  • 6. Align your popup with the website
  • 7. Use the right type

• How do you create an email popup?

• Takeaways

What is an email popup?

An email popup is a window that appears on a website and contains a form requesting the visitor's email address. Email popups capture the attention of your website visitors and encourage them to sign up for your email list. In exchange, they offer your visitors incentives like offers, discount coupons, ebook downloads, etc.

These popups are typically triggered by user behaviour, such as visiting a specific page or spending a certain amount of time on the website. Email popups are the most popular and are also known by names like ‘newsletter popups’ and ‘email subscription popups’.

7 Email popup best practices

We’ve analysed numerous email popups and curated a list of best practices you must follow while creating your email popup.

1. Keep your email popup simple

Your email popup must be straightforward and easy to understand and use. This doesn’t mean that your popup shouldn’t be attractive. Also, avoid asking for too much information and focus on the most important parts.

2. Offer something irresistible

What you offer to your visitors must be irresistible and something of value that they might not get anywhere else. This can be a free resource, access to exclusive content or even a discount code.

3. Time it right

You must not bombard your visitors with popups the moment they land on your website. It spoils the credibility of your website. Give them time to familiarise themselves with and engage with the page.

4. Write quality copies

The copy of your popup must be concise, clear and compelling. The copy of your popup has the power to capture and retain the attention of your visitors. You must use it to lead them to the CTA.

5. Test and optimize your popups

You must always test your popups on various devices and browsers to ensure they don’t spoil the user experience. We’ve all been websites with a popup that you just can’t close because the close button is out of the frame. It’s important that you test and optimize your email popups to ensure proper rendering.

6. Align your popup with the website

Ensure that your email popup doesn’t look like it isn’t a part of your website. You can do this by ensuring the copy's format and style are similar. You can use complementary colours and fonts. This will make the popup look like an add-on to or an extension of your website.

7. Use the right type

There are other types of overlays that you can use apart from popups that might suit your needs best. Take a look at all the types:

• Standard email popup: It is the most common type of overlay and is basically a small window that pops up and hovers over the web page.

• Full-screen popup: This kind of popup covers the entire screen and the web page. It is only advisable to use them if you want to get the viewer's complete attention.

• Side message: These are small popups that appear on the side of the screen and deliver messages without disrupting the view of the visitor, as they usually do not cover a large section of the screen.

• Sticky bar: Sticky bars stick to the top or bottom of the screen and stay intact in their place even when the visitors scroll. They subtly present your message, do not force the visitor to act right away and do not obstruct the view of the visitor.

How do you create an email popup?

Creating an email popup for your website is easy using a popup builder service like Popupsmart, Claspo, or Poptin. They offer a host of templates to choose from for your popup.

Once you’ve chosen the template, you can even customize it to suit your specific needs. You can then define the other specifics like the trigger for the popup, where to transfer the data and you can then add the script to your website.

OptinMonster’s popup builder plugin also allows you to create popups on WordPress.

Takeaways

Email popups must be employed in the right way. You may have to strategically decide the kind of popup you will use and focus on the various aspects of it, like the appearance, the copy, CTA, etc. It helps you grab the visitors' attention and build a mailing list with multi-faceted benefits.

An email popup will help you build your email list to enhance your email campaigns and brand awareness. We hope that our guide also gives you an idea of how you can create one for your website. You must also remember that creating and employing an email popup is just the beginning of your marketing efforts.