Popup is good or bad? It is a controversial issue among online store owners and customers. Some people find popup as annoying spam. However, popups are applied through many big brand websites. So is it really worth implementing popups in your Magento stores?

Firstly, we should define again the popup in ecommerce area. There are multiple types of popups with such different purposes as gaining traffic, getting email address, etc. However, in the scale of this blog post, popup is referred to an opened box which displays content within the page and not a new window. This type of popup is popular in term of ecommerce area, and its purpose is to attract customer attention then increase conversion rate.

Someone say that popup is just like 2-edged sword, which is so sharp that it can increase conversion rate dramatically but it may urge customers to leave. In this blog post, I will show you the pros and cons of popup to have a deeper look. In the next blog post, best practices to have effective popups will be delivered to you.

Popups: Good or Bad?

1. Popup Pros:

As you know that with popups, you can attract customer attention to every significant event with higher conversion rate compared to normal publication. It can’t be denied that if you implement this tool smartly enough it could bring many benefits as follows:

• Visibility:The most obvious benefit of popups is the amplified visibility. Instead of simply appearing on website banner, now your promotion can be reached by an appealing popup when customers visit your site.
• Conversion Rate Increase: The fact shows that Darren Rowse of ProBlogger grew his newsletter signup rate by 900% after adding a popup. By attracting customer attention at unexpected time, you are gaining the higher chance of sales as well. For example, if image or CAT (Call-to-action) sentence on your website are not strong enough to persuade customers to click, a nice popup with clear CAT and even a small discount can push your customers to checkout page.
• Flexibility in content and targets: With many purposes, you can design different popups in terms of content and targeted pages to display popups. By this way, you will deliver suitable content to right targeted customers. For example, it can be a popup encourage customers to place order when they go to checkout page. Or it can be designed to prevent customers from leaving your site.

2. Popup Cons:

We have seen how beneficial popups can be. However, people often consider “popups” as annoying and have tendency to close them automatically. Therefore, if we intend to implement this type of marketing tools, we should consider the associated risks as follows:

• Customer loss: With instant popups annoying customers, you are making them leave you. Be careful with the content and frequency of popups display. Some popups even don’t show exit button, and this is such an uncomfortable compel. Customers won’t come back to suffer this pain again.  Research findings from Statistical Research shows that pop-up Internet advertisements are 50% more likely to be noticed than banner ads, but also that they are 100% more likely to be considered intrusive.
• Popup blockers: Popups make no sense in case customers never see advertising popups by using specialized software. Now, many browsers also provide popup blocker, which prevents the popups from appearing on the page.

You have seen the two sides of popups with substantial benefits along with associated risks. In our next blog post, we will help you to create effective pop-ups with best practices for 2015.

Check out our newly released popup extension – Magento Promobox extension. Especially, it is FREE DOWNLOAD now!