How long to wait before showing a pop-up to your website visitors
Deciding how long to wait before showing a pop-up to your website visitors is actually more important than you may think. The reason it’s important is that you need to strike a balance between allowing your visitors to see what you offer, but catch them before they leave. Too soon and you’ll annoy them, too late and they’re gone.
You wouldn’t be too impressed if you walked into a high street store and someone immediately leapt out and demanded your email address in return for a discount. In high street stores you may be asked for an email address at the checkout (think Mountain Warehouse, or Holland and Barrett), or you’ll see discount offers as you browse products. No one wants to be jumped on as soon as they put one foot inside a store. The same applies online.
Avoid showing a pop-up as soon as someone arrives on your site
So, the first rule is to avoid displaying a pop-up such as, “Sign up to our newsletter for 10% off”, the second someone lands on your site. That’s just annoying and it’s unlikely users will sign up to a newsletter before they’ve actually viewed your site and had the chance to decide whether they’re interested in your products/services. Lots of ecommerce sites show their pop-ups too soon, potentially blowing their opportunity to woo visitors with their offers. The thinking behind showing a pop-up right away is obvious, “I need to show them the 10% off pop-up right away, before they go elsewhere!”. However, it doesn’t quite work like that.
Give visitors chance to check out your site
Give people the chance to check out who you are, what you’re all about and what you offer. Typically (I say typically, because there are always edge cases where the norm isn’t quite right), you should display the pop-up when people have accessed a certain number of pages, scrolled for a certain amount, or been on your site a certain amount of time. But, how long should you wait?
So, how long should you wait before showing a pop-up?
A bit less than the average time someone spends on your homepage
One way of potentially taking out the guesswork is to check out your analytics and look at the average time a visitor spends on a page. You can then show the pop-up slightly sooner than that – try anything between about 50-70%. You could start with 60%. So, if your average visitor stays on your homepage for 15 seconds, set your pop-up to appear after 60% x 15 seconds, i.e. after 9 seconds. Leave that for a while, then try setting it to appear after 50%, then 70%. See what yields the best results.
After 5-10 seconds
If you want to improve your signups with a simple, no analytics approach, try setting the pop-up to appear after about 5-10 seconds, and again, have a play with the timing to see what works for your business. For most websites, if someone leaves before 5 seconds has passed they are highly unlikely to become your customer irrespective of you offering them a discount to sign up to your newsletter. In fact, if they leave so soon, your newsletter is the probably last thing on earth they’d be interested in. 5-10 seconds should give them time to suss you out and show interest in your offering. Note that for some businesses, the ideal timing may be much more than 10 seconds.
Related: Are you an artist, creative, maker, artisan? If so, check out our Website advice for artists article for some useful tips. Also, if you need some business help, drop me a line. Here are 15 problems I can solve for your business.
Optimising how long to wait before showing a pop-up to your website visitors may take a bit of trial and error, but by having a play with the timing you should achieve better results than simply shoving the pop-up in front of the user as soon as they arrive on your site.
