We all hate popups, right? Gideon actually went out of his way to tell me how much he dislikes the pop-up we added here at Haden Interactive. But I’ve been testing the Add This popup with a friendly invitation to sign up for our newsletter.
Because we may dislike popups, but they work. We often create popup adds for our clients, and an easy tool that lets businesses try the idea out without much investment of time or money seems like a useful thing.
We use Add This sharing buttons on most of the websites we build, and using their pop-ups is super easy. In fact, they have plenty of fancy tools, but using them requires you to make a little change at your WordPress website, as you’ll notice in the banner in the screenshot below.
Don’t feel intimidated. If you haven’t installed the Add This plugin, do so. Set up your Add This profile if you haven’t already done this. Now you’re ready. Just go to Settings> Add This in your dashboard side bar, choose Advanced settings, and scroll down the page to choose to handle your plugin from the Add This dashboard. You’ll instantly have access to all those options from the dashboard at AddThis.com
The pop up is under Targeting, and you can either use their default or click “Choose a new rule” to get more options:
Choose your goal, and you’ll be offered a super simple way to build your pop up.
Super simple isn’t always the best; we often have our graphic designers create snazzy pop ups with graphics and well-planned text. This one lets you add a few words, though, and change the text on the “Submit” button as well. If you want to see how a pop-up works for you without investing in graphics, this is a good way to get started. Once you make your changes, Add This automatically hooks everything up for you and collects the sign up emails, too. You have to upload the file to your email marketing list yourself, but there is no simpler way to add a popup.
These are the free things. If you upgrade, you have more options. It looks as though $13.00 a month ($10.00 with an annual commitment) lets you choose specific target audiences from a fairly broad list with Add This’s estimates of your current traffic.
You can also choose custom colors, a couple of different behaviors, background images (about a dozen options) and a variety of behaviors and other customizations, some of which you can see in the screenshot below..
You can get a completely custom graphic from a company like ours or a graphic designer and use it with a free pop-up plugin instead, so the price makes more sense if you plan to use a frequently-changing collection of offers targeted to different audiences — not a bad idea at all.
The $13.00 plan allows 5 different pop ups at a time. A $100.00 a month plan gives you unlimited pop-ups and limited branding. We’re not sure exactly what that means, but I’m guessing they remove the tiny Add This logo from your pop ups.
How effective is the simple popup? Last week we had six signups from the popup and just one from the handy newsletter subscription form which you can find on our home page and all our service pages. Because people may dislike popups, but not if they offer us something we actually want.
(Hey, if you haven’t signed up yet, you should. We have some exciting plans for our newsletter this year.)
If you’re able to get over your dislike of pop-ups long enough to try them out, we think either the free or the $13.00 plan makes perfect sense for a small business. You or your web team can do this without IT or graphic support and it’s easy to track the ROI.
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