Increase Newsletter Subscribers With Popupally

If you’ve been following me for long, or had a Talk it Out Session before, then you’ve heard me speak about using your website as the hub of your online marketing efforts.

You’ve also probably heard me emphasize the importance of building a list, and using an online newsletter as a tool to build know, like and trust with your customers and prospective clients.

Online newsletters have become such a powerful marketing tool that companies will go to great lengths to get new subscribers.  Sometimes they go too far, and it’s often at expense of the user.  I’m sure I am not the only one whose been annoyed by a newsletter popup before.

The worst type of sign up box tries to guilt you into signing up by making you choose between something like “Sign up now” or “No thanks, I don’t want to grow my business.” I don’t know whether or not this is effective, but it sure is irritating.

But there are ways to gain newsletter subscribers without annoying users or being counterproductive.

In fact, the New Tricks website uses an “exit intent” popup so that when you are leaving the website, a popup asks you if you want to subscribe to the Just a Digital Minute. This way, the user is already finished reading the content, and is already planning on leaving the website.

The “Polite Popup”

Popupally was created by Nathalie Lussier as a “polite popup” so that instead of annoying and scaring off users, you get more subscribers.  The plugin was created for anyone to use, with or without a technical background.

Popupally comes in three different flavors.  The free plugin through the WordPresss repository offers limited options, while the pro version offers many more user options and templates to choose from.  The pro version also integrates with pretty much every newsletter software out there from Constant Contact to Mailchimp so that anyone who subscribes goes into the appropriate newsletter.

Not only is the backend of the plugin easy to navigate, but the user options are robust. From styling options, to choosing particular posts or pages, you can make any popup show up anywhere at anytime.

Key Popupally Features:

1. Exit Intent: When the user’s cursor starts to go towards leaving the website, Popupally will recognize the intention and display a friendly reminder that they can great more great content before they leave by signing up for the newsletter.

2. Scroll activation: When the reader gets to a certain part of the page or at the end of a post a popup will appear.  This is usually not annoying, and in fact, a reader maybe responsive to wanting to sign up for the newsletter if they enjoyed the content.

3. Click based: When the user clicks on something specific like a call to action.  Using Popupally, you can create a cool designed sign up box that will appear when a reader clicks your call to action. If you’re not a designer, these kind of boxes can be difficult to create, but Popupally makes it easy to create nice looking email sign up boxes.

4. Time delayed: After a certain amount of time the popup will be displayed.

5. Embedded: Instead of a popup, the newsletter signup box stays wherever you want it on a page or post.  As an example, you can see the green sign up bar on the Transform Leaders website.

6. Thank you page: Allows you to create a thank you page so that once someone signs up for your newsletter they do not see the popup again.