NEWSFLASH: President Obama Is Now Using A Popup (And Squeeze Page) . . . And You Should Too

Hello, everyone, my name is Clay Collins and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Show. In today’s episode we’re going to be talking about President Obama’s presidential pop-up at WhiteHouse.gov. Yes it’s true, President Obama, the president of the United States of America is using a pop-up on WhiteHouse.gov to capture email addresses. We’re going to explore this. So last weekend, I went to Colorado. And as I was going there on my flight, I saw this, a pop-up, no less a pop-up meant to capture email addresses from people visiting WhiteHouse.gov, in fact, this is the very first thing that you see when you got to WhiteHouse.gov and it goes to confirm a fact that every single direct sales marketer on the Internet knows which that the email address is the most important asset when it comes to marketing online. Now, the pop-up is incredibly controversial, incredibly. But as we’ve seen in our own business and as others have seen, it is highly effective – we have a website called businessideas.net which currently gets about 1,000 opt-ins per week, that’s 52,000 email addresses added per year. And it’s remarkable. We do that because among other things we have a pop-up that captures email addresses. And a lot of people have both criticized and praised the use of pop-ups. And I’m here to tell you if President Obama at the White House can use a pop-up, then so can you. And I’m going to be talking in a second on how to properly use pop-up in your business. So back to today’s marketing lesson, as I said, pop-ups are extremely effective, in fact, as you can see here, this graph illustrates the use of pop-ups as recorded by my friend Mary Jaksch who runs A-ListBlogMarketing.com. And as you can see here, when she turned on the pop-up, opt-ins skyrocketed. When she turned it off, they decreased. When she turned it back on again, they skyrocketed; and when she turned it off, they decreased. So given that the data shows that this works and given that the White House is currently using this to build their email list, shouldn’t you? I’m here to argue that you should. And here are four tips for doing this correctly. Pop-up guideline number, graphics are absolutely key. The difference between a spammy-looking website often and a professional-looking website often has nothing to do with tactics that are used on the website. As you can see, spammy websites often have pop-ups but so does the White House. The difference is presentation and graphics and, of course, what you do after you can capture the email address. So if you want to do this and still remain professional and still be viewed as a professional, you absolutely must have a beautiful well-designed pop-up on your website. Point number two, when someone goes to your site, the pop-up should not appear immediately. Someone is going to your website to get some specific content, and when that pop-up comes up, immediately, it’s obstructing them from what they want to see. So I like to set the delay on my pop-up for about 30 seconds. At that point, folks have time to navigate around the website, see some different things, maybe begin reading an article and evaluate whether or not you have a helpful website; 30 seconds after they’ve been to your website, however, that’s when the pop-up appears. They’re much more likely to opt-in when you have a delay and they’re much more likely to be happier about their experience when you do it this way. Point number three, the pop-up should never appear more than once per visit. If someone comes to your website, a pop-up appears, and they either enter their email address and move on or they click to make the pop-up disappear, they should not see that pop-up again while they’re navigating around your website. Point number four is that you should make the pop-up easy to close. Folks shouldn’t have to search around for a long time to find out how to close your pop-up. That should happen easily and you should clearly indicate how to go about closing that pop-up. Anyway, if you’ve enjoyed today’s show, I’d appreciate it if you donate a tweet or a Facebook share. Leave a comment below and if you’d like to get more marketing goodness sent to your inbox, subscribe to our email list on the right-hand side of the page. Anyway, my name is Clay Collins and thank you so much for watching The Marketing Show. I’ll talk to you later.