Love them or hate them, some popups make do make you stop, take notice, and take action. While others, meh… move on. Nothing interesting. So what makes a popup not suck?

Quality Images

Most popovers aren’t image-centric. That probably has a lot to do with the purpose of the popover. Still, images can provide visual interest for your message and buy you some extra time to get your message through. Try a quality, topic-focused image for your background.

If you are announcing something like a sale – don’t stay with plain old text. Have a great looking image done. If you don’t have a designer, places like Canva are a great start.

Different Offers For Different Pages

Not everyone coming to your site enters the same way, or come with the same intentions and expectations. Someone who clicked through an ad to a piece of content will have much different expectations than another who clicked through a social media post. People visiting a free download page will again have different expectations than someone else who wants to read your blog to find our more about you.

It only makes sense to present different offers to these visitors. Yes, it does take a bit more time to figure out, but you’ll probably enjoy better conversions.

Go BIG

So many popovers you see are small. Perhaps we feel a small or moderately sized popover is less annoying. The truth is, if someone is going to be annoyed with a popover, it doesn’t much matter what size the popover is going to be. If you’re going to get in their face, go big and be seen.

Remember Visitors

Part of the big problem with popovers are those that never die. You close them and they come back every time you refresh, every time you visit. If it isn’t that, it’s popovers that keep offering you different things. Like pesky street hawkers. Hey. You want to buy a watch? No? How about a foot massager? You don’t like that? Maybe a set of knives.

Though these are becoming rarer, they really should be avoided. If someone says no to your popup once, leave them alone.

Use Sparingly or On Specific Pages Only

There is no rule that says a popover, when used, must be turned on for your entire website. Use them well on pages where it will make a real difference. Forget it on the rest. If your popover system or plugin can’t do that, get another one. Like Sticky Note Ads.

Change Your Offer

Similarly, just because you put up a popup doesn’t mean it should stay up forever. Popups that are always present can really annoy regular and semi-regular visitors because they’ve seen it before. After the first one or two times, what was a small inconvenience becomes a real annoyance.

What you can do instead, is to remove the offer for a time, and come back with something else later. Switch them out, rotate them. Build in a little breathing room between each rotation to reduce the annoyance factor, and keep your offers fresh.

Do you have other ideas and practices you use to make your popover suck less?