These 2 Ridiculously Simple Tactics Will Boost Your Conversion Rates by Next Tuesday, Guaranteed

Author: Neil Patel / Source: Quick Sprout If there’s one thing I hear all the time, it’s this: “Neil, I just want to get more conversions

Author: Neil Patel / Source: Quick Sprout

If there’s one thing I hear all the time, it’s this:

“Neil, I just want to get more conversions from my website.”

That’s it. That’s the big one.

I get it. Conversion rates are notoriously low.

By vertical. Low.

By channel. Low.

By device. Low.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m talking with a group of startup entrepreneurs in San Francisco, a meetup of marketers in Sao Paulo, or a team of e-commerce geeks in Seattle, everyone wants more conversions.

Heck, I want more conversions too!

Are there some simple ways to turn up the conversion juice and make more money from your blog, e-commerce site, startup, or landing page?

Yep, there are.

And I’m about to show them to you.

First off, though, why did I write this article? For whom?

After all, I write a ton about CRO (conversion rate optimization). Why another article?

Because tactics. Simple, practical, easy tactics.

Most people I talk with are just looking for a few plug-and-play tactics—things they can do on an average Tuesday afternoon to get more conversions and make more money.

These are two that I recommend.

“What?! Only two?”

Yes. The reason I’ve given you only two is because I don’t want you to be distracted by stuff that doesn’t work!

These two CTA-boosting techniques will work. And if you implement them this Tuesday, I guarantee you’ll have more conversions the following Tuesday.

Use popups

It’s time to open the proverbial can of worms.

Yes. It’s time to talk about popups.

When you visit Teachable.com, you’ll see this:

And after five seconds, you’ll see this:

What just happened?

A timed popup.

Popups are synonymous with pull-your-hair-out levels of frustration. It’s accepted as absolute truth that popups are bad.

But are popups bad?

According to some people, yes.

Jakob Nielsen surveyed users on their responses to popups: 95% of them rated the experience of “pop-ups in front of your window” as negative.

That survey of 605 respondents was conducted in 2004.

In Internet epochs, 2004 is the equivalent of the paleolithic era.

And back in 2004, popups were pretty bad.

I mean, look at this. Really?

But today, popups have matured into an art form: they are helpful, compelling, useful, and valuable.

The real truth? Popups are not bad. And if you want to increase conversions on your long-form content, I strongly suggest you use popups.

Derek Halpern says it like this,

If you don’t use popups, you’re an idiot.

I try not to call people idiots, but I do agree with Derek’s point: you should use popups.

Popups are a useful, powerful, in-your-face technique that can skyrocket your conversions on long-form content.

On his blog, Derek himself uses this popup on the article discussing popups:

Think about it like this. Users who don’t like popups may not be your ideal customer anyway.

Never thought about it like that, did you?

If you lose a reader for disliking your popup, you have not lost a customer. You’ve just lost a visitor. And that’s okay. In fact, it might be a good thing.

I will always counsel you to make website improvements that enhance the user experience. Some may argue that a popup is detrimental to the user experience.

We need some balance between the perceived tension of UX and marketing goals.

To help achieve this balance, take a look at a handful of representative statistics:

Using the List Builder popup, Sumo Me collected 23,645,948 email addresses in 24 months.
One marketer instantly doubled his conversion rates by using an exit overlay popup.
Derek Gehl reports a conversion boost of 162% after adding a popup to his website.
A recipe blog experienced a 10x boost in conversions after adding a popup.

Most online marketers I know would love to see a bar graph like this for list growth: