WordPress popup plugins are diverse. Choosing the right plugin depends on what features are important to you. There are some basic features that I think all popup plugins should have, and then there are unique features that serve very specific needs. Based on this, I have two categories of features: essential and supplementary.
Essential features
Integration with 3rd party email marketing service providers
Most website owners use popups to collect email addresses — not simply show announcements and videos. That’s why integration with email marketing service providers, such as GetResponse and AWeber is important. Some plugins integrate with these services very well.
The difference between good and bad integration is this: the good plugin will recognize when the submit button is clicked and it will close the popup window. The good plugin will only ask you to paste the HTML code from your provider and it will do the rest. A bad plugin doesn’t know when the submit button is clicked, so the popup remains open. Or it will redirect to the Thank You page within the tiny popup, which is undesirable.
Display rules
Without reliable display rules, the popup plugin will bombard your readers at every single page load — ouch!
Do you think it is a good idea to show an instant popup to a visitor who is landing on your website for the very first time? It’s not. The visitor has no idea who you are and whether to trust you. It’s important that your popup plugin gives you options like:
- only show the popup after a certain number of page views to give the user time to browse your site before giving you their email
- when a user clicks the close button don’t show the popup until a certain time has passed, like 7 days
Supported types of popups
This feature is related to the one above. In addition to the standard popup, the two most important types of popups that plugins should support are: delayed popups and exit popups.
Delayed popups wait a certain number of seconds before they pop. This delay gives the user some time to review your free content and determine whether it is valuable and worthy of their email.
Exit popups can help you retain visitors that were about to leave your website forever. They work in a smart way. When the plugin detects that the user’s mouse is approaching the browsers back button or window close button, it will show the popup to get the user’s attention back.
Exclude posts and pages
This feature is also related to improving user experience on your site. If you think about the objective of your popup, you may find that you don’t want to display it on every single page of your website. A good popup plugin will allow you to exclude WordPress posts and pages based on categories, or it may give you the option to only display the popup on the homepage.
Flexibility of popup content
You don’t want your plugin to restrict what you can show in the popup. You should be able to embed anything you want: opt-in forms, videos, images, JavaScript, Flash, whatever. Make sure your plugin of choice supports the content format that you love.
Stylability, effects, and built-in templates
With most (or even all) popup plugins, you can edit the HTML and CSS to style the appearance of your popup, but not everyone knows HTML and CSS. It is important that the plugin provides user friendly options for changing and customizing the appearance of the popup.
You may also want your popup to appear with some fancy visual effects, like fade in and out, slide in and out, etc. Some plugins do have such features.
Most importantly, does the plugin ship with a variety of beautiful templates (like themes) that totally change the appearance of your popup? If you’re not a graphic designer and still want beautiful popups, make sure your plugin has this feature.
Live preview
Getting your popup styles, position, and content right requires tweaking and adjustment. It is a hassle to have to reload your pages every time you want to preview a small adjustment you made. In this case, the live preview feature that some popup plugins have can help.
Supplementary features
I covered all the essential features above, but some plugins have very unique features that a subset of marketers may find crucial. Here are these features:
Split testing
Some marketers love to test everything–and they have a strong case for wanting this. But for most people, relying on intuition maybe more feasible. Anyway, some popup plugins allow you to test various popup content to see which offer converts best.
Email address and name autoload
When someone leaves a comment on your WordPress site, their email and name are stored in a cookie that can be read by your domain. Some popup plugins exploit this by retrieving the information from the cookie and prefilling the name and email fields for the user (only if the cookie exists, of course).
Display opt-in forms and content in places other than the popup
Some plugins go beyond popups. They let you display your opt-in form and content in a sidebar widget, a slide-up footer bar, or even in the post content using a shortcode.
Price, license, and refund policy
Popup plugins are most popular in the Internet marketing niche because they improve the opt-in rate for mailing lists significantly. And bigger mailing list = more cash. That’s why, most popup plugins are not free. So, if you’re going to pay for your popup plugin, make sure you get enough value for your investment. Make sure that the license doesn’t restrict where you can install your software, and that if it doesn’t work for you, you can get your money back.
