Increase Your Newsletter Subscriber Sign Up Rate With Pippity Pop Ups

Whether you like them or not, pop ups have proven time and time again that they are the most effective way of increasing sign ups to a newsletter. Today I would like to talk about a WordPress plugin that helps you increase your newsletter sign up rates.

Pippity is a popular pop up plugin that was designed by the same people who created the Headway framework. Some alternative subscriber plugins help you increase sign ups in a number of different ways however Pippity only uses pop ups. Thankfully, it does it really well.

Creating A Pop Up

Creating a pop up using Pippity is very straight forward. The first thing you need to do is choose your style. There are 8 beautifully designed themes to choose from. A preview of each design is shown when you hover over the design name. Some designs use images but you can use them with plain text if you wish.

In the next section you can customise the design you choose more. You can change the colour scheme of the design, the colour of the bullet points and the font. You can also change the Overlay Opacity percentage to change how much the background is faded when the pop up is shown.

Advanced users can add their own custom CSS in this section too, allowing much greater control over how the pop up appears.

The heading and text can be changed in the next section. Asterisk’s (*) create bullet points when inserted into the main text area. The name, email and submit button labels can all be modified too.

Pippity gives you a lot of control over how your pop up is displayed. You can set the time before the pop up appears to a visitor and the number of pages the visitor has to view before it shows up. You can also set the pop up to appear once they have scrolled to the end of an article. This should increase conversion rates as people will be more inclined to subscribe to your newsletter if they have read all of your article.

The pop up can be faded in and out too and you can set the number of days before the pop up is shown to that same visitor again. You can also only show the pop up on post pages or to those who aren’t logged in.

Last but not least you need to enter your newsletter HTML code. Pippity will do the rest. For example, I copied over my newsletter form code from MailChimp into the box and it did the rest for me.

I decided to use the Sharpe design for WP Mods. I didn’t want a pop up that took up the whole screen and I liked the simplicity

Sharpe Design

The great thing about Pippity is that you can split test different pop ups to see which performs the best. It’s very easy to do this as there is an option to clone one of your existing ads. This allows you to tweak your existing ad rather than starting from scratch. For example, I tried out 3 different designs but kept the same header and main text in all 3.

Concrete Design

If you find that a certain design is not performing as well. All you need to do is deactivate it.

Classy Design

The main panel gives you a summary of how all of your pop ups are performing. The number of impressions, conversions and conversion rate are shown. As you can see from my summary below, I decided to use the sharpe design exclusively as I wasn’t happy with the other designs I created.

Analytics

The analytics section is very useful for tracking the performance of your pop ups. Impressions, conversions and the average time spent on the pop up and page are shown.

In the screenshot above you can see that I made 20 conversions from 839 impressions. A conversion doesn’t mean that you have added someone to your list, it only means that someone completed the form. Of those 20 conversions around 7 clicked on the confirmation link that was sent to their email account. The other 13 people submitted their details using the pop up form but did not confirm their subscription. This is obviously not a criticism of Pippity as you are going to experience this problem with whatever method you use to increase your newsletter subscriber count.

I’d love to see future versions of Pippity connect to your newsletter provider (Aweber, MailChimp) in order to track the number of people who submitted their details via your pop up and how many of those confirmed their email. I’m sure if I track my stats over the next few weeks I will be able to see a pattern e.g. 50% of people who submit their details don’t confirm their email link. Once I know that I will be able to quickly check my conversion stats through the WordPress admin area and get a rough idea of how many people signed up within a given period.

Alternatives to Pippity

Last year I reviewed a few WordPress plugins that help you increase the number of newsletter subscribers you have such as Subscribers Magnet, Pop Up Domination and Email Buddy.

I also spent a lot of time recently testing WPSubscribers. It’s a great plugin but I found many features to be very buggy. Their support team suggested that this was being caused by another plugin though the same issue happened on a test blog with no plugins installed. It’s a shame as I am keen on installing a plugin that lets commenters subscribe to my newsletter.

So what is the best newsletter plugin? Well, I think it depends on how you want to promote your newsletter on your website. At the moment I would have to say Pippity is my favourite. It doesn’t have as many features as some of the other plugins I’ve tested but it’s easier to use, has better designs to choose from and tracks how each pop up is performing. If you are looking for a plugin that integrates your newsletter in multiple areas of your website then I would recommend something else but for me, Pippity is the best plugin for building your newsletter list through pop ups.

Overview

I’ve only been using Pippity a short period of time but I have been very happy with the results so far. Sign ups are two to three times higher than what they were before. This will allow me to reach a wide audience in a shorter space of time.

A personal license for Pippity retails for $49 and permits you to use the plugin on one website. The business license costs $87 and allows up to 5 websites whilst the developer license retails for $164 and allows you to use the plugin on an unlimited number of websites. All licenses come with 1 year of access to updates and support.

Thanks,
Kevin

Link: Pippity