A Cheap Trick … that Works

May 16th, 2008 Chris

I was going through tips from a recent session on web marketing and I came across one that made me cringe – the dreaded drop-in pop-up. Yep – that horrible thing that comes floating in front of content that you’re trying to read with some obnoxious request to sign up for a free newsletter, e-zine (puke – I hate that term), report, etc…

Having had all my conventional wisdom proven wrong about a million times in the last year, I decided to tried it. The problem is that, despite my qualms, it worked. It really worked. I threw it on every page with a one month “snooze button” (if dismissed with a no-thanks, it goes away site-wide for a month), and registrations for our newsletter more than doubled. It is the single most cost effective way that we’ve increased our database in the last year (and one of the easiest). You can see our implementation at www.EngageSelling.com.

Hold your nose and do it!

What did I use to implement the drop-in? Because I am the cheapest bastard on the face of the earth, I started going down the free scripts route. Of all the free scripts sites, I found www.dynamicdrive.com was the best with lots of robust and well documented examples.

The problem is that most of the free scripts didn’t have exactly the features I wanted. I wanted to be able to dismiss the drop-in from any page on the site and not have it return for a specific amount of time (or ever). After a fair bit of research I found Advanced DHTML Pop-Up. Had all the features, was easy to use and Joe provided awesome support. And it was cheap. Highly recommended.

C.

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