I seem to be seeing more and more of those pop-up windows that, within seconds of you first visiting a website, ask whether you immediately want to fill in your email address so they can send you spam.
Usually, it happens before I’ve even read the first sentence, let alone the first paragraph, so my reaction to “Would you like to receive updates from us?” is generally, “How the hell should I know? I’ve only seen your URL so far!”
So my curmudgeonly questions of the morning are:
- Does anyone, anywhere, ever fill these in? My basic respect for human intelligence would suggest not, but I suppose roughly half the world has below-average IQ.
- Who are the fools who, when planning a shiny new website, decide that immediately obscuring it with one of these, and simultaneously annoying every new visitor to your site, is a good idea?
- Are people who work in marketing actually the kind of people who would fill these in themselves? Or do they just think everyone else is an idiot? Either option would not reflect well on them, which leads me to an inevitable conclusion and final question.
- Why do so many of those people with below-average intelligence work in marketing?
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Ah – probably because marketing is about herd instinct, not intelligence, unfortunately. Say, 100k people visit a site, and just 1% of them fill it in (either genuinely interested, or dim people, or both), that’s a thousand leads. So, clickbait+popup > quality, in these cases. I just close the page, so their bounce rate increases, and they notice at what point folk back out, hopefully!