How I made Washington Post’s pop-up 1000% more clickable.



After a few seconds, a subscription box appeared, and I realized how the Post was leaving tons of money on the table.There’s one major mistake The Post makes. The “Subscribe” button leads to a paid subscription to the digital newspaper. The conversion rate for a paid subscription (newspaper, newsletter, etc.) is just a fraction of what it is for a free newsletter.I’m guessing the Post has a lot of SEO power, bringing tons of readers from Google. And when they’ve read the article they came for, they’ll leave and most certainly never come back. Asking for their email — not credit card info — will convert many more, and now they have the opportunity to keep talking to them until they are ready to go paid.The only words talking about some actual value are the first two, “Stay informed.” But it’s a pseudo-buzzword. At first glance, it seems to describe value, but it doesn’t really paint a picture in the head of the reader of how their life will change for the better. The main title is what will stop someone from scrolling.The more niche and defined your audience is, the more powerful your offer will become. The general promise to help them “make more money” is not nearly as powerful as “earn $1000/month from your marketing newsletter”. The latter will target just a fraction as many as the first, more generic one. But everyone in that specific niche will be able to imagine what it would feel like to have an extra thousand bucks every month. For the Washington Post, the audience is extremely broad; there’s no way around it. But you can still find common denominators, something most of their readers want.