One thing I’m always curious about when trying new software is how the company is using the product itself.
It’s one thing to talk about a product, but it’s another thing entirely to showcase how your company uses it to achieve the results you promise in your marketing.
Today, I’m going to put Sleeknote’s money where its mouth is and share seven ways we’re using our own product to get more leads and sales.
1. Collect Emails from New Visitors
2. Lead Score Returning Subscribers
3. Offer a Preview of Our Book
4. Personalize on Money Pages
5. Showcase Our Product
6. Invite Bookings
7. Offer Help on Our Pricing
The first, most obvious page we’re using Sleeknote is on our blog. We’re using a few variations on the traditional email popup, so let’s take each in turn.
One of the most popular popups we have on our site is our multistep slide-in popup that we show to all new blog visitors. (I’ve zoomed in on my browser for clarity.)
We show desktop users a teaser to tease our offer—access to our marketing resource—and use the form’s second step to showcase testimonials from other subscribers.
We’ve also translated a variation of this campaign into Spanish as we get many visitors from Spanish-speaking countries reading our translated content.
We all know that more website visitors come from mobile than desktop. (Source.)
But does the same apply to conversion from a new visitor to an email subscriber?
We found from our research that indeed it does, with popups converting better on mobile (5.8 percent) than they do on desktop (3.11 percent).
For that reason, we’re also collecting emails on mobile, but with a slight alteration to our desktop version.
After running several a/b tests, we found that conversions were higher after removing the teaser and showing the final form from the start.
(Ignore the color; my browser is in dark mode.)
In each article, we have a callout box that invites readers to enter their email in exchange for a lead magnet.
Our main lead magnet is access to all our marketing resources, but we vary the copy depending on the post’s category.
For instance, for a broad post, such as our post on satisfaction guarantees, the copy reads:
But for a more specific post under, say, our email marketing category, we list our best resources related to the post’s category:
When a reader clicks the anchor text, a click-activated popup shows, asking them for their email.
We’re currently testing an exit-intent popup on our blog for desktop users—and the results have been interesting.
When we tested a popup with an image versus a GIF, previewing our marketing resource… the latter outperformed the former by 46.05 percent.
In the last 90 days, these four list building tactics combined have boosted our blog’s conversion rate from organic visitor to email subscriber by 46.28 percent.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with website popups, to collect emails or otherwise, is to treat new visitors and returning subscribers alike.
Asking a returning subscriber for their email address when they’re already on your list does more than hurt the user experience—it misses a chance to move subscribers further down the funnel.
Think about it. A subscriber returns to your site for a reason. They like, know, and trust your brand more than a new visitor. Why not nurture that relationship further?
With that in mind, we have a separate campaign for emails subscribers returning to our site.
In fact, if you’re a returning subscriber coming from an email promoting this post, you should see this campaign (depending on when and where you’re reading the post).
But if you’re viewing a non-blog page, you will see this popup promoting a free webinar (again, depending on when and where you’re reading this post).
If a returning subscriber registers for the webinar, we pass the lead to an Outbound salesperson to follow up with later. We know from experience that if a person registers for a lead generation webinar, chances are they’re a good fit for our product and are willing to start a free trial of our product.
Our example is one of the countless ways you can think about returning subscribers. For instance, if you’re in e-commerce, you could invite new visitors to join a giveaway and “activate” returning subscribers with a time-sensitive discount.
Create separate campaigns and offers for new visitors and returning subscribers, and you will move users down the funnel with much greater ease.
In 2019, we published our first book called Built to Scale. But given the cost (€97), we knew some visitors would want to preview the book’s content first.
To help ease prospective buyers, we created a campaign that offered a free chapter—without having to enter their email. All the visitor had to do was click the campaign’s CTA, and the preview opened in a new tab.
We liked this popup so much that we duplicated it and customized it for our most recent book, Subscribe!
Of course, not everyone bought, but offering a preview helped visitors overcome buying objections without the need to leave the product page.
How can you copy what we’re doing? If you’re in e-commerce, you could offer a size guide. Or, if you’re in B2B, you could invite returning subscribers who visit your pricing page or book a demo of your product.
Whether you’re in B2B or e-commerce, don’t be afraid to offer visitors an opt-in free resource to help them make a buying decision.
Transactional, or “money” pages, are pages on your website that are made with purchase intent in mind. In e-commerce, the obvious examples are product and checkout pages.
In B2B, by contrast, the less obvious examples are pricing and demo pages. At Sleeknote, we have several pages that can influence a free trial, and as such, use popups to nudge potential users.
To personalize our campaigns (not to mention showcase what’s possible with Sleeknote), we also integrate with Clearbit so that the popup’s copy includes the visitor’s company (if applicable).
For example, on our homepage, we have a campaign asking visitors to start a free trial. If you look at the teaser, you will notice that the copy says, “Sleeknote + Sleeknote.”
The reason that it says Sleeknote twice is because Clearbit recognizes that I work for Sleeknote. All we need to do is add a merge tag in our Campaign Builder, and Clearbit will do the rest.
However, if you work for a business that Clearbit recognizes, the copy will populate with your company’s name. (You can test it now for yourself here.)
We also use our geo-targeting feature to show a translated version of this popup to Danish visitors, as a fair percentage of our customers come from Denmark.
You might notice here that many of our campaigns focus on driving free trials. But in our experience, it doesn’t make sense to invite mobile users to start a free trial. Why? Because our software is best suited for desktop users. (I don’t care how responsive your favorite software is—the mobile version almost always fails in comparison.)
With mobile users in mind, we ask mobile visitors to book a demo rather than start a free trial.
Have a conversion goal in mind, by all means, but consider how achievable that goal is on devices other than desktop. You might be leaving conversions on the table.
I mentioned before that the most obvious page we use Sleeknote is on our blog to collect emails. But there’s so much more to Sleeknote than collecting email addresses.
Given that most of our features are suited for e-commerce, there are more Sleeknote examples than we use ourselves. So, if we couldn’t showcase them all on our site, we did the next best thing…
We made an e-commerce website.
SleeknoteShop is more than a mock site to showcase our favorite use cases—it’s also a source of inspiration for our blog.
Say I’m writing an article about how to use a popup to promote new arrivals to returning subscribers, a super-specific use case. I wouldn’t want to spend time finding an example like that, so instead, I can show a real example on our Sleeknoteshop.
All I need to do is check our Notion page with all our current use cases, click the link to the page, and take a screenshot. I can even preview the popup with our new preview feature. (To see an example, click here.)
You don’t have to go to the lengths we have to promote your product, but having additional resources, like a website in our case, can often showcase your offer in ways that go beyond your brand.
As I mentioned above, if a new visitor is on mobile, we invite them to book a demo as it’s better for the user experience. No truer is this than on our popup examples page.
Here, anyone who is interested in Sleeknote can click one of our 120+ pre-made templates and have it live on their website within minutes, collecting leads and driving sales.
Even though this page is geared towards free trial signups, we added a second CTA, inviting users to contact one of our experts to get a tour of Sleeknote.
The common marketing consensus is not to have too many CTAs. And when focusing on one channel, such as email, it makes perfect sense. You don’t want to overwhelm readers with multiple choices.
But in our experience, there’s no harm in adding a second CTA if the first isn’t suitable for other devices such as mobile. Or, if the first CTA is too big of a request or prospects need more nurturing.
This leads me to the seventh way we use Sleeknote on our site.
Buying online is a fairly straightforward process. Browse a product page or two, add items of interest to your cart, customize as needed, and you’re good to go.
Buying software, by contrast, can be more complex.
With many companies offering multiple features and multiple plans, it’s sometimes hard to know which plan is right for you, especially if the pricing page’s copy isn’t clear or you want something that isn’t mentioned on the page.
This is something we gave considerable thought to when revamping our pricing page recently.
While we put a lot of time and effort into our copy, explaining each plan as carefully as possible, invariably, prospects will have further questions, which is more than understandable, if not expected.
To help prospective buyers as much as possible, we have a campaign inviting them to contact Mogens, our CEO, if they have any further questions.
The jury’s out on whether the campaign will perform. But the promise that Mogens will get back to them with an answer personally is a nice added personal touch and something we haven’t seen other providers offer.
We’ve written before about how to use Sleeknote and how Sleeknote works, but never about how we use Sleeknote at Sleeknote.
I’ve shared seven ways we use our own product in this post, but there’s so much more to Sleeknote than the examples I’ve mentioned here.
If you’re curious about our product, try Sleeknote for seven days, and one of our experts will make a free popup for you, at no obligation to you.
You won’t be disappointed.
Imagine, for a moment, walking into your favorite high-street store. You’re looking around, minding your own business, when a persistent sales assistant begins following you around, suggesting several relevant—yet expensive—items before you even get a chance to finish browsing.
Would you go back to that store, let alone buy any of those recommended products?
Probably not. And you’re not alone. Your website visitors feel the same way.
Many online stores add recommendations to their product pages, hoping to increase sales. But in reality, most product recommendations annoy customers because they target the wrong shoppers at the wrong time.
It’s crucial to know when and how to recommend products. If you get it wrong, visitors will abandon your site, or worse, move to a competitor. But if you get it right, and you master the above, you’ll increase your average order value on autopilot.
What’s better, and what I’m going to suggest here, in this post, is recommending the right products to the right person at the right time using website popups.
Doing so will help you:
To help you with that, I’ve created seven eye-catching popup examples you can use on your site and divided them into categories, so you can easily follow along at home.
Have you ever been to a bookstore and found yourself gravitating toward the bestsellers section? Or stumbled on an online store and sorted a category page based on “most popular”?
If you have, you’re not alone.
Based on the principle of social proof, when a product is selling well, we believe that it’s for a good reason. If a certain item made it to the most popular list, we assume other people know something we don’t.
By leveraging this principle, you can put your bestsellers on display and draw your visitors’ attention to them, using a timely product recommendation popup.
With it, you can convert both first-time and returning visitors. All you need to do is to tweak your copy and call-to-action (CTA) to optimize them for users at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
For new visitors, you can frame your campaign copy around usefulness and guide them to better buying decisions:
Want more popup examples? Get immediate access to 100+ proven and tested popup templates (for free).
Browse Our Popup Gallery.
To make your popup less intrusive and give visitors space to look around, you can use a timed trigger to ensure that your campaign shows after, say, seven seconds.
For returning visitors, update your copy with a welcome message and your CTA with a more sales-driven one:
If you’re a Sleeknote Insider, it takes seconds to set your campaign to show ONLY to return visitors.
If you don’t want to manually update your product names, prices, images, and links week after week, you can use dynamic recommendations and increase your revenue on autopilot.
While promoting bestsellers to returning visitors works just fine, you can increase conversions and personalize your campaigns further with exclusive recommendations.
After all, those prospects are further down your sales funnel, and are, therefore, more likely to convert. By using exclusivity as a persuasion tool, you can make prospects feel like insiders.
Whether you want to target returning visitors, logged-in customers, or loyalty club members, you can easily show them the right messages by setting up the right conditions.
Curated product recommendations can take many forms—editor’s picks, staff favorites, expert recommendations, and so on. It’s a different type of social proof that adds authority to your brand and proves your expertise in your field.
Take a look at this popup example you can use to recommend exclusive products to return visitors:
Handpicked recommendations take more time, that’s a given. But it creates a sense of belonging and increases the likelihood of converting subscribers into buyers, and one-time purchases into repeat customers.
It takes a few clicks to set up the right conditions for the right visitors:
Nobody wants to miss out on a good opportunity, and your visitors are no exception.
When an item is low-in-stock or available for a limited time only, consumers tend to assign greater value to the product. (Think about H&M’s designer collections or Starbucks’ pumpkin spice madness.)
Similarly, when a lot of people are paying close attention to a product, we tend to act quick and grab it before it’s gone.
Combining this principle of scarcity with social proof, you can promote the products that other visitors are currently viewing and add a virtual stamp of approval to them. This way, you can imply that those products may sell out any minute, without sounding too salesy.
Although teasing the possibility of selling out is an all-year-round strategy, it fits perfectly with the holiday season.
Since shopping for gifts is already a time-sensitive activity, you can convert more holiday shoppers, using a gentle nudge with your popups.
Take a look at this campaign example I made:
With a similar campaign, you can guide your visitors to better buying decisions to nudge them to make a purchase while stocks last (and before it’s too late.)
Following a similar logic, limited-time offers help e-tailers increase their sales by focusing on the scarcity of time.
However, the offer itself isn’t always enough to convert prospects into customers. You also need to guide your website visitors in the right direction so they can find the right products to cash in on.
If you’re offering daily deals or time-sensitive coupons, you need to keep your product recommendations fresh and relevant.
The best way to achieve this is to show the bestselling products of the day in your popups and add an incentive to them.
Check out this example:
Whether you’re offering a discount code, a mystery gift, or free shipping for a limited time, support it with your latest bestsellers to keep your recommendations up-to-date.
Add a countdown timer to your campaign and drive a sense of urgency without overwhelming your visitors with too many options.
Acquiring new customers is tough.
Chances are, you’re spending valuable time and resources to get new customers through the door each month.
That’s why, once you get a prospect to land your site and move them through your checkout process, you need to make the most of them.
Meaning, you need to use the power of cross-selling to increase your visitors’ average order value.
Although cross-selling during checkout is an effective revenue-booster, it performs better if you give visitors a compelling reason to spend more.
Nine out of ten consumers’ favorite shopping incentive, free shipping is one of the most attractive benefits you can offer to your customers. However, if you can’t afford to offer free shipping on every order, you can incentivize only high-value orders.
With a product recommendation popup that shows to the right users during checkout, you can nudge visitors to spend more and suggest relevant products to add to their cart.
Here’s how your popup might look like:
Using the Clerk element in our editor and the SiteData condition, you can insert recently bought products into your campaigns and show them to visitors below the required basket value for free shipping.
If you work in e-commerce, cart abandonment is likely one of your biggest nightmares.
Maybe you’re already using website popups, email campaigns, and even some advanced strategies to reduce cart abandonment.
While all the above work fine to convert on-the-fence prospects, some visitors still leave their baskets simply because they haven’t exactly found what they’ve been looking for.
Luckily, you can grab those visitors’ attention with a timely popup and recommend them relevant products based on the product category they’re interested in.
Take a look at how Apuls helps their visitors find the right products:
When you visit one of their category pages, Apuls, first, welcomes you with a teaser that reads, “Have you considered these exercise bikes?”
After spending around 15 seconds on the page (or if you click the teaser), they show you a slide-in campaign with three different products in that category:
In it, the company recommends three products at different price levels. What’s more, Apuls directly speaks to the buyer by describing these products as “high quality for a good price,” “for those who just get started,” and “for those who want the best.”
It’s an effective tactic for guiding your visitors in the right direction and, as a byproduct, reducing cart abandonment.
Product recommendation popups like the above perform well because:
If you want to show your campaign only on a specific category page and its subpages, use the “URL Matches” targeting option:
It’s a common practice to make product recommendations on product pages, category pages, or homepages.
But there are other pages on your site that are like a goldmine waiting to be tapped. Not many online stores take advantage of these underused opportunities, and 404 pages are one of them.
By adding product recommendation popups to your error pages, you can ease your visitors’ frustration and help them find their way back.
It’s an excellent opportunity to engage your otherwise-lost visitors (and it’s super easy to apply to your site.)
Take a look at this popup example I created for my imaginary 404 pages:
It doesn’t need to get more complicated than this.
Another place you can turn frustrated users into happy customers is sold-out product pages. With a product recommendation popup, you can manage the disappointment and guide visitors in the right direction:
Whether you want to promote your bestselling products or highlight social proof with recently bought items, product recommendation popups like the above will improve the conversion rate of your underused pages.
With our HTML Condition, you can show or hide your campaigns based on the HTML content of your pages. For example, you can show your out-of-stock popup only on sold-out product pages.
Cross-selling is a double-edged sword. It might help increase your average order value, but it might also make you sound salesy.
If you want to increase your revenue without being too promotional (and without overwhelming your visitors with too many product options,) product recommendation popups are perfect for you.
When most marketers think about popups, they think about, well, popups. They think about the form, with a headline, body copy, an input field, and a call-to-action.
But there’s more to a popup than the popup itself. There’s also the teaser, which is the “preview” visitors see before the popup shows. Its job is to entice readers to click to learn more about a brand’s offer.
For this post, I’ve scoured 2,347 teasers to find seven that I feel best do that. From lush designs to copy that makes even the most boring offers sizzle, these are the seven examples that set a high precedent.
Falby Shop is a Danish online retailer that specializes in supplements, fitness apparel, and more.
With its unorthodox design and persuasive copy, the brand’s teaser grabs first-time visitors’ immediate attention.
The teaser also has a transparent background that affords an aesthetic experience when scrolling.
When a visitor clicks the teaser, a slide-in popup appears bearing the brand’s signature colors of black, white, and orange.
Let’s take a closer look at this popup as there are a few areas worth addressing.
First, founder Søren Falby builds intrigue in the visitor by teasing 100 percent price reductions for specific products. I’m familiar with emphasizing price anchoring with strikethrough text, but I’ve never seen it done in a popup before.
Second, Falby Shop offers two gifts based on a customer’s average order value: a shaker for orders over €75 and a tee-shirt for orders over €135.
Few online retailers use website popups for more than list building. And those that do seldom remind visitors of what’s on offer, beyond a potential order. Falby Shop is a rare exception and nicely illustrates using website popups to activate potential customers.
If you wanted to build on Falby’s free gift strategy, you could create a second popup that triggers based on the buyer’s order value, reminding them of the offer mentioned in the first campaign.
Here’s how that might look:
As mentioned before, a teaser’s goal is to entice visitors to click through and learn more about a brand’s offer. Good design will help you do that, as we saw with Falby Shop, but it’s not essential.
Cup & Leaf, a brand known for its in-depth tea-based articles, exemplifies how one doesn’t need to be a graphic designer to achieve conversions.
On each page on the Cup & Leaf site, the brand uses a simple teaser asking first-time visitors, “Looking for the perfect tea?”
When a visitor clicks the teaser, the form appears, inviting the visitor to take a quiz to discover the perfect tea.
I took the tea quiz, and after answering a few questions about my tea preferences, the brand recommended a tea based on my answers. Furthermore, it also offered a 15 percent discount that I could use on my order.
When I clicked, “Shop High Energy Tea!” the tea Cup & Leaf recommended me, I landed on a page where I could use my discount.
This quiz is a classic example of a list funnel, and if you work in e-commerce, you might even be using one yourself. But make no mistake, it’s super effective when relevant.
I reached out to Nat Eliason, founder of Cup & Leaf, and he told me this one campaign has been viewed 1,426,950 times and generated 48,107 leads in eleven months. To be more specific, that equated to $10,392.77 in revenue.
Not bad for a simple teaser, huh?
In this post, we’ve discussed a teaser that appeals to our love for freebies (Falby) and a teaser that appeals to our love for quizzes (Cup & Leaf). Now let’s look at a brand that appeals to our need to solve a pain.
Growth Machine, also founded by Nat Eliason, is a marketing agency that helps fast-growing startups and Fortune 500 companies acquire customers through SEO and content.
Given that the number one pain point for most new businesses, if not all businesses, is customer acquisition, Growth Machine appeals to, and promises to solve, that very problem in its teaser copy.
When a visitor clicks the teaser, the agency uses a customer testimonial to sell its services, which puts a creative spin on how business owners can sell more products and services.
With a clear call-to-action and a testimonial that addresses and overcomes a common objection (“Will this work for me?”), this one popup has brought in $49,772 in additional revenue.
Good testimonials are hard to come by. But if you have one, consider using it in a popup to sell more online. If you’re selling high-end services (as Nat does), you might be leaving serious money on the table.
I’ve written about Real Coffee a few times on this blog, and with good reason: the brand has one of the best-designed teasers and slide-in popups I’ve seen.
If you visit one of Real Coffee’s product pages, you notice a teaser offering the chance to “get a free milk frother as a gift.” Then, when you click the teaser, the form appears, where Real Coffee invites you to click the through to learn more about its offer.
After clicking the call-to-action, Real Coffee takes you to a page where it tries to sell you one of its monthly subscriptions.
Real Coffee has experimented with this teaser a lot, but this is my favorite iteration because,
As mentioned above, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to make a teaser like Real Coffee’s. Even a floating image will achieve a similar effect. But if you can pull off a draw-dropping design, let me know. You’ll deserve more than a mention in a future post.
If you’ve read my post on popup optimization, you know that we advocate creating popups—and teasers—for each step of the buyer’s journey.
Think about it. If a teaser’s job is to entice readers to click on the teaser to learn more about an offer, then the teaser needs to reflect the popup’s purpose in its copy.
Let me share an example. We’re currently working on a new feature that will allow Shopify customers to recommend relevant products with a Sleeknote campaign.
To promote that feature, we’ve created two campaigns that we plan to run on relevant pages on our website. One campaign, which we will show to Sleeknote customers, will tease the update.
The other, which we will show to non-Sleeknote customers, will invite website visitors to start a free Sleeknote trial.
So, if you want to show the right popups to the right audience, remember to tweak the teaser copy and the popup copy. Your audience will thank you for it (and maybe so too will your company accountant).
Joyous Health is a blog founded by Joy McCarthy, an award-winning Certified Holistic Nutritionist and best-selling author specializing in “nourishing recipes and healthy inspiration for everyday living.”
The brand has several teasers on its website, including its online store and sister site Joyous Business. The teaser I want to focus on, though, mostly for how it frames its copy, is its blog teaser.
Take a closer look at the teaser copy, “We saved you a spot.” With an open-loop like that, it’s impossible to resist, isn’t it? After all, you can’t help but wonder what spot she’s referring to.
Once clicked on, you see the form, inviting you to “Join over 40,000 others who have discovered how simple and delicious healthy living can be.”
The teaser’s copy, or the strategy as a whole, isn’t new. I’ll grant you that.
But the implication that a spot has been reserved for you to join its email list, as has done for 40,000 others, is smart and is something I haven’t seen before. You know what you need to do.
Most of the examples I’ve featured in this article have focused on generating leads or informing visitors. Let’s end this article with an example that focuses on customer acquisition.
Let’s, then, take a look at Hart & Holm, a Danish retailer that specializes in fashionable sunglasses for men and women.
What I like most about Hart & Holm’s teaser is how it upsells related offers to its visitors. Here’s how the teaser looks on the homepage.
And here’s how it looks upon closer inspection:
When clicked, the form appears, lead with the headline, “Take extra care of your new glasses.”
Beneath the headline, are four items, ranging in price, which, when clicked, take the visitor to the relevant product page.
Pitching relevant products in popups isn’t new. We see it a lot at Sleeknote and recently featured our favorite examples in this post. But what we don’t see often, is pitching relevant upsells.
Hart & Holm could have promoted their bestsellers, as most online retailers do, and few visitors would have faulted them for doing so. But pitching low-cost items that complement the brand’s core offer (sunglasses), is a surefire way of getting a foot in the door and clinching a guilt-free sale.
In a bid to boost their conversions, many marketers optimize their popups. They remove a field, improve its headline, change the offer—these are the elements we think about most.
While important, it’s crucial marketers remember that there’s more to a popup that a popup itself. Often, the teaser is as, if not more, important to clinch conversions from website visitors.
In 2024, we analyzed 26,270 Sleeknote popup campaigns to determine how to build a high-converting website popup in 2024.
Here’s what we learned:
Despite the ongoing changes in the marketing landscape, popups continue to work for businesses that leverage them.
Our data shows that the average Sleeknote campaign conversion rate is 4.13%.
But what is a “conversion”? And what are the variables that influence that number?
Read on to learn our seven most surprising findings (and how to build a high-converting popup).
When we think about popups, we tend to think of the following scenario:
We visit a site and, within seconds, see a popup asking for our name and email address.
Sometimes, a brand asks for a name and email in exchange for a discount. But more often than not, it’s an afterthought, pushing instead for visitors to “get updates” (i.e., join its newsletter).
In 2024, we consider such an approach the “old way” of using popups. The relationship is transactional; the visitor trades their details for an incentive.
By contrast, the “new way” of using popups is relational. Here, the visitor plays for the incentive, such as “spinning” a wheel or completing a quiz.
The change to “gamify” the opt-in experience drives a level of engagement we haven’t seen before, as reflected in the numbers below.
Here’s an example from one of our customers, Danish travel retailer Take Offer, combining a giveaway with a “wheel popup” to drive email signups:
We saw popups using spin-to-win (8.67%) outperformed popups that did not use spin-to-win (3.70%) by a whopping 132.32%.
Aside from spin-to-win, we looked at two other gamified popup variations, each with surprising conclusions.
Offering visitors a sale on a product for 24 hours is a popular tactic for collecting emails during specific seasonal periods like Easter, Christmas, and Black Week.
Rather than offering a 10% discount to all visitors (which shoppers now expect in industries like ecommerce), the brand gamifies the visitor’s experience.
(The visitor thinks to themselves, “Should I opt in now? Or, return tomorrow and compete for a potentially better, more compelling offer?)
The data shows that people love daily offers. We found that the average conversion rate for popups with daily offers was 29.59%.
One approach to using daily offers, as shown in the example below, is asking the visitor for their name and email and then revealing the day’s offer in the second step:
(As an aside, Sleeknote makes it simple to run daily offers. Set the dates and add the copy, images, coupon codes, and links for each offer. Then, we update the campaign with the day’s offer each day it goes live.)
Lesson:
Use daily offers to collect more details from readers, send better, more targeted emails, and leave visitors wanting to return to your site for new offers.
Prevalent in ecommerce, quizzes ask website visitors questions about their interests and recommend potential products based on their answers.
The visitor gets a personalized experience on-site, and the brand collects valuable details from its subscribers, which it can use to send better, more targeted emails.
The problem, however, is once shoppers leave the homepage (where the invitation to take a quiz is often featured), brands miss out on using quizzes to their full potential.
To solve that problem, marketers can instead use onsite quizzes—popups with quizzes embedded—and target specific pages where it makes the most sense for the visitor.
For instance, if a visitor is on a product page, the brand can show a popup offering to help them find the right product (without leaving the page).
We found the average conversion rate for onsite quizzes was 8.65%.
Popups that encourage active participation from the shopper perform much better than those that don’t. Invite users to spin a wheel, take a quiz, or opt into a daily deal to drive higher email conversions.
Some marketers use popups with a timer-led trigger, which shows the popup to the visitor after a certain number of seconds.
Others use a scroll-led trigger, which shows after the visitor has scrolled a certain percentage of the page.
(And some show a popup the second a visitor lands on the website for the first time, which serves no one.)
But which is better? And which is the optimal number to use when setting a trigger?
We found that timer-led triggers (4.42%) outperform scroll-based triggers (2.64%) by 67.42% and that 6 seconds is the optimal number of seconds.
Use timer-led triggers and set popups to show after 6 seconds to give visitors time to browse the current page.
Google doesn’t like intrusive interstitials. You know that. You also know users spend more time on mobile than on desktop.
The question is: do mobile users convert as well as desktop users, if not better?
To our surprise, mobile popups (5.60%) outperform desktop popups (2.86%) by a whopping 97.18%.
It’s worth mentioning here, however, that no two conversions are alike, and a conversion goal might change from one device to another.
At Sleeknote, for instance, we want to capture email subscribers on mobile and drive free trials on desktop (given the latter’s UX is better).
As such, we have campaigns that reflect the above, each with its own device-specific goal.
On our Recipes page, we want desktop visitors to start a free trial by clicking one of our pre-made popup templates.
But on mobile, we want visitors to book a free demo.
So, to help them do that, we show a teaser, inviting the user to learn more about our product before inviting them to book a free call.
Yes, making one popup for both devices is quicker and easier. Still, given that few marketers capitalize on desktop and mobile traffic to their fullest extent, making that second mobile campaign is well worth the time and effort.
Show popups on mobile, but make them device-specific depending on your conversion goals.
Internet privacy has become a hot topic in recent years.
With the death of third-party cookies, the birth of Consent Mode 2.0, and other privacy-related updates, more marketers are seeking alternate solutions to collecting first-party data from site visitors.
The problem, as CRO marketers in particular can attest to, is asking for more details from visitors—in other words, adding more input fields—can lead to fewer conversions.
We can confirm this as our research shows that conversions drop from 4.41% to 2.90% when going from one input to two and 2.90% to 1.93% from two to three.
But not all hope is lost.
When using a multistep popup that asks for the visitor’s email in the first step and more details in the second step, marketers can see that 76 percent of visitors input more information.
To enrich lead data without compromising conversions, consider using a multistep popup. In the first step, ask for the visitor’s email. Then, in the second step, ask for extra details, such as their interests or preferences.
You can later use this information and other details collected in the second step to send better-targeted emails and drive more revenue per subscriber.
Use multistep popups to collect more details from website visitors without seeing a conversion drop.
It’s no secret that images increase conversions. Showcasing a product on a product page, complete with a model demonstrating said product, moves shoppers to purchase.
But what about popups? Does adding an image move browsers to input their details or click-through to learn more about a product?
As it turns out, it does.
We found that campaigns with an image (4.05%) outperformed popups without an image (0.66%) by 513.63%.
It’s important to mention here that images are not limited to products.
Some of our favorite popup examples, including Børsen promoting its paid subscription as per the example below, feature an image promoting the offer.
To increase a popup’s conversion rate, use an image that complements the popup’s message. (You’ll go even further when using an image for the popup and teaser.)
Countdown timers can also increase conversions when combined with a genuine, time-sensitive promotion.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a seasonal campaign, a Black Friday promotion, or a limited-time offer—the fear of missing out moves shoppers to purchase.
While urgency is common in email campaigns and on landing pages, we wondered whether creating urgency in a popup had a similar effect.
However, rather than look at popups that create urgency in their copy, we looked at another, more underused element: a countdown timer.
We found that popups with a countdown timer (5.17%) convert better than campaigns without a countdown timer (4.12%) by 25.48%.
Marketing tactics change over time. But “weapons of persuasion” that move us to action? Those will never change. Give visitors a much-needed visual reminder (when it makes sense) to drive higher onsite conversions.
When running a time-sensitive campaign, include a countdown timer to remind users of the campaign’s deadline.
Timing is everything when it comes to popups.
Showing a popup too soon causes a visitor to close it without thinking while showing it too late increases the risk of missing out on a potential conversion.
As discussed above, using a timer-led trigger solves the issue for most marketers—waiting 6 seconds gives readers time to decide whether to join the brand’s email list.
Still, the best time to engage visitors is when they decide to see a popup, such as with a teaser that previews the popup’s content.
The teaser is often visible in the screen’s bottom-left or right-hand corner, reminding visitors there’s an offer for them if/when they’re ready to learn more.
Here’s an example from a Sleeknote customer, WoodUpp.
We found that popups with a teaser (4.54%) convert better than campaigns without a teaser (2.74%) by 65.69 percent.
Sometimes, a sneak preview is all needed to nudge skeptical visitors to opt in or make a purchase. If not, the visitor can reopen the popup when the offer is most needed (such as adding a code before checking out).
Use a teaser to preview a popup’s message to increase conversions and reengage visitors when needed.
If you’re already using popups, this guide will teach you how to use them to their full advantage.
And if you’re not, there’s no better time to get started than now.
You can try Sleeknote for free for seven days and get unlimited access to all our features (including those mentioned in the guide).
Try Sleeknote for free now.
Social proof is nothing new. For many years, it’s been used by both online and offline marketers to persuade prospects and increase sales.
Simply put, the principle of social proof refers to the influence of other people’s actions on our behavior. Meaning, when a large number of people are doing something, we assume that it must be the correct action.
Leveraging this principle cleverly, many online stores use social proof on their websites and in their emails.
While social proof is an effective tool to convert visitors into subscribers and beyond, only a handful of e-commerce marketers use it in their website popups.
Naturally, those marketers know how to convince visitors to sign up for an email list or complete their orders—without having to spend a fortune. And today, I’ll show you how you can join those smart marketers by adding social proof to your on-site messages.
So here are 13 highly effective social proof popup examples you can use to convert visitors into subscribers and customers.
Whether it’s product reviews, quotes, or videos, customer testimonials are one of the most common (and most powerful) types of social proof. And it’s for a few good reasons:
If you’re already displaying testimonials on your homepage or product pages, you’re off to a great start.
When used in popups, customer testimonials help create a gentle nudge, inviting users to take action without feeling overwhelmed or pressured into buying.
One way to incorporate testimonials into your on-site campaigns is to display positive product reviews to handle possible objections.
Take a look at this popup example you could use on a product page:
For this example, I chose a real-life review from Press Juicery that answers possible questions in the prospects’ minds like the following:
By showing selected product reviews in your popups like the above, you can remove possible obstacles to buying, and create social proof for that given product.
What’s more, by providing reviewer details, such as age or location, you can add credibility to your reviews and help your visitors identify themselves with the reviewer.
Make sure to set a timed trigger to give users some space to read product descriptions, browse product photos, and so on.
If you’re selling a wide range of products or don’t have many reviews for individual items, you can show a generic campaign that runs on category pages, like this:
By using our Specific URL condition, you can target visitors viewing your category pages and hold their attention with social proof.
If you’re a single-product business or simply want to build a positive brand image, you can use your company reviews in website popups, instead.
Casper uses this strategy by displaying their company reviews on their homepage…
…and on a dedicated landing page
…as well as in email marketing:
If they apply the same to their popups, as I recommend today, this is what it might look like:
The main advantage of using testimonials in your popups is the ability to show your messages to the right people, on the right pages, at the right time.
There are multiple effective ways to use testimonials in your popups. No matter which one you choose, they instantly add the element of social proof to your popups.
Bestsellers sell well for a reason. Or, at least, we think they do.
The “bestseller” stamp acts as proof of how good a product is. After all, if lots of people are buying an item, they must know something we don’t.
With customer acquisition costs continuing to rise, you can’t afford to lose a prospect that just landed on your site.
Although bestsellers can be highly persuasive on any visitor segment, they’re especially ideal for guiding first-time visitors by giving them a starting point.
While many online stores guide their visitors to new arrivals or selected items, bestsellers work better than ordinary product lists. Why? Because they carry a stamp of approval from fellow consumers (read: social proof.)
Here’s a popup example promoting popular products to first-time visitors:
Similarly, bestsellers work great for getting confused visitors back on track. By adding a product recommendation popup to your 404 pages, you can ease your visitors’ frustration and guide them in the right direction. Here’s how your campaign might look like:
It’s ideal for reducing bounce rates and redirecting otherwise lost visitors to product pages.
Social proof isn’t the only explanation for why bestsellers help you sell more. They also work well because this type of social proof contains the element of scarcity.
Given that the stocks aren’t unlimited, it also carries the risk of selling out if a product is selling well. As a result, the word “bestseller” helps users make a quicker decision by implying scarcity.
To take full advantage of this principle, you can trigger prospects’ fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) and create a sense of urgency.
With an exit-intent popup like below, you can warn an abandoning visitor that the product they’re viewing is high-in-demand and, therefore, may sell out anytime soon.
In this example, where I trigger visitors’ FOMO and highlight the popularity of the product, I added an incentive to engage them further.
Make sure to set an exit-intent trigger on this campaign to ensure that you capture abandoning visitors at the right time and persuade them with social proof and scarcity.
For consumers, landing on a sold-out product page only means disappointment.
For marketers, however, those pages are like a goldmine waiting to be tapped.
Sold-out products carry an inherent stamp of social proof because if a product went out-of-stock, lots of others must have liked and bought it.
When a visitor ends up on a sold-out product page, you need to manage their disappointment by either promising them a back-in-stock notification or guiding them in a new direction.
Check out how Allbirds does that:
With this popup, the company uses back-in-stock notifications as we know them and grabs this opportunity to collect email addresses of highly interested leads.
Using a consent checkbox, Allbirds also asks if you want to join their newsletter by framing its call-to-action around the benefit. Now the company can retarget these prospects with relevant product recommendations and personalized incentives.
JyskVin, on the other hand, takes a different approach to sold-out product pages. When you visit a product that had sold out, you see this popup:
With it, the company, first, informs you that the product you’re viewing went out-of-stock, and then recommends a similar item, instead. This way, JyskVin removes friction and creates a personalized shopping experience by imitating a store assistant.
It’s a brilliant tactic to ease visitors’ frustration and convert them with a timely and relevant product recommendation popup.
It’s no secret that numbers strengthen the social proof by adding specificity to your claims. When nine out of ten dentists (rather than some) recommend a toothpaste brand, we trust that brand more.
Whether you want to convince visitors to sign up for your email list or complete their purchase, you can enhance your social proof popups with the power of numbers.
Check out this example by Hideaways:
By showing the number of its newsletter subscribers, the company creates social proof and makes you think 24,000 people can’t be wrong.
What’s more, Hideaways evokes a sense of belonging by inviting you to join among 24,000 others and “do the same.”
Remember to add specificity to your social proof popups whenever possible. Using exact numbers, such as 26,871, makes your claims more credible than round numbers, like 20,000.
Numbers also work well in converting prospects into customers. Showing the number of your customers or products sold so far in your popups can help ease prospects’ minds:
In case your visitors have any doubts about completing their order, you can regain them with social proof the moment they’re about to abandon your site.
Granted, the words of an expert have more influence on us than an ordinary consumer because we believe that experts have more knowledge in the area than us. That’s why we trust their authority and accept their recommendations as the correct behavior.
One way to demonstrate this powerful type of social proof is to build or show your expertise within your field.
Check out how fitness equipment e-tailer Apuls adds social proof to its popups by positioning the brand as experts:
The company knows that buying expensive fitness equipment takes time and research, and sometimes even requires a consultation. That’s why they show a popup inviting you to “talk to an expert” on specific category pages.
With it, Apuls doesn’t only guide its visitors to better buying decisions with excellent customer service; they also position themselves as experts in the field.
Another way you can infuse social proof into your popups is to borrow authority from an expert. To use this tactic, you don’t necessarily need to collaborate with celebrities or big influencers in your field.
Take a look at how Bizz Up borrows authority from an expert in this popup:
In this popup, the company offers visitors a lead magnet on Facebook contest rules that they created with a Facebookfessor.
Since a Facebook expert creates the document, Bizz Up’s visitors are more likely to submit their email addresses in exchange for valuable, expert-approved information. As a result, Bizz Up grows its email list with highly relevant leads and demonstrates authority in their field.
Media has always been influential in guiding consumer behavior, both online and off-.
Getting media coverage for your brand extends your reach. But it also acts as a stamp of approval.
For this strategy to work, you don’t necessarily need to get featured in large, international publications. Nor do you need to be a blogger or a SaaS company.
It works just as well for e-commerce businesses and in local contexts, too.
Here’s a brilliant popup example by Rosemunde:
In it, Rosemunde promotes one of its products by applying the traditional “as-seen-on” marketing approach to its popups.
The popup copy reads “Rosemunde Silk Top, seen in IN on July 26th,” referring to a Danish fashion magazine called “IN.”
By using the media coverage of one of its products, Rosemunde adds social proof to this promotional popup and makes the product more attractive.
If your brand, website, or products got praised by a local newspaper, blogger, or a micro-influencer, use it in your popups to create social proof.
Social proof works like a charm to convert website visitors into subscribers and prospects into customers.
Although it’s often applied to web copy, email marketing, and paid ads, marketers still underuse social proof in their on-site messages.
By using one of the strategies above, you can instantly enhance your popups with social proof and drive more sales to your online store.
Today, I’m doing a makeover. But not just any makeover…
A popup makeover.
#SleeknoteStyle
Here’s the deal:
Let’s get started.
1. Allies of Skin
2. Calvin Klein
3. History
4. Bombas
5. Hotel Chocolat
Founded on the belief that skincare shouldn’t feel like a chore, Allies of Skin offers “effective formulas designed to suit adventure-seekers and go-getters alike.”
At the time of writing, Allies of Skin are using not one but two website popups.
The first triggers automatically to all website visitors, offering a 15 percent discount before checkout.
The second, which appears shortly after, offers a 20% discount.
Therefore, Allies of Skin has two contradictory popups that show to all visitors a coupon with two opposing values (15 and 20 percent).
Here’s how I would fix that.
First, I would disable both popups. Then, I would take the copy from the first…
…And combine it with the design of the second.
Here’s the popup I made using Sleeknote’s Campaign Builder:
Finally, I would add the following rules:
i. Show only to new visitors. (If I wanted, I could create a second campaign for returning subscribers, promoting a new offer.)
ii. Show only on product pages as that’s where engagement is likely at its highest.
iii. Show after 8 seconds. (We found from our research of 1+ billion popups that 8 seconds converts best.)
Here’s how that popup might look to a first-time visitor browsing a product page:
There’s no harm in having multiple popups. In fact, we encourage having multiple campaigns running simultaneously. Just remember to have specific audiences in mind for each.
Describing itself as “iconic fashion reimagined,” Calvin Klein needs no introduction.
I recently landed on Calvin Klein’s homepage and saw this:
While nicely-designed, Calvin Klein’s popup:
Let’s see if we can do something about that.
As mentioned above, Calvin Klein has a nicely designed popup, so I’ll copy that for my design.
Here are a few changes I made:
The biggest change I would make is where Calvin Klein could show its popup. In the original, if you recall, the popup shows to all visitors on all pages.
In the revision, though, I’ve created a rule so that it will show only to first-time visitors on category pages for men.
What’s more, I created a second campaign that will show only on, you guessed it, category pages for women.
Of course, if I wanted to make it even more personalized, I could add more gender-specific copy to the body (e.g., “Get Updates on New Arrivals for Men.”)
Filled to the brim with extraordinary, entertaining, and groundbreaking stories and characters, History is the premier destination for historical storytelling.
After watching Columbia: The Final Flight on Netflix, I was reading an article about the disaster when I saw the following popup:
History’s popup wasn’t bad; it was timely and had a decent design. But it didn’t excite me enough to join its email list. Getting “intriguing stories about the past” is ambiguous and doesn’t speak to my interests.
Before reading on, consider what you would do.
Ready? Okay. Read on for my answer.
History categorizes its content by “Topics,” with my Challenger article filed under “Space Exploration.”
History also uses a floating menu at the bottom of each article to invite further reading on the current article’s topic.
So, here’s how I would take advantage of that:
If a reader clicked on two or more articles under the same topic, I would show a popup addressing the articles’ topic in its copy, as with my example below:
How would I achieve such a feat? Well, with Sleeknote’s SiteData, you can trigger a popup based on any variable in your data layer, such as an article’s category (which is exactly what we do on our blog, by the way.)
I would rewrite the headline using one of my favorite headline formulas, “Give Me/Us a Week and I/We’ll…” to evoke more curiosity and drive signups.
Nice work, if I do say so myself 😉
Bombas is “a comfort-focused sock and apparel brand with a mission to help those in need.”
At the time of writing, it’s Black Week. So, it’s unsurprising that Bombas has changed its homepage copy to reflect its Black Friday promotion.
Bombas is reminding its visitors that it’s offering 20 percent off everything and will auto-apply a coupon at checkout.
The problem, though, is Bombas hasn’t updated its website popup to reflect the change.
Why would you enter your email to get 20 percent off when it’s auto-applied at checkout?
If you’re making this mistake, here’s what you can do instead…
Rather than repeat what’s already written on its homepage, I’ve rewritten Bombas’ popup copy to promote another incentive for joining its list: early access to its Black Friday offers.
Building a Black Friday waiting list has three main advantages, including:
Given the broadness of the offer, I would show this popup on all product pages and use an exit-intent trigger to capture abandoning shoppers who might not be aware of Bombas’ Black Friday promotion.
Hotel Chocolat is an award-winning chocolatier and cocoa grower on a mission to make the best chocolate on the planet.
As I mentioned above, I’m writing this article in November 2020. It’s Black Week, and many brands are pushing Black Friday offers.
But Hotel Chocolat isn’t one of them, opting to promote it’s Christmas promotion instead.
After clicking “Reveal My Code,” Hotel Chocolat reveals a coupon that visitors can copy and redeem at checkout.
Upon first glance, one can’t fault Hotel Chocolat’s popup. The copy is clear, the strategy is sound, and the countdown timer is a nice added touch.
What’s missing is what happens after visitors “Continue Shopping.”
Say I add a “Vegan Sleekster,” priced at £22.05, to my basket.
Because my order is £2.05 shy of the £25 coupon requirement, I don’t qualify.
And for that reason, I’m likely to abandon my cart.
No one wants that. Let’s fix that right away.
As I’ve written about before, it’s worth having multiple popups to meet different goals.
So, with that in mind, I would create a second popup to nudge visitors to spend more so they qualify for the coupon.
But I would go further than that and specify precisely how much they need to qualify.
Here’s how I would do that.
First, as mentioned, I would create a second popup for those who:
Then, I would use a SiteData merge tag to show the remaining amount needed to qualify.
Returning to the above example, I needed £2.05 to qualify for the discount, so the copy would reflect that in the headline:
Here’s how it would look on the product page.
If Hotel Chocolat wanted to expand on my popup, it could recommend popular or discounted products to help visitors qualify for the coupon.
Of course, that’s just the beginning. As is always the case when using SiteData, the possibilities are endless.
We’ve seen that even the biggest online brands make mistakes with their website popups. Even those who don’t leave some room for improvement.
I hope my makeovers have inspired you to correct any mistakes you’re making with your popups and maybe even inspired a future campaign or two.
I need to address the elephant in the room.
There are a million and one popup builders on the Internet, and many of them are free.
So, why invest in any lead generation tool, or even Sleeknote, for that matter?
That’s what I’m going to answer in today’s post. I’ll cover what Sleeknote is, seven of my favorite use cases, and why you might consider Sleeknote if you’re looking to personalize your popups better.
I’ll also answer my favorite frequently asked questions, including:
1. Grow Your List (The Right Way)
2. Enrich Your Leads
3. Reduce Cart Abandonment (But Not for All)
4. Retarget Return Visitors
5. Recommend Relevant Products
6. Get Targeted Feedback
7. Demonstrate Social Proof
The days of targeting all website visitors and asking them to join your email list are long gone.
Today, it’s better—and more profitable—to target the right visitors at the right time with the right offer.
With Sleeknote, you can customize your popups’ messaging in a variety of ways.
For instance, if a returning visitor is browsing a category page on your webshop, you can offer a category-specific discount.
Or, if a first-time visitor is reading your pricing page, you can invite them to get in touch.
The latter worked particularly well for marketing agency Growth Machine, which attributed $49,772 to one campaign.
The bottom line is you can grow your list. And you can do it without annoying your website visitors.
If you want to write better marketing emails, you need better segmentation.
And if you want better segmentation, you need to know as much as possible about your leads (ideally, as they’re joining your list).
The problem, as you likely know, is that with each additional input comes fewer conversions.
We found from our testing of 1+ billion popup sessions that popups with two input fields convert better than those with three by 206.48 percent.
With our Multistep feature, you can enrich lead data without losing conversions.
For instance, you can collect a visitor’s name and email in the first form. Then, in the second form, you can collect additional information such as their interests or preferences.
We’ve even found that popups with a second step see 76 percent of its subscribers input further details.
You don’t have to sacrifice quality for quantity. You can have your cake and eat it too.
Cart abandonment is a real problem for online retailers, with the average rate recently climbing to 88.05 percent across all industries.
To combat that, many online retailers offer a discount to abandoning visitors, and in doing so, hemorrhage its already dwindling profits.
Rather than offering a discount to all website visitors, we suggest targeting only visitors with a certain amount in their basket.
With our SiteData feature, you can trigger a campaign when a buyer has, say, $60 in their basket.
You recover an otherwise lost sale, and the buyer receives the nudge they need to complete their purchase.
One common mistake marketers make with popups is ignoring where a visitor is in their journey.
A returning email subscriber sees a website popup asking for their email address (again). A return buyer sees a popup promoting a product they bought on their first visit. The list goes on.
With Sleeknote, you can make a popup for each stage of the visitor’s journey.
If you’re trying to get more orders, for instance, you could “activate” returning subscribers by offering a coupon.
Or, if, like Sleeknote, your goal is to “warm” marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to start a free trial, you could promote an upcoming webinar.
Using multiple campaigns effectively moves leads and customers down your funnel without being too aggressive.
And with Sleeknote, it couldn’t be easier.
Recommending relevant products during checkout is an effective way to increase a customer’s average order value (AOV).
But what’s equally effective is recommending relevant products before a visitor checks out.
Not all visitors know what they’re looking for when browsing online. And those who do can fall into indecisiveness when given too much choice.
Further, many first-time visitors feel overwhelmed, especially if you have products that need further explanation.
One brand that solves both of those problems is fitness retailer, Apuls.
When browsing one of its category pages, the brand recommends three variations of an exercise bike based on price.
After clicking one of the options, the brand then shows a second campaign, offering assistance if needed.
Sleeknote even integrates with third-party apps like Clerk and Hello Retail, making it easy to recommend products based on what’s popular, trending, or more.
You know the importance of asking for customers and even website visitors for feedback.
After all, with better feedback, you can improve your marketing, customer satisfaction, and hopefully, increase revenue.
But what you might not know is when you ask is as important, if not more important, than what you ask.
In our experience, we’ve found that asking a customer for feedback when they’ve taken a particular action is incredibly useful.
With Sleeknote, you can easily ask for feedback using one of our many pre-made templates.
[insert CtC here.]
But what’s most important is customizing your forms for mobile, given its limited screen space.
Copenhagen Airport used Sleeknote to ask mobile visitors if they had feedback after making a booking.
With that feedback, they were able better to improve the user experience for its booking page and boost customer satisfaction.
We all know word-of-mouth is useful in helping potential buyers make a purchase.
It’s one of the reasons highlighting customer testimonials is common in many e-commerce newsletters.
But that’s just the beginning.
Say you’re an e-commerce manager running an online retailer like Casper.
One way to nudge indecisive buyers could be to make a popup that invites them to read product reviews before buying.
You could even make the popup so that, when they’re on a product page, they can click the CTA button in the popup, the customer reviews page opens in a new tab to prevent them from leaving the page.
Best of all, with Sleeknote’s advanced rule engine, you could create multiple popups depending on who’s viewing the page.
For first-time visitors, you could ask for their email. But for returning subscribers that are coming from a promotional email, you could offer them more reviews.
The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume if you’re reading this, I’ve piqued your interest, and you’re at least curious about Sleeknote.
If that’s the case, there’s only one thing left to do, and that’s to try Sleeknote for free.
Leave a comment below and let me know how it goes for you. I want to hear from you.
There’s arguably no better way to get visitors to engage with your brand and take action than to use automotive popups.
They’re exceptional attention grabbers and succinctly let shoppers know about your offerings. They’re also incredibly versatile and can be used in a wide variety of different ways.
For this post, I’m going to showcase some of the best automotive popup examples I’ve come across so you can see just how many possibilities there are.
I’m also going to highlight the best practices these brands use to make their popups…well…pop. So by the end, you should walk away knowing the full range of applications and get some ideas on how to use popups for your own automotive site.
Let’s get right down to it.
Headquartered in Oakville, Canada, this company makes cars specifically for Canadian drivers and carries an “exciting lineup of SUVs, crossovers, hybrids, trucks, and vans.”
Ford Canada uses a timed popup, which only appears after a visitor has been on the site for a certain period of time (common increments are 5, 10, and 20 seconds).
By the way, our research found that 8 seconds is the sweet spot for timed popups, and they convert 3.62 percent better than popups shown before or after that.
Here’s what Ford Canada’s popup looks like.
Many brands like this technique because it gives visitors a chance to get settled in and ensures a base level of engagement.
I know that I sometimes get a little annoyed if I get hit with a popup the second I land on a site and haven’t had the chance to feel it out yet. And if a visitor quickly bounces in just a few seconds, it’s likely that they wouldn’t be interested in what you’re offering in your popup anyway.
This example from Ford Canada lets visitors get acclimated before seeing the popup. As for its purpose, this brand makes it clear that it’s to gather feedback after a prospect is done with their visit.
They concisely ask the question, “Would you help us to make our website better by providing feedback AFTER your visit”…
…and include two straightforward answer options at the bottom.
And to prevent disruptions for visitors that aren’t interested, Ford Canada features a conspicuous “Close” icon in the top right-hand corner so they can easily exit.
Also, notice the abundance of negative space they use here.
The information is well organized, and there’s no clutter, allowing prospects to quickly digest it and make a choice. So, if the goal of your automotive popup is to obtain feedback, this is an excellent example to borrow from.
This is a Honda dealership in Charlotte, North Carolina. Their popup is built around one of the most time-tested strategies of offering a sweet discount.
Here Honda buyers can get $300 off any new vehicle by getting a voucher.
Scott Clark Honda makes it ultra clear what the offer is by spelling it out in a bold red font and using a simple CTA.
To get the voucher, the visitor simply clicks on the CTA and they’re taken to the second step.
Then, they fill out the form, click the CTA, and can select the exact model they want.
This approach allows the dealership to quickly pique the interest of many car buyers and features an attractive incentive that a sizable chunk are receptive to.
That way Scott Clark Honda is able to get a lead’s:
From there, they can fully customize their outreach and send targeted offers through email, greatly increasing the odds of ultimately making a conversion.
And while $300 off would probably kill the profit margins of many brands offering lower priced items, it’s only a drop in the bucket for an automotive dealership like this one. If they sold a $25,000 car for example, shaving $300 off the total price would still be a massive win.
This isn’t to say that you have to go this big with your discounts to have an impact, but it does show how effective something like $300 is at grabbing the attention of visitors and getting them to take your offer seriously.
“AutoAnything is America’s leading truck accessories and auto accessories site with in-house experts ready to help you with all of your auto and truck parts.” This is one of the best automotive popup examples because of the fact that it’s so simple.
It gets straight to the point, letting shoppers know they can get 20 percent off the best gear when they order $99 or more, along with special deals, the latest product releases, and more.
All they have to do is enter their email address and click the CTA (which, by the way, is very well written).
I also like that this popup features a professional looking image of a truck on the left-hand side. As we mentioned in a previous article, popups that have images have 3.8 percent more conversions than popups without them.
This along with the clean, uncluttered layout of the text on the right-hand side give this popup some nice aesthetics that no doubt catch the eye of many AutoAnything shoppers.
In turn, this brand is able to accomplish three important things:
By default, it encourages shoppers to go ahead and take the plunge and buy right away.
And as you’re probably aware, it’s much easier to sell to existing customers than new prospects. To quantify, “the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60–70 percent, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5–20.”
So, this is a fantastic template to base your own automotive popup off of when you’re looking to get your foot in the door.
Here’s a brand that sells “wholesale auto parts, car parts, truck parts, OEM car parts, and performance parts and accessories.” Their website is well laid out and makes it a breeze for shoppers to find exactly what they’re looking for by year, make, and model.
Buy Auto Parts also makes great use of a popup. Check it out.
Let’s start with the obvious. It features a stunning image on the left-hand side that visitors’ eyeballs can’t help but gravitate to. Next, there’s an attractive offer that shoppers can see at a glance where they can get $20 off any orders over $150.
Buy Auto Parts uses bold light blue text that contrasts perfectly with the popup’s background. They also include extra information at the bottom that lets visitors know the other perks that come along with signing up, including access to exclusive offers, instant savings, and limited time discounts.
The CTA gets the job done, and makes it crystal clear the action shoppers need to take, mentioning that it’s free.
This brand also makes it simple to exit out of the popup to not irritate anyone who’s not interested. There’s a well-marked “X” icon in the top right-hand corner, or a shopper can simply click anywhere outside of the popup to get out.
Finally, the colors they use are 100 percent on brand and perfectly match the look of the Buy Auto Parts website.
The dark purplish blue flows seamlessly and jives well from a branding standpoint. And this type of homogeneity is something you should also strive for with your own popups.
This is the “second largest mail order company of automotive equipment in the United States.” JEGS High Performance Parts has an absolutely massive online store where shoppers can find virtually any part they need.
Here’s what their automotive popup looks like.
The first thing most shoppers notice is the high-quality image of a car on the left-hand side. This combined with the enticing offer on the right-hand side of $100 off your next order serves as a one-two punch, which gets many people dialed in from the start.
Toward the bottom, JEGS goes into a bit more detail about what shoppers will receive by signing up, including company news, special offers, promotions, and targeted messages based on a subscriber’s personal interests.
The CTA certainly pops and uses effective wording to get visitors to take action.
And for those who aren’t interested, they can easily exit the popup and continue browsing without any drama. There’s an “X” icon on the top right-hand corner, a “decline offer” link under the CTA, or they can simply click anywhere outside of the box.
In terms of branding, JEGS keeps it cohesive with the rest of their website, featuring their signature yellow, white, and black colors.
And the overall layout of the popup looks clean and uncluttered, making the information easy to digest.
In short, this example follows all of the core automotive popup best practices and shows that you don’t need to get fancy to have a big impact.
Mac’s Auto Parts specializes in classic and vintage car parts and accessories, focusing specifically on Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury. Like many of the other examples I’ve mentioned, their angle is to collect email addresses, which they do by offering 15 percent off.
They’re by no means reinventing the wheel with this offer, but it’s certainly enough to pique the interest of a good percentage of their shoppers. And there’s no beating around the bush.
Mac’s Auto Parts gets right into the offer and uses a nice bold header to let shoppers know about it. Just below that, they point out that by signing up, shoppers will also receive exclusive updates and offers.
The form is also dead simple to fill out with just a single field, and there’s no confusion with the CTA that says, “Sign Me Up.”
Let’s also talk about aesthetics. The entire background is an image of vehicle headlights with teal colored lights on the sides, which contrasts perfectly with the light website background.
Also, notice that the teal, black, and white stays on brand with the color scheme of the website.
As we mentioned in another post, a popup should always compliment your website. But at the same time, it also needs to distinguish itself from your website’s content to grab a shopper’s attention. And this is an excellent example of that in action.
The final brand I’m going to discuss is Deutsche Auto Parts who focuses on selling Volkswagen and Audi parts online. Like most of the examples I’ve mentioned, they’re goal is to capture email addresses for lead nurturing.
But rather than offering a discount, they use this popup that asks shoppers to enter the make, model, and year of their vehicle so Deutsche Auto Parts can send them future offers.
They offer convenient drop-down fields so shoppers don’t have to do any manual typing.
And the “Subscribe” CTA is about as straightforward as it gets in terms of directing visitors to complete an action.
Like most other well-crafted automotive popups, this one incorporates the same branding colors found on the website — red, white, and black in Deutsche Auto Parts’ case.
So, if you want to create an attractive offer that doesn’t require an immediate discount, this is a potential angle you can take.
I learned something interesting from my research. Not a lot of automotive sites use popups.
After scouring well over 100, I only found a handful that featured them—most of which were auto part supply stores. Popups for vehicle brands and local dealerships were practically non-existent.
And that’s good news for you because it means putting in the effort to create a winning popup can give you an edge on the competition.
The automotive popup examples discussed here should give you a better idea of how to approach the design and some specific types of offers you can use to get shoppers to follow through.
Forget everything you know about website popups.
In this article, I want to share the seven types of popups you need to know or be familiar with, at least. Not all will be relevant to your organization, mind you.
But those that are will update you on the best practices you need to follow if you want more subscribers, customers, and repeat buyers for your business.
Let’s take a look.
I hate it. You hate it. And just about every online retailer on the planet hates it. I’m talking, of course, about cart abandonment. And it isn’t going away. In fact, it’s getting worse.
As of writing (March 2020), the average cart abandonment rate is 88.05 percent across all industries, with automotive seeing rates as high as 96.88 percent. (!)
On the other hand, reasons consumers abandon their cart haven’t changed, with 41 percent citing unexpected shipping costs as their reason for leaving.
With that said, one way to at least reduce cart abandonment is to offer, or remind, some buyers that they’re eligible for free shipping by using a website popup.
Fashion retailer Kate Spade is an excellent example of a retailer that increases its free shipping policy’s perceived value. After adding an item to their cart, they remind the buyer that they qualify.
You don’t have to offer free shipping to all visitors. Nor should you feel like you have to. After all, every business has tight margins to contend with.
Using a feature like SiteData, you could trigger a website popup that shows ONLY to visitors that have a certain amount in their basket, encouraging them to buy more.
Does mobile traffic convert better than desktop? That’s the question we asked of ourselves when we analyzed more than a billion website popup views.
As it turns out, it does, and by a fair amount, for that matter.
When we looked at customers with a mobile popup versus customers without, we found that mobile popups outperformed desktop by a whopping 86.49 percent.
Based on our results, it’s safe to say that you will profit from having a mobile-specific popup. Note the word specific. You want to avoid duplicating an existing desktop campaign.
Why? Because your conversion goal might change based on the device. Let me share a concrete example to explain what I mean.
If you’re selling software, as we are, your marketing goal on desktop might be to drive free trials. This is what we do on many of our product pages.
But given our software isn’t mobile-friendly, we want to avoid asking mobile visitors to try our product, and instead, invite them to book a free demo.
Conversions are important. But what happens after the user takes action is even more critical. Have that in mind when creating any popup, on desktop, or otherwise.
One common misconception with website popups is you can only use them for capturing leads.
But savvy brands know that’s certainly not that case.
Take Black Friday, for example, one of the busiest days of the year for online retailers. With so many potential shoppers visiting your store, it makes perfect sense to welcome and inform them of your top deals.
In fact, that’s precisely what Wool and the Gang did in 2019.
With its eye-catching design and benefit-driven headline, the brand drummed up more business by offering a massive 30 percent reduction on all its products.
If you wanted to build on a campaign like this, you could follow Pura Vida Bracelet’s example and add a countdown timer to drive more urgency.
Using a feature like this might not seem like much, but we found from our research of 1+ billion popup views that adding a countdown timer to a popup can increase conversions by as much as 112.93 percent.
So, if you’re already using promotion popup, you can’t go wrong with adding a countdown timer. And if you’re not? Then there’s no better place to start than reading the article below.
There are many ways to demonstrate social proof using website popups, but there are two, in particular, I want to highlight. The first is obvious: showcasing customer testimonials.
One brand that exemplifies this well is Zapier. When you scroll down the page for one of its articles, a slide-in appears with a testimonial from Bryan Harris, founder of Growth Tools.
Given that Videofruit rebranded into Growth Tools in 2019, and Zapier is tracking links in the CTA using a UTM parameter, it’s safe to say that this slide-in is driving a healthy number of free trials for Zapier.
The second, less common way to use social proof in website popups, is to inform visitors that the item they’re considering buying is popular with other buyers.
Conveying that information might include the number of people currently looking at the item, or, mentioning that the item is unavailable, as AllBirds does.
Seray wrote a fantastic post on how you leverage social proof in website popups, which you can read below.
If you ever hear anyone complaining that popups are annoying, you can guarantee they’re talking about gimmicky popups that intrude on the reading experience.
You know, like this:
Sorry, Brooklinen. Love the brand; hate the popup.
A better, more user-friendly way to engage visitors, online, is to use popups that are based on the visitor’s browsing behavior, such as a slide-in popup.
What makes a slide-in popup less intrusive is two-fold. First, it has a teaser, which is a way of teasing the visitor to learn more about the offer the popup is promoting. Here’s an example from Falby Shop.
Second, given its limited space, it forces you to be more concise and even creative with your popup copywriting. Take online retailer Apuls, as an example.
With such an extensive product line, the brand uses teaser-triggered slide-ins to recommend the right product to the right visitor. And with teaser copy like that featured below, it’s hard to ignore.
As a final word, it’s essential to consider when it’s to use slide-in popups versus exit intent popups. The former is great for product pages and blog posts; but less effective for shoppers abandoning their carts. Use wisely.
One of the most common ways to incentivize against cart abandonment, as we saw earlier, is offering a discount. But that’s not to say that’s the only way.
There’s a time and a place to offer discounts, and you’ll be glad to know it’s not only with recovering lost sales. In fact, when combined with multistep popups, offering discounts is a great way to enrich lead data.
Wedio, a camera leasing company, knows this better than any B2B I’ve found. When you visit its website for the first time, you see a popup offering a 10 percent discount. (Note the countdown timer.)
When you enter your name and email, there’s a second step, where the brand uses checkboxes to learn more about your interests and email preferences.
Given that the average conversion rate at this stage is 76 percent, it’s safe to say Wedio is growing a targeted list of subscribers, and its subscribers, in turn, are getting—and using—a well-earned discount.
Win. Win.
So far, we’ve looked at the different types of website popups for-profit organizations utilize to get more subscribers and orders. But it’s nonprofits that need to master popup best practices better than anyone.
Think about it. With email driving as much as 40 percent of all donations, it’s crucial nonprofits learn how to capture as many leads as possible to fund their causes.
One nonprofit that does that masterfully is Unicef USA. When you visit its website for the first time, you see a popup telling you, “You can be a hero to children in need!”
Combining a provocative image of a little girl praying with a clear call-to-action, Unicef builds on its request by inviting you to donate, within the popup.
In our above-cited research, we also found that as much as 76 percent of visitors who complete a form’s first step go on to fill out the second step.
If you’re a for-profit organization like Sleeknote and you’re looking to hone your marketing chops, take it from me: there’s a lot to learn from nonprofit popups.
In this article, I’ve outlined what I feel are the seven types of website popups that will help you get more leads and drive more orders, directly or otherwise.
But it’s important to remember that a popup is only as good as the end goal it’s helping you achieve. You can have the best lead capture form in the world, but if you’re not doing anything with returning subscribers and later, returning buyers, nothing else matters.
If you view website popups as a means rather than an end and use them to assist in moving people down your funnel, you will make a difference to your bottom line.
That’s a guarantee.
By the time somebody reaches your donation page, they’re so close to the finish line. They’re almost ready to give to your cause.
At this point, your goal is to make sure they follow through. And an appealing page and user-friendly donation form can make all the difference here.
These elements build confidence and trust that the donor’s dollars are going to the right place. A well-designed donation form also means there are no roadblocks that might prevent a donor from handing over their cash. You can even use your form to encourage recurring donations from the get-go and more.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at some fantastic examples of donation forms that you can take inspiration from.
1. Girls Write Now
2. Black Lives Matter
3. Albert Kennedy Trust
4. Climate Emergency Fund
5. Autostraddle
6. Canadian Urban Institute
7. The Donkey Sanctuary
Your donation page should include a sort of sales pitch for your cause. It should incorporate aspects such as your mission statement and explain why the cause is so worthy.
Keep this info close to your donation form. So when a visitor is wowed by your pitch, making a donation is the next logical step.
Girls Write Now is a mentoring organization with a focus on diversity, equity, and creating the writers and leaders of tomorrow. It makes a persuasive pitch in its “5 Reasons to Give. Write. Now.” just above its donation form.
It’s punchy and easy-to-digest like a mini blog post. You could also use a few bullets or a numbered list next to your donation form to get your points across quickly and clearly.
The actual contents of the list give the cause credibility. For example, it states that the nonprofit ranks “in the top 4 percent of programs nationwide for outstanding performance”. Like any good sales pitch, you should use hard evidence to prove the efficacy of what you’re doing.
Girls Write Now also mentions that mentees have published on renowned and well-known sites such as the New York Times and BuzzFeed. This also adds credibility as any reader will know of these sites and (likely find it impressive).
You could do something similar by mentioning any well-known organizations you’ve partnered with or any influential people that support the cause.
As a nonprofit or charitable organization, bagging repeat donors is no doubt one of your key goals and your biggest challenges. So it’s a good idea to encourage ongoing donations from the get-go.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation gives users the option to make a one-off donation or set up monthly donations in the same form.
You can do the same and add the option to donate weekly, monthly, or yearly to your form. And make it as simple as this form where users only need to click one tab or tick one box to set up recurring donations.
Most organizations will likely add a monthly option but consider what makes sense for your organization and take inspiration from how your existing regular donors like to donate.
To further encourage repeat donations, the BLM Global Network Foundation includes the tagline “Build a sustainable movement”. Its well-written copy reminds you that social justice isn’t a one-time thing.
Consider how you can emphasize the fact that you need ongoing support and why. Then create a succinct statement to express your point as the BLM Global Network Foundation does.
Another way to encourage repeat donations is to stay in touch with previous donors. Considering the fact that global donor retention rates have shrunk slightly over the past few years, you’ll need to employ tactics like this to keep people on board.
The Albert Kennedy Trust, an LGBTQ+ youth homelessness charity, gives donors the chance to opt in to email, telephone, SMS, and/or post communications in its donation form.
Giving donors the option to choose how you can contact them is smart. It makes for a better user experience. Plus, they’re more likely to open a message on a channel they use often.
You should emulate the Albert Kennedy Trust here to give you an opportunity to build up a database of donors. You can then contact them by email to:
All of the above keeps even one-off donors engaged and makes people much more likely to donate to the cause again.
When you create a form, there are a few vital design elements you need to keep in mind. Most of all, your form must be designed in a way that makes it super easy to use.
If your form is too complex, users may give up halfway through and abandon their donation. Our data suggest that form conversions start dropping significantly after two input fields.
Climate Emergency Fund is an organization that supports and funds climate activists. It makes donations simple with a clean and easy-to-use popup form.
It walks you through donations one step at a time. In step one, you choose the amount. In step two, you choose between monthly or one-off. And in step 3, select your payment method.
Multistep forms like this prevent users from feeling overwhelmed or put off by the idea of filling in a ton of information in a long form all at once. Choose a multistep form over a traditional form to break down and simplify the process for users.
This form uses big, clear buttons and minimal copy to keep users moving through the steps quickly and easily. You can easily make a donation even without reading the copy on the left.
Take inspiration from the overall style and design of Climate Emergency Fund’s donation form make it your own with branding.
To ensure your visitor follows through with their donation, you must instill confidence and trust. People want to know that your cause is legit and that their money will be utilized in the right way before they’re willing to part with it.
Autostraddle is an LGBTQ+ blog with an emphasis on culture and community. It uses the copy next to the donation form to build trust.
The site shares the exact monetary value of its fundraiser goal. This implies that the folks behind the site have worked out exactly what they need and where it will go. You can do something similar to show that you haven’t just pulled a figure out of thin air.
Autostraddle also describes precisely why the site needs funding when it says, “We’re fundraising so that we can do this work ethically,” and “We’re independent of wealthy corporate owners or a parent company.” This level of transparency builds trust.
Autostraddle also uses this section to evoke emotion in the audience and express why its site is a worthy cause. They explain that the site represents a safe space for people in the community and people have even written to them over the years to tell them it “saved their lives”.
All in all, this is a good example of how to use a donation page for something that isn’t a charity, for example, a blog or a podcast. Go beyond the “buy me a coffee” trope and you’re more likely to get donations.
When you ask somebody to share any kind of information they’re wary nowadays. This is magnified when it comes to financial information.
Your average person online is fully aware of what companies can do and do do with their data. (And they don’t like it.)
Plus, data breaches and information leaks are well-publicized nowadays. So people are conscious of whether their information will be secure whenever they fill in an online form.
The Canadian Urban Institute brings together local pros, leaders, academics, and activists to collaborate on all things to do with city building. It features a secure payment gateway as part of its donation form.
First off, the section is labeled “Secure Payment Options” with a little shield symbol. This emphasizes that it’s secure. Plus, it features the logos of major credit card companies. As these are recognizable to users, they’re subconsciously put at ease.
And if anybody is still unsure about the security of their financial details, they can use PayPal or a gift card to donate instead, which are known to be secure payment methods.
Similarly, you should add multiple secure payment methods to your donation form, as well as trust badges that put people’s minds at rest. Some charities even accept crypto donations now which appeals to those concerned with privacy.
How do you make a form free of too many distractions but still appealing? Use powerful imagery.
Studies show that people are more likely to give when they are able to identify a beneficiary than when they learn statistical information about the scale of a problem. In other words, they’re more likely to respond to a person or other recipient and their story than generalized numbers about the cause.
And we all know how many words a picture speaks.
When you use an image alongside your form, it evokes emotion and gives some insight into what the charity or nonprofit does without the need for words. There’s no better example than this one from the UK-based organization, The Donkey Sanctuary.
Here we have a simple, clean form with a hugely impactful image. It tugs at the heartstrings and tells you exactly who your donation is helping.
You can use images to evoke emotion. Empathy, of course, works but it doesn’t have to be that. For instance, you could conjure up feelings of community, strength, and belonging with images for an activist group. Or you could evoke serenity and happiness with images of people in nature for an ecological cause. Figure out what makes sense for your cause.
When a potential donor finds your donation form, the ultimate goal is to get them to complete it. There are a number of key takeaways from these examples to help you encourage users to follow through with their donations, such as:
What’s next? Take a look at your donation form to find possible improvements.
There’s a common misconception among marketers today. And it’s one that’s misleading the industry:
Popups are only for capturing email addresses.
Yes, popups are great when it comes to growing your email list. But after analyzing 1+ billion campaign sessions, we know that’s not all they’re good for.
In reality, popups are a great way of increasing on-site e-commerce conversions … but only if you’re willing to get creative with them.
So, with that in mind, I want to share nine of my favorite popup use cases that do NOT involve asking for an email address.
I probably don’t need to tell you the importance of using customer testimonials in your marketing.
Inviting buyers to vouch for your products is one of the best ways to convince on-the-fence buyers that your product is worth buying.
But how you use customer testimonials on your website impacts their effectiveness.
For example, featuring general testimonials on product pages isn’t nearly as effective as showcasing product-specific testimonials.
Further, where you place testimonials is also important. If you place them at the bottom of the page—as most online stores do—they’re easy for potential buyers to overlook.
Here’s an example from Sephora:
One way to draw attention to testimonials, without putting them front and center, is triggering a popup to slide in at the bottom of the page after visitors have had time to view a product.
Here’s an example of what it could look like:
My recommendation is to review a product page’s average session duration in Google Analytics and then trigger a popup to show just before visitors bounce. So, if a page’s average session duration is seven seconds, you could show a popup after five seconds.
Create slide-in popups with product-specific testimonials and trigger them on popular product pages. Remember to include people’s names and headshots (provided you have their permission, of course).
We all know how hard it is to find the right size when shopping online.
Often times, without the option to try things on, we end up guessing and choosing the wrong size, and inevitably, returning the product when it doesn’t fit. Other times, we don’t buy at all because we don’t want to risk getting our size wrong.
To overcome problems like the above, many e-tailers offer size guides. But there’s a problem. Because they’re often on another page, visitors have to leave the product page they’re on to view it.
Well, not always.
With a well-designed popup, you can trigger a size guide when visitors click a link on a product page.
The best part is you can have different size guides trigger on different product categories.
Here’s an example of a popup for a product page selling t-shirts:
It’s simple, easy to close, and it doesn’t redirect visitors from your product page.
Avoid redirecting visitors from your product pages to view size guides. Instead, trigger size guides on the individual product page to shorten the journey from visitor to customer.
When you launch a new product line, you want everyone to buy it, right?
The thing is visitors who enter your site for the first time might not be ready to buy yet.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t tell them about your new products.
One of my favorite best practices for promoting new products is guiding ONLY new visitors to a new product page using a slide-in popup.
Don’t ask people to buy yet. Instead, use phrasing like “Discover our new…” or “Learn about our…” and more.
Here’s an example:
It might seem like semantics, but asking people to view a product rather than buy it requires less commitment—and that means more click-throughs to your product pages.
Drive traffic to new products using a popup with a low-commitment call-to-action. Remember to include an attention-grabbing headline and image of the new product(s).
Having a big sale on your site isn’t worth much if people don’t know about it.
Yes, you can email your list and let them know you have an upcoming sales.
But what about the people who aren’t on your list?
One way to create buzz for an upcoming sale in advance is by using a promotion bar on your website. That way, you’ll drive more traffic to a product page when the sale begins.
Here’s an example of how you can promote your upcoming sale with a promotion bar:
By adding a countdown timer to the bar, you can build anticipation for the sale and make your message more memorable.
Create a promotion bar with a countdown timer to promote your upcoming sale. Get people excited about it, and they’re more likely to come back and buy during the sale.
Asking for feedback is not often a strategy you would use to increase sales.
But if asked correctly, it can be highly effective, especially if you’re looking to collect feedback to validate a future product line.
Let me give you an example.
When Bang & Olufsen launched the Beoplay A2 Portable Speaker, they wanted to know which colors their audience preferred.
To get feedback, they created a popup for visitors to give their opinion:
With a popup like the above, B&O was able to collect valuable feedback for future product development.
If you offer products in different colors and ran a similar campaign on your website, you could base stock orders on the colors most voted for by visitors.
Use popups to gather valuable feedback from your visitors. Make it easy for visitors to provide their feedback (e.g. with radio buttons). Base future product development on this information and implement the findings in your sales strategies.
We all know that offering customers tailored product recommendations works.
In fact, research by Evergage found that 45 percent of consumers are more likely to shop on a site that offers personalized recommendations. Moreover, 56 percent of online shoppers are more likely to return to a site that offers product recommendations.
One of my favorite ways to personalize product recommendations is to create a popup that shows based on the number of items a visitor has in their basket.
Let me take you through an example.
Imagine a visitor adds a pair of jeans to their cart. You want to increase their order value, so you show them t-shirts that go well with the jeans they added.
One way you might do that is show a slide-in campaign, like the one below:
With this strategy, you can personalize your product recommendations to the product category and ONLY show it to visitors once they’ve added a product to their cart.
Create different slide-ins that trigger on your most popular product category pages. Show products that go well with the items in the cart and make sure to include images of the recommended products along with an “add to cart” button.
Imagine your checkout crashes and you’re unsure when it will go live again.
You need to inform your visitors and give them a temporary solution so they don’t abandon your site.
A great way to do that is to create a popup informing visitors about the problem and encourage them to stay on your site while you fix the issue.
Here’s what that could look like if you sell makeup:
This type of popup should appear after a few seconds on your site so everyone sees it. And it should be easy to close. (For example, by using two buttons like in the example).
When you tell people that you’re having issues and you’re working to solve it, they’ll have more patience.
And if you give visitors something to do (like asking them to watch a video), you’ll increase the chances of them keeping them on your site until the issue is resolved.
Don’t be afraid to let your visitors know of any problems you’re experiencing. Be honest and your visitors will have more patience. Add a call-to-action in your popup and encourage visitors to stay on your site while you fix the issue.
I think we’ve all tried entering an online store only to feel overwhelmed with choice, right?
Many online stores have multiple products on their product category pages making it can be hard for visitors to figure out what product is right for them.
They can’t ask a shop assistant for help like in a physical store, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give them the same personal experience.
One way to do that is to offer product guides.
For example, you can create a slide-in that offers a guide for products that need further explanation.
When visitors click through, you can ask them a series of questions to narrow down product options.
You can even create a fun quiz to help visitors find what they’re looking for.
Quizzes work well because they’re fun to do, they engage visitors, and they don’t require the same level of commitment as a “Buy Now” or “Shop Now” button.
Show visitors a slide-in offering a guide to help them find the right product for them. Keep your guides short and fun, and make sure to include product recommendations at the end.
Do you have videos on your site?
If so, this strategy is for you.
This strategy involves showing a popup when a visitor has watched a certain percentage of one of your videos.
Pretty clever, right?
Let’s imagine, for example, that you sell golf equipment and have an on-site video tutorial on how to improve your putting stroke.
When a visitor has seen 75% of the video, you could trigger a popup like this:
Why? Because if a visitor has watched 75% of a video showing them how to improve their putting stroke, you can assume they’re looking to improve their putting skills. (They might also be interested in equipment that can help them do so).
Showing them products used in the video makes the decision to buy easier for prospects because they don’t have to sort through hundreds of products. They’ve seen how the products work in the video, so they’re more likely to add one of the products from the video to their cart.
Use your visitors’ behavior on your site to determine what message to show and when. A visitor who’s watched 75% of a tutorial video featuring your products is more likely to buy one of those products than a visitor entering your site for the first time. Set up different popups for the different videos you have to make your message more personal.
Popups can be used for so much more than just for lead generation.
Consider your popups as a shop assistant whose job is to create a personal shopping experience for your visitors.
They can do wonders for your bottom line if, that is, you trigger the right message at the right time to the right person.
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You visit an e-commerce site and see a newsletter popup asking you to join an email list that you’re already on.
Next, you’re notified about a sale in women’s shoes, even though you were heading towards men’s clothing. And when you’re about to exit, you’re offered free shipping on purchases over $100 when your empty cart is nowhere near that amount.
That’s what your average e-commerce popup experience looks like, and it likely results in you leaving a store empty-handed, never to return.
While spending a lot of time and resources on email flows, automations, and ad sequences, most e-commerce marketers fail to align their website popups with the buyer’s journey.
But that changes today.
In this post, I’ll show you how to create a popup for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
From a first-time visitor to a returning customer, you’ll learn how to create a popup that nudges each user down the funnel. That way, you can get more subscribers and buyers, without annoying your website visitors.
Most website visitors fail to convert on their first visit. This isn’t new knowledge.
With the ever-rising number of e-commerce sites, today’s online shoppers have endless options. They need time to look into your return policy, examine if your store is trustworthy, and compare your prices with others.
But this doesn’t mean that they’ll forget about your store after their first visit. Not if you keep yourself top-of-mind with remarkable emails and irresistible offers.
To do that, you need to capture your visitors’ emails with relevant popups. There are three foolproof ways to do that.
Choose the one that best fits you, run them for different periods, or test them against each other.
One of the most effective list building techniques is on-site giveaways. When done correctly, giveaways help you get email subscribers who are interested in your products and want to hear about your future offers.
If you don’t want to offer discounts on every signup, giveaway popups should be your go-to email capture tool.
For your giveaway to be effective and to avoid attracting freebie-seekers, offer a relevant prize such as store credit or one of your top products.
Here’s how your giveaway popup might look:
Notice a few key elements in this popup:
While the points above make the perfect recipe for creating a high-performing giveaway popup, the star of this popup is the countdown timer.
By using a countdown timer in your giveaway popups, you not only state when the competition ends, but you also drive urgency. This way, your visitors know that they need to sign up before the time runs out, or else they’ll miss out on a chance to win this amazing prize.
If you’re a Sleeknote insider, adding a countdown timer to your popups is as easy as dragging-and-dropping an element. Watch my colleague, Sofie, showing you how (along with a jaw-dropping result):
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Many e-commerce brands refrain from content marketing, thinking that it’s time-consuming or irrelevant. That’s why the word “lead magnet” is almost exclusively associated with SaaS companies and bloggers. (Psst: We use them, too.)
To create valuable e-commerce lead magnets, however, you don’t necessarily need to start a blog or a YouTube channel.
Simply put together your expertise in a PDF file or, even better, collaborate with an expert to create a small guide. Next, use this free, valuable resource as a lead magnet in your popups and show them on relevant product pages.
If I had a health and beauty store, I could, for example, create a free eBook on skincare (or work with an expert on it) and show this lead magnet popup only on relevant product pages. In this case, it could be organic or nature-based skincare product categories.
For apparel brands, a lead magnet can be a short guide on “how to find the perfect pair of jeans,” while for food and kitchenware stores, a “recipes for busy weekdays” PDF would work like a charm.
As long as you’re offering something valuable and relevant for your visitors, they’ll be willing to give their email address in exchange for it, and you’ll grow your email list with quality leads.
No matter what your incentive is, make sure to hide your email popups from your existing subscribers. With Sleeknote, it takes one click to do that.
Discounting is a dangerous game. Offer it too often and your visitors will expect it all the time. But don’t use an incentive at all, and your signups will likely take a hit.
While many e-tailers choose to give an immediate discount code upon signup, that’s not your only option.
If you don’t want to discount your products or can’t afford to offer vouchers that’ll hurt your profit margins, you can collect emails with the promise of something more exclusive.
Say you’re planning to run a spring sale in a month or so. By using this upcoming sale as your anchor point, you can persuade your visitors with a VIP code that gives them an additional discount or early access to the sale.
This is what your discount popup could look like:
With a popup like the above, you can evoke a sense of exclusivity and grow an email list with subscribers who are ready to hear more about your offers.
If you want to segment your new subscribers, you could use a multistep popup, instead, and ask for more information in Step Two:
Once you ask for gender, location, interests, or skin type, as in the above example, you can target your new subscribers with more relevant offers and promote your products that fit their needs the best.
Multistep popups are ideal for collecting more visitor information without hurting your conversion rates. Plus, they’re super easy to set up. See this video where Morten shows how multistep works and shares a surprising fact:
Now that you got the visitor’s email address, you can market to them with your emails. That’s why many e-commerce marketers assume that they’re done with popups from this point onward.
On the contrary, when a subscriber clicks a call-to-action (CTA) button in your emails and revisits your site, it’s only the beginning of a new stage in their buyer’s journey.
Since your goal is to nudge subscribers to make a purchase, your popups must help solve their problems, answer their questions, and guide them to the right products.
Here’s how.
Whether you follow the VIP discount strategy from the previous section or not, your sales announcement popups should always highlight exclusivity when you’re showing them to existing subscribers.
With good popup copy and a subscriber-only discount code, you can nudge your returning subscribers to shop from your store even before your sales start. Just like this:
By giving early access to your subscribers, you not only appreciate and engage your email list, but also help them more easily complete their first purchase. This way, they can shop at a lower price without the risk of their favorites selling out. (And you manage to convert them into first-time buyers.)
If you’re already running subscriber-only email campaigns, make sure to support them with sales promotion popups and recreate that exclusivity in your copy.
Lastly, remember to set your popup to show only to existing subscribers, and you’re good to go.
Schedule your popups in advance while planning your seasonal sales. For instance, you can activate this subscriber-only popup ten days before the regular one goes live.
Popups aren’t only for collecting emails or pushing discount codes to your visitors.
When used right, popups can help solve your visitors’ problems and remove obstacles to buying. With a well-timed contact popup, you can offer help when needed and guide your visitors to better buying decisions.
The problem with most contact popups, though, is they make promises stores can’t fulfill. If your popup invites visitors to reach out for help anytime (although your customer service team is done for the day), they’ll likely turn to a competitor that can offer better assistance.
By creating two contact popups, one to show during office hours and another for nights and weekends, you can easily solve this problem.
Since expert help is often needed for complex or high-end products, such as workout equipment, custom-made furniture, or software, you can create a simple popup like the one below and show them on relevant product pages:
While this popup invites visitors to call you during office hours, another one can guide prospects to leave their phone number and get a call once you’re back at the office:
It’s the perfect way to improve your visitors’ shopping experience and nudge your subscribers to move down your sales funnel.
Make sure to offer help at the right moment it’s needed. If a visitor scrolled down 35 percent of a product category page, they might need help choosing the best option. Add a scroll trigger to your popup and show it at the perfect moment.
You got a visitor’s email, given an incentive, and offered your help. Yet, the visitor is about to leave their cart without making a purchase. With cart abandonment rates hovering around 70 percent, you’re not the only one that experiences this.
When prospects are this close to making their first purchase, you can’t afford to let them go. And that’s when cart abandonment popups come into play.
For your cart abandonment popups to be persuasive, you need to pick a compelling incentive. If your message is simply “Don’t go, finish your order!” you may not sound convincing.
Since you already have the subscriber’s email address, your popup should focus on the incentive, be it a discount code, free shipping, or a giveaway entry to win their cart items.
Here’s an example of that:
With its FOMO-evoking copy and benefit-driven CTA, this popup invites visitors to stay on the site and complete their purchase.
Once visitors click the CTA to qualify for free shipping, you can show them a success message including a coupon they can redeem at checkout:
Now that your visitor committed to finishing their order by taking action (clicking the CTA,) they’ll be more likely to use the coupon code.
You can’t think of cart abandonment popups without exit-intent. With our exit-intent trigger, you can show your popup the moment a visitor is about to leave your site. Here, Onno shows how you can set it up with one click (plus, some fascinating stats you need to hear):
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Congratulations!
You’ve gently nudged a first-time visitor into becoming a subscriber, and, eventually, a buyer. Now is your chance to convince them for another purchase when they’re back on your site.
Now that your returning customers know you well, you can also collect valuable insights from this segment, and learn how you can keep them coming for more.
Here are three must-have popups you should show to your returning customers.
There are a million different ways to use product recommendations for your store. You can use them in your emails to invite subscribers back to your site, and in your popups to increase sales.
While bestsellers are typically ideal for helping new visitors get started (thanks to social proof), your returning customers need something else.
When those visitors are back in your store, they’d like to see what’s new since their last visit. And, more importantly, they’d like to be treated differently.
Welcome and wow your returning visitors with a new arrival popup that highlights exclusivity, just like this:
If you want to re-engage your returning customers, you might even add a discount code to your new arrival popup and show it only to them.
The bottom line is, make sure to recognize your existing customers through cookies or URL queries, and welcome them with a handpicked product collection or an incentive they’d like to see.
If you have a Shopify store, you can create custom collections and add them directly to your Sleeknote popups. (If not, we integrate with your favorite recommendation engines, too.)
Upselling is a tricky business. Do it at the wrong time to the wrong visitor, you’ll end up losing them forever. But upsell the right people at the right time, and you’ll get more revenue out of each order.
Returning customers are the ideal targets for upselling since they’re familiar with your store and they’ve already bought from you. Now, you can get a bit more salesy and ask them to spend even more.
The perfect moment to upsell is, unsurprisingly, after the customer adds a product to their cart. However, the secret is to upsell with highly relevant recommendations based on what’s already in their basket.
For instance, when a customer has cart items from the kitchenware category, valued over, say, $75, you can recommend cheaper products from the same category:
Since they’ve already made a bigger commitment, they’ll be more likely to comply with your offer and add more products to their carts.
With Sleeknote’s SiteData feature, you can show personalized upsell popups to each visitor based on what’s in their basket, how much they’re about to spend, what brands they’re interested in, and much more. Check out this page where we explain how you can use SiteData.
It’s a common challenge among e-commerce marketers. You want to get more customer feedback, but don’t want to shift customers’ focus away from your products.
The best time to survey your customers is, in fact, when they just made a purchase. Not only because it’s the moment when they’re most excited about their new buy, but also because they’ll be more likely to answer your questions at this moment.
According to Cialdini’s liking principle, we tend to say yes to the requests made by people we know and like. If a customer has bought from you, not only once but twice, they probably like you enough to say yes to a small favor.
Plus, they have more information about your store than any first-time visitor, so they can give you more valuable feedback.
Here’s what your post-purchase survey popup might look like:
If you want to increase your survey conversions, consider promising a free gift or a discount code customers can use in their next order. That way, you can also make them return to your store once again.
Use page-level targeting to make sure that your popup shows only on the success page of your checkout flow.
Your visitors are not the same. They’re in different places in their buyer’s journey.
Your job is to help them move to the next stage by removing any friction and helping them out throughout the way. And, as you saw today, website popups are the best tool to achieve that.
Copy these nine must-have popups in your e-commerce site and create your own flow today.Whenever you need help, feel free to book a free call with one of my talented colleagues, and they’ll help you use popups on your site the best way possible.
Whether you work with e-commerce, B2B, or SaaS, attracting quality traffic to your website is likely among your top priorities as a marketer.
However, getting new visitors through the door is costly and time-consuming, so you want to make the most out of your hard-earned traffic.
After all, with customer acquisition costs going through the roof, you can’t afford to lose an interested prospect after they land on your website.
That’s exactly where exit-intent popups come into play.
With elegant, to-the-point exit-intent popups, you can target visitors who are about to leave your site and show the right message that will convince them to stay and take action.
When used correctly, exit-intent popups can help you:
Here are seven different ways to use exit-intent popups to get you started—with examples and templates you can easily copy for your brand.
What Is Exit-Intent?
1. Turn Abandoning Visitors into Subscribers
2. Prevent Cart Abandonment
3. Offer an Incentive (to Some Visitors)
4. Remind Benefits
5. Recommend Alternative Products
6. Handle Common Objections to Buying
7. Collect Visitor Feedback
Exit-intent is a technology that detects when a visitor’s cursor moves outside the browser window.
Since this action hints at the intent to leave a website, many marketers use this sweet moment as the last attempt to persuade visitors with a popup.
But there’s a caveat: Exit-intent popups often come across as annoying—simply because marketers overuse them.
The key to creating exit-intent popups that don’t bother your prospects is to stay relevant for each visitor group.
For example, a first-time visitor who’s abandoning your homepage is at a different stage of the buyer’s journey compared to a returning customer who has $100-worth items in their cart.
If you want to keep your exit-intent messages relevant, personalized, and unintrusive, combine this technology with other targeting options available in your popup builder.
Let’s take a look at seven ways to do that.
Asking for an email address when someone is about to leave your website is nothing new.
What I suggest here is to add more context to your email popups to make them relevant to the abandoning visitor, rather than show the same popup to everybody.
One way to achieve this is to use page-level targeting for your exit popups.
For example, if a visitor is about to leave one of your product pages, they’re likely interested in your store but unsure about that product’s fit, quality, or price. Here’s how you can grab their attention and turn them into email subscribers:
Now, if someone is browsing coffeemakers, they’re likely interested in coffee equipment, beans, and such. With an exit popup that only shows on specific product pages, you can make your email list more attractive to the abandoning visitor with a promise to notify them when they can buy these products for a lower price. It’s a much more compelling offer than “join our weekly newsletter.”
If you want to personalize this popup further, you can use a merge tag and update your popup copy automatically based on the product or category name the visitor is browsing:
With this type of exit popup, you’ll disturb much fewer visitors and get more subscribers who’re looking forward to hearing about your offers.
Remember, quality over quantity.
Cart abandonment popups are the most common use cases of exit intent.
Just because you cover the exits doesn’t mean that visitors will magically stop leaving your site, though. Your popup’s offer, design, and copy play a big role in persuading shoppers to stay.
If you’re already offering welcome discounts on your store, the exit-intent position is a great place to reiterate your offer. For instance, you may have a site-wide welcome slide-in that looks like this:
For exit-intent, you can slightly adjust your copy to make it fit the context and drive urgency, like this:
This way, you’ll get more leads for your email list that you’d otherwise lose. Plus, you’ll give visitors a reason to stay and place an order.
And what if you’re not currently running any offers on your site? That takes me to my next point.
If you don’t want to discount your products for exiting visitors, I completely get you. Discount codes can hurt your profit margins and reduce your products’ perceived value.
Whatever your incentive is (a free product, shipping, or small discount), my suggestion is to offer it only to a portion of your visitors.
Not just any portion, though. Incentivize warmer leads—the serious shoppers—to complete their purchase.
A valid indicator of buying intent in e-commerce is basket value. So consider offering, for example, free shipping to orders over a certain basket value and use exit-intent popups to remind shoppers they’re missing out on this opportunity.
If a visitor has, say, $50 in their cart and decide to leave your store, they can see this exit popup:
Whereas another shopper with only $30 doesn’t yet qualify for your offer and sees this popup instead:
By reminding the second group of visitors what they’re missing out on, you won’t only recover an (almost) abandoned cart, but you’ll also make them spend more and increase average order value.
So far I assumed you’re willing to spend money to make money. Meaning, you’re okay with taking a small dent into your revenue to get more visitors to stay on your site and keep shopping.
What if you’re not?
The good news is, you don’t necessarily have to offer anything extra to convince abandoning visitors. You can use exit-intent popups to remind shoppers what they’re about to miss out on.
Do you have a solid return policy, a bulletproof satisfaction guarantee, unbeatable product quality, or fast delivery? Remind visitors of these additional benefits of shopping from your store.
Three simple bullets often do wonders in this type of exit popup:
It’s one thing to hear what makes your shop unique from you—the store owner or marketer—and another thing to hear it from your happy customers. In other words, if you want to take this exit-intent popup one step further, use your customers’ words instead of marketing copy.
Insert real screenshots of your top customer testimonials or embed your Trustpilot reviews into your popups to add credibility and social proof to your claims:
Now your existing customers will help convince on-the-fence visitors to stay on the website and choose your store over others.
Zero dollars spent. Lots of potentially lost revenue recovered.
There are hundreds of reasons why a visitor might be leaving their cart behind or abandoning a product page without taking action.
If you’re offering seamless website navigation, using trust badges, providing multiple payment options, you’re already taking measures to prevent cart abandonment.
But it’s not always your website itself that’s causing friction. Maybe that specific product isn’t right for the visitor or the price is higher than they expected.
In either case, there’s a perfect opportunity here to guide shoppers back to your store and that’s by recommending alternative products when they’re about to leave your site.
Let me illustrate with an example. Say, a visitor is browsing bags and then decides to leave the page. You could (a) offer them a discount or (b) guide them towards what’s already on sale:
If they’re shopping for bags, chances are, they’re also interested—if not more interested—in bags at a discounted price. An exit popup like this draws more visitors to your sale and stops abandoning shoppers without hurting your profits.
If you don’t have a sale section on your store, you can recommend products directly in your exit-intent popup, instead:
With a product recommendation popup that shows on exit-intent, you can redirect abandoning visitors’ attention to your bestsellers and help them keep shopping with one click.
It’s not the same thing when someone visits your homepage and decides to leave immediately because you’re not a good match, compared to when they add products to their cart and then decide to leave.
In the second scenario, there’s clearly something stopping them from placing an order. With an exit-intent popup, you can address and solve this pressing issue before it causes visitors to leave for good.
A simple contact form that shows at the right time works especially well if you’re selling subscriptions, high-priced products, or items with a longer buying cycle:
While this popup offers a helping hand at the right time, it requires you to be ready to answer questions. It doesn’t handle the objections right away, either.
An even better example you can follow, then, is this one:
A short, pre-recorded video that handles the common customer objections about your products, delivery, or returns, and shows when shoppers are about to leave your site.
What’s better, you can set the first popup to run during working hours, and schedule the second popup to show only when you’re away.
It’s personal, efficient, and, best of all, it costs nothing.
No matter how many initiatives you take, you won’t convert all abandoning visitors into buyers, that’s a given. But at least, you can make the most out of the situation.
If you have pages with high bounce rates or if your cart abandonment rates are higher than average, there’s no better way to learn the reason than to ask people who are leaving your site.
Didn’t they trust your website? Couldn’t they find what they were looking for? Or did they quickly want to check their delivery status or see if you have a certain product in stock?
All it takes is a simple survey popup with radio buttons, asking how you can improve your store, like this:
While the above form is ideal for new visitors or top-of-the-funnel prospects, you may need to get more detailed feedback from people who are deeper in your sales funnel, abandoning, for example, your checkout or pricing pages.
An exit-intent popup with an embedded third-party survey is the perfect way to achieve that:
Once you know the main reasons why people leave your site, you can go back to my previous point and better address those issues in your future exit popups.
Exit-intent popups aren’t everyone’s favorite. They’ve been misused by marketers for many years.
In this post, you read several ideas that you likely have heard before in one way or another.
But today, I wanted to show you a new way to use exit-intent popups—one that convinces the right group of visitors to stay on your site rather than annoy all of them.
Hopefully, I did a good job, and now you know that there’s a better way to use exit-intent popups to get the most out of your website traffic.
Recreate these exit popups in your own popup builder or get started with Sleeknote for free and test all these possibilities for yourself.
The travel industry has slowed down dramatically in the past year for obvious reasons.
But as restrictions ease and things gradually return to normal, travel is picking back up—both domestically and internationally. So, there should be a considerable increase in the amount of people traveling over the course of 2021 and beyond.
This means it’s the perfect time for your travel agency to get back in full swing and reel in new customers. One of the best ways to get the most from your online traffic and convert a higher percentage of your leads is by using popups.
And when done correctly, they flat out work, with one studying finding they helped boost leads by 162 percent and increased newsletter subscriptions by 114 percent. To point you in the right direction, here are seven of the best travel agency popup examples we’ve seen.
Pack Up + Go is a travel agency with an interesting angle. Customers tell them their budget and fill out a quick survey, answering questions about their travel dates, preferences, interests, and other information. Then, Pack Up + Go plans a surprise destination for them.
While it’s probably not ideal for planning-obsessed travellers that like to stick to a rigid itinerary, it’s a cool concept that’s perfect for more adventurous spirits. I’d personally be interested in trying this out at some point.
This popup works because it quickly directs a visitor’s attention to Pack Up + Go’s offering by asking, “Where will you explore next?”
Below the header is some quick info letting visitors know they’re now booking vacations for spring and summer 2021—something many people are no doubt wondering about.
And this travel agency offers two clearly written CTAs just below that where visitors can either click on “Trip Types” or “Sign Up.” If a visitor clicks on “Trip Types”…
…they’re taken to this page, which gives them an overview of the process, quickly getting them up-to-speed.
Or, if they click “Sign Up”…
…they’re taken to this page where they can tell Pack Up + Go about their travel history, interests, preferences, and budget to get started.
So, rather than just having prospects aimlessly browsing through their website, this travel agency’s popup quickly directs them to essential information with very little effort. That way, visitors know what’s going on, and Pack Up + Go greatly increases their chances of converting.
In terms of design, this popup’s strong points are its:
This is a branch of the American Automobile Association (AAA) that “partners with leading travel industry vendors to secure exclusive benefits and money-saving offers, from cruise packages and hotel discounts to car rental deals and all inclusive vacations.”
AAA Travel specifically caters to residents in western America, including Alaska, Arizona, Northern California, Nevada, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming.
And in order to provide an ultra personalized experience, they feature this popup that 1) welcomes visitors to the website and 2) asks them to enter their ZIP code so AAA Travel can give them local content.
They simply enter their ZIP code in the box and click “Go.”
I’ll use a ZIP code from Missoula, Montana for this example.
After entering it, the rest of the experience is customized based on the visitor’s location.
In fact, the URL even switches to this one, which is specifically for travelers in the mountain west area of Montana in the US.
I like this popup for a few reasons. First, it’s clean and uncluttered, with the information clearly broken up so visitors can quickly digest the offer.
It includes simple, straightforward instructions, asking visitors to enter their local ZIP code to receive customized local content. The CTA is clearly marked and contrasts nicely with the red against the white background.
And finally, it takes full advantage of personalization—something that’s incredibly important when you’re looking to appeal to prospects and stand out from the competition.
Sorina Mone of Magnolia CMS notes that most modern travelers are looking for content that’s specific to them, and using personalization techniques like this is critical for delivering the right content at the right time. So, there’s plenty to be learned from this travel agency popup example.
The next brand needs no introduction. Almost everyone is familiar with Booking.com by now, and this Dutch travel agency allows customers to book in 120,000 destinations worldwide.
This isn’t your conventional popup that appears front and center of a website. Instead, it’s a bit more subtle and is designed to bring attention to one particular section of Booking.com’s site—the “Sign in” page.
A quick look at the popup, and the interest of visitors is instantly piqued when they see that by signing up they can save up to 50 percent on member-only deals.
That’s huge! All visitors have to do is click on the conspicuously placed CTA…
…and they’re taken to this page where they can sign in or create an account.
By using this popup strategy, Booking.com is able to dramatically increase the number of people who sign up. And from there, they can gradually nurture leads and send them targeted content to encourage a purchase.
This example shows that you don’t have to be ostentatious with your popup and go nuts with bright colors or huge headlines. You just need it to attract eyeballs and include an offer that’s enticing enough to get visitors to take action.
Here’s another example of a subtle popup from GetYourGuide—a Swiss online travel agency that allows customers to “find, compare, and book sightseeing tours, attractions, excursions, things to do and fun activities from around the world.”
Its main purpose is to gather data to create a better experience for visitors over time. To do that, GetYourGuide asks visitors to say why they’re viewing their website.
For instance, visitors can select, “I’m here to explore where to travel next.”
After clicking on that, GetYourGuide thanks them for helping out and explains that gathering feedback like this helps the travel agency improve. Then, they ask for the visitor’s consent by either clicking on the check mark for yes or the “X” for no.
By doing this at scale, GetYourGuide can learn more about their visitors, which helps them gradually optimize their offerings to create an A+ customer experience.
So, if you’re looking to gather feedback to better understand your customers, this is a nice idea to try out. And like the example from Booking.com, it shows that you don’t have to be flashy about it.
In fact, your popup doesn’t even have to be directly in the center of the page. As long as it naturally attracts attention without disrupting the user experience, you should be good to go.
Here’s an agency that helps travelers find cheap business and first class flights around the world.
Skylux Travel is all about making luxury flight accommodations more affordable, which is what helps them pull in a larger demographic than competitors who cater solely to high-end customers with deep pockets.
Their popup is a simple email capture form where visitors can join the Skylux Travel privileged travelers club to receive notifications on secret sales and find the best seats.
It starts off with an eye catching headline of “Interested in Business Class Deals? Then it provides a quick overview of what visitors get by signing up.
And on the right-hand side, Skylux Travel displays a slider featuring real-time deals on business class and first class flights to major cities like Dubai and London.
All visitors have to do is enter their email address in the box and click the “Subscribe” CTA.
This travel agency popup works because:
And for visitors who aren’t interested, they can exit out of the popup without any fuss by clicking the “X” icon or anywhere outside of the box. If your goal is to entice travelers to join your newsletter, this is a fantastic template to borrow from.
After scouring well over a hundred different travel agency websites, one major trend emerged. The vast majority of sites feature a search box where visitors enter their departing location, where they’re heading to, travel dates, and desired accommodations.
And in most cases, this section is placed prominently—typically in the center of the homepage. That’s fine, but it does create a problem if you want to place a popup so visitors see it above-the-fold without having to scroll down.
But I think this travel agency popup example from CheapCarribean.com—a brand that helps customers book vacations in the Caribbean, Mexico, Bahamas, and Central America—has a nice workaround for this issue.
They place their popup in the bottom right-hand corner of their homepage so that it overlaps slightly with the search function, while still effectively getting their offer across. Check it out.
Visitors can clearly see the search feature and enter their information. But they also see CheapCarribean.com’s attractive offer in the popup below. The headline “LESS Planning. MORE Beach.” in reddish pink letters certainly stands out.
And the concise paragraph below that does a great job of explaining the benefits readers get by signing up to the CheapCarribean.com newsletter.
They get the best deals, insider tips, and $100 off their first vacay. Nice!
I like this popup because it’s so simple and because it’s got the “firepower” needed to get the attention of visitors.
Aesthetically it looks great, and even though it’s a small popup in the corner, the text and other elements are spaced out to not look cluttered. If you use the classic search box above-the-fold on your travel agency homepage but still want to inject a popup, this is a smart approach to take.
My final example is from All Inclusive Outlet—an agency that allows customers to “choose from 400+ world class resorts, shop exclusive deals, and book a discount all inclusive vacation today.” It’s very straightforward, asking visitors to sign up for their newsletter.
But their offer is a definite attention grabber that trumps what many of their competitors are doing. Here All Inclusive Outlet gives subscribers a chance to win a free 3-night stay at Melia Punta Cana Beach—one of the premier destinations in the Dominican Republic.
This popup features a beautiful image of the beach, which instantly helps visitors connect the dots, and the signup form gets right to the point.
And to ensure their email offerings are personalized, All Inclusive Outlets uses the “Preferred Gateway” drop-down where subscribers can choose the primary city they’ll be travelling out of.
As I mentioned before, personalization is everything in the travel industry. So, anything you can do to make the visitor experience more personalized is going to have a positive impact.
The travel industry is a competitive one. As of early 2021, there were over 66,700 travel agencies in the US alone, with a total business growth rate of 19.2 percent.
The traffic that you bring to your site is precious, and you want to make sure to direct visitors to your key offerings and give yourself a chance to nurture leads that aren’t ready to convert right away.
Popups are far and away one of the best ways to go about this and allow you to quickly get visitors up-to-speed. The travel agency popup examples I’ve highlighted here show some specific ways to compel visitors to engage and get them to take action.
And you can use these ideas to create your own winning popup.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s ugly, intrusive popups. But if there’s anything I hate more, it’s ugly intrusive popups that ignore copywriting best practices.
I’ve seen more than my fair share of bad popups on the Interwebs recently, so, today, I want to put the world right by sharing my favorite popup copywriting examples.
More specifically, I’ll share why they’re effective, the psychology behind them, and how to improve your popup copy if you’re already using popups.
You might assume that you need to write copy from the perspective of you, the writer, or on behalf of the brand you’re representing. And ninety-nine percent of the time, you will be correct in that assumption.
But on rare occasions, if you know your audience well, and you want to try something different, it’s worth writing from the viewpoint of a “character,” fictitious or otherwise—even if that character isn’t human.
The Humane Society of The United States is a great example of a brand using a character copy in a way I haven’t found online before. When you go to leave its site, you see this exit-intent popup.
Opening with an emotionally-evocative headline (“I deserve a better life”), the non-profit writes its plea from the perspective of a puppy. “Right now, animals like me are suffering in puppy mills, research labs, and factory farms. Join the fight to protect us,” invites the canine before asking you to “donate now.”
The message is powerful, no doubt, but the psychology behind it is even more interesting. We’ve all made excuses to high-street charity workers, but a suffering animal, pleading for help? That’s much harder to reject.
Do you have to rewrite your copy from the perspective of an animal? Not necessarily. But if you’re in a market where your target demographic is inclined to say no on autopilot (as they often are with non-profits), it might be enough to pull on their heartstrings long enough to get some much-needed donations.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention BarkShop in an article on good copywriting best practices. We’ve written about the brand before (here and here) thanks, in part, to its ability to write and speak like its ideal buyers: dog enthusiasts.
In its email popup, for instance, the brand offers 10 percent off your next order by asking, “Got a good doggo?” before assuring you, “they deserve all the goodies.”
While there’s a lot to admire about the form’s catchy design, what I most gravitate towards is its headline. Not only does BarkShop use its target buyer’s language, but it also asks a preloaded question that few dog enthusiasts would say no to. (Who doesn’t have a good doggo?)
You’re likely already using language that resonates with your ideal buyer on your product pages, in your email campaigns, and throughout your other marketing materials. But if you’re not using them in your popups, it’s worth considering, if not split testing.
Brain Pickings is “an inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, psychology, and more.”
Like many websites, Brain Pickings targets abandoning website visitors with an exit-intent popup. But rather than ask for an email, as practiced, it previews a poem, before inviting you to read on in the call-to-action (CTA).
In a world every marketer is copying one another and achieving similar results, it’s sometimes worth forging an uncharted path—even if that path means few opt-ins.
A campaign like the one above won’t drive more email conversions. Nor will it work on everyone. But it will keep users on your website longer, and in today’s hyper-driven attention economy, that’s only a good thing.
Like many people, I’m currently working from home. And, in an effort to safeguard my productivity, I recently decided to research programs that block certain pages on my computer. (*Cough* Wikipedia *Cough*)
That’s when I came across Freedom. While browsing its homepage, however, I came across its website popup offering 40 percent of an annual plan.
While the headline itself is compelling, what piqued my curiosity was its CTA buttons. On the left, “April40,” a coupon; on the right, “Choose Plan.”
While popups with two CTAs often reserve one for opting out, Freedom’s two CTAs, by contrast, give identical outcomes. No matter whether you click “April40,” or “Choose Plan,” both CTAs take you to its pricing page.
If, then, you’re an online retailer selling a monthly or annual subscription, consider testing one CTA versus two CTAs that result in the same action. Who knows, you might see a bump in conversions. I know Freedom did. I became a customer. (R.I.P. Wikipedia.)
I’ve written about Apuls before here. But it bears repeating because its copywriting is a work of art. From its intriguing teaser asking, “Have You Considered These Exercise Bikes?”…
… to its engaging form recommending products by budget, Apuls have mastered giving prospects what they’re looking for when they’re most engaged.
Upon closer inspection, you can see that each bike is accompanied by a recommendation relating to your budget. Offer One, for instance, boasts “high-quality at a good price.” Offer Two, by contrast, assures it’s “for those who just need to get started,” while Offer Three is reserved “for those who want the best.”
Apuls’ copy is a great illustration of the power of framing because:
If you have a product category that caters to all levels of experience, consider experimenting with a popup that has three calls-to-action based on how visitors self-identify.
I’ve written about Harry’s before here. But what I didn’t cover in that post, was a tactic so clever, it’s now my favorite e-commerce marketing strategy for activating customers.
Here’s how it works.
If, during checkout, you abandon your cart, Harry’s shows this cart recovery popup.
Let me break it down because there’s a lot going on here:
While Harry’s popup is concerned with selling a monthly subscription, you can easily tailor the tactic by “bumping” prospects to qualify for free shipping.
Here’s an example of how that might look:
Another brand utilizing a cart recovery popup is retailer Kate Spade. However, they’re doing something I haven’t seen before (and it’s as creative as it is clever).
The brand, like Harry’s, has a popup in place for those abandoning their cart.
And at first glance, there’s nothing out of the ordinary here. You’re asked to enter your email in exchange for an incentive. But upon closer inspection, there are a few subtleties that you can easily overlook.
First, Kate Spade frames its offer as something you “qualify” for, something only a few are privy to. Next, it offers, not one, but two, time-bound benefits—benefits that are free, regardless of whether you’re a first-time visitor—and offers them at no extra cost. Third, each benefit is formatted as a bullet point for easy reading.
You don’t always need to offer freebies or discount your products. Sometimes, it’s enough to take what you’re already offering for free elsewhere and repurpose them for new visitors.
During Black Friday 2019, I was browsing online, avoiding the allure of a good bargain, hoping to snag a few good popup examples that I could feature in future articles…
And that’s when I came across the below popup from Shein.
During its Black Friday promotion, Shein offered website visitors, not one, but two time-specific coupons that they could redeem during a six-day period.
While I confess, the copy isn’t as strong as it could have been (they could have written a more compelling headline, for instance), I wanted to showcase this popup because of the brand’s inventiveness.
While other retailers offered one, generic site-wide coupon, Shein offered two, safe in the knowledge that a percentage of subscribers would likely use both, and therefore, splurge on more during the promotion.
While this tactic was used during Black Friday, it doesn’t have to be limited to the once a year holiday. You could easily adapt this strategy for any holiday or clearance sale.
Earlier, we discussed how curiosity gaps are an effective way of inviting users to take action, whether that’s adding an item to their cart or entering their email address.
But as Topshop nicely illustrates in this popup, curiosity gaps don’t always have to deliver on the promise immediately.
In its headline, Topshop warns readers not to miss out, before promising “a special treat on your birthday.” Me, being a sucker for surprises, entered my email, and forgot all about the offer.
That is until months later when my birthday rolled around (January 21st, if you’re asking), and I got this email:
When I scrolled to the bottom, I saw, spoiler alert, a discount off my next order.
Not only does Topshop masterfully close a curiosity gap they opened (as much as 364 days earlier), but they do so on the one day people are likely to be mindful of those who remembered their big day.
Not enough brands are taking advantage of wishing its customers a happy birthday. (I’m not criticizing; we’re guilty of this at Sleeknote, too). And that means there’s an opportunity to capitalize on. Right now.
Having copy that moves readers to action should be an integral part of your business. And having copy in your website popups is no exception.
Following good popup copywriting best practices isn’t hard. Look at what the top brands are doing, adapt the principles for your business, and you, too, will enjoy the fruits of your labor.
As an ecommerce marketer, you’re likely spending much time and resources driving traffic to your online store, growing an email list, and reducing cart abandonment.
The good news is, there’s a perfect tool for achieving all the above and more. And it goes by the name website popup.
But not the ones that make people reach for the close button right away.
I’m talking about timely and personalized popups that are tailored to your visitors’ needs.
Let’s take a look at 11 proven ways of using popups to engage your website visitors and turn them into email subscribers, first-time buyers, and repeat customers—without annoying them or hurting their browsing experience.
1. Grow a Segmented Email List
2. Gamify Your Forms
3. Collect More Phone Numbers
4. Gather Valuable Feedback
5. Reduce Cart Abandonment
6. Promote Your Offers
7. Upsell and Cross-Sell
8. Welcome Returning Subscribers
9. Offer Guides
10. Inspire Shoppers
11. Offer Help When Needed
With consumers’ privacy concerns growing bigger, ecommerce marketers focus more on collecting zero-party data—the data people voluntarily and actively share with you.
After all, the more you learn about your prospects, the better you can personalize your emails.
One way to collect zero-party data without hurting your conversion rate is asking questions in multiple steps.
Say you grab the most important information such as name and email address in the popup’s first step:
You could, then, in the next step(s), ask follow-up questions, such as interests, birthday, or a phone number:
If you use an advanced tool, like Sleeknote, you can still capture visitors’ email addresses even if they don’t fill out the second step. (However, we found that 76 percent of people who submit their email in the first step of a popup also fill out the second step.)
Many visitors today are bombarded with aggressive full-page overlays making opting in a far from a pleasant experience.
One way to make opting in more fun is gamifying the experience.
Rather than resorting to generic email capture popups, you can boost your conversions by inviting visitors to spin a wheel and get a chance to win different prizes, like in the example below.
A word of warning, though: gamification is a double-edged sword. Use it wrong and you’ll lose not only conversions but also your visitors’ trust. But use it right, and you’ll see a spike in the number of quality subscribers, interested in your products.
When using gamification, make sure you:
With around 97 percent of Americans owning a cell phone, SMS marketing is a goldmine waiting to be tapped for ecommerce brands.
Growing a marketing list with quality phone numbers, however, can be a challenge for many marketers looking to grow their lead base. That’s where popups come in once more.
If you’re looking for a quick solution that’ll kickstart your SMS list, you can add a phone input field to your email capture forms.
To make sure you comply with TCPA regulations, you can create a multistep form and ask for visitors’ email address, first:
And in the following step, collect their phone number and SMS marketing consent:
Remember to incentivize text signups with an additional reward, such as a giveaway entry, and give people a compelling reason to submit their phone number.
Every ecommerce marketer wishes they had more insights into their audience. What do customers want? Why do visitors bounce from the site? Did they find what they were looking for?
The key to collecting valuable feedback from your website visitors is to ask your questions to the right people, at the right time.
For example, if you’re looking into customer satisfaction and ideas for improvement, create a survey popup and show it only to shoppers after they place an order.
Set your survey to show on your checkout success URL to ensure you target the right audience at the moment when they are most engaged with your store.
Abandoned carts are a headache for all ecommerce brands, costing on average $18 billion in revenue each year.
While you can’t prevent cart abandonment completely, you can reduce it significantly by sending abandoned cart emails and recovering some otherwise-lost sales.
You can even stop visitors from leaving your site with an exit-intent popup before cart abandonment happens.
With a popup that shows when visitors are about to leave, you can recommend alternative products, invite shoppers to get in touch, or remind them of your existing discounts and offers.
You’re about to launch your next sale campaign. Your emails are ready and your ads are all set up. Your first goal is to bring as much traffic to your sales as possible.
Your next (if not more important) goal should be to make the most out of this traffic.
By guiding shoppers toward the relevant product page and helping them find the products they’re looking for, you can drive more orders from your sales campaigns.
A countdown popup like the above nudges shoppers to browse the sale before it’s too late and creates a sense of urgency, driving more revenue from your sales campaigns in the process.
One of the best ways to incentivize non-buyers to become buyers—and potentially spend more than they planned—is to offer free shipping. But rather than offer free shipping to all visitors, you can go one step further and offer it only to visitors that already have items in their cart.
With Sleeknote’s SiteData feature, you can show visitors the amount they need to spend to qualify for free shipping in your store:
If you want to take this strategy one step further, you can insert relevant product recommendations into your popup and make it even easier for shoppers to spend more.
Most marketers think all popups are good for is collecting emails.
But as you’ve seen in this post, that’s not their only use case. In fact, popups can also help you engage the people that are already on your email list.
Rather than ask your existing subscribers if they want to join your list over and over again, consider offering a special thank you discount when they return to your site.
Or, if you’re not a fan of discounts, promote your new arrivals or the bestselling products in your store:
Not all popups need a direct, salesy call to action. When used correctly, popups can also double as virtual assistants that help shoppers make better buying decisions.
Whether you need a size guide, product guide, or video guide, you can create different popups for different goals and set them to show when shoppers most need to see.
For example, if you have products in your store that are difficult to buy online, such as clothing, footwear, or eyewear, you can create mini guides and promote them with popups.
A few best practices to bear in mind:
Of course, if you want to go one step further, you could create video guides and insert them into your popups to complement the guide you’re promoting.
A good store clerk assures even the most casual of browsers leave their store feeling satisfied.
But it doesn’t take much to create an online equivalent of such a positive experience with popups and slide-ins.
By showcasing seasonal gift ideas or trending products, you can inspire shoppers to discover their new favorite items much like a helpful store clerk.
Sidebar campaigns are especially ideal for this type of message.
They don’t take up much screen space, yet can still display a lot by allowing visitors to scroll through.
While you can’t always answer every question a shopper might have, you can do the next best thing: offer on-site help when visitors most need it.
If you already know when and where shoppers often drop off, consider setting up customer support popups to show on those pages. This might be when people view your high-ticket items or after they visit five product pages.
Or if you prefer, play it safe by placing your contact form inside all relevant content, such as your homepage or product pages.
You can even set up scheduled campaigns based on your working hours, and replace this form automatically with another one when your support team is available to pick up the phone.
There’s much more to popups and slide-ins than simple lead capture forms.
As you’ve seen in this post, popups can help you achieve all your ecommerce goals, from growing an SMS list to gathering customer insights, to reducing cart abandonment, and selling more.If you’re looking for an easy-to-use ecommerce conversion tool that can help you do all of the above (and much more) try Sleeknote for free now.
In a recent post, I explained why you should never buy an email list.
(You can check it out here to learn the details and see why most experts consider it to be a cardinal sin of digital marketing.)
Along with discussing the pitfalls of this approach, we also mentioned some better alternatives for growing an email list without buying one.
For this post, I’m going to expand on that conversation and delve into how to build an email list for free.
I’ll list six of my favorite list building strategies along with examples from notable e-commerce brands that have mastered this technique.
So once you’re done reading, you should walk away with a handful of highly effective techniques to quickly build your email list without having to resort to dodgy tactics like buying one.
Here we go.
Whether or not e-commerce brands should use popups is a debate that’s been raging for years.
On the one hand, it’s an effective way to capture a shopper’s attention and quickly let them know about your newsletter, along with any perks they’ll get by signing up.
This, in turn, can have a significant impact on the number of subscribers you gain and the leads you generate.
A recent study even found, “Some popups can convert up to 40 percent of your website visitors into subscribers and leads.”
So there’s something to it.
On the other hand, popups can be annoying and intrusive if abused, which can diminish the user experience and create friction.
When this is the case, they can do more harm than good.
But when you put it all together and look at the big picture, popups can be extremely beneficial and instrumental in growing an email list, as long as you use them responsibly.
By this, I mean creating non-intrusive popups that showcase your newsletter but without distracting or annoying the pants off of shoppers.
Let me give you a couple of examples so you can see what I’m talking about.
The first is from Pilgrim, a Danish brand that sells women’s jewelry, watches, and sunglasses.
Here’s the popup shoppers see when first arriving on their site.
It’s certainly prominent and instantly attracts eyeballs.
But it’s located on the bottom left-hand side of the screen so that it doesn’t obstruct a shoppers entire view when browsing—something that’s known as an interstitial.
Instead, shoppers can still easily browse without the popup getting in the way.
And if they want to get rid of it, they can simply click on the “X” button, which is marked and resume regular browsing. No sweat.
This way, Pilgrim presents the information they want and lets shoppers know that by signing up, they’ll receive a newsletter full of inspiration, sneak peeks at new collections, and so on, but without having the popup hog the entire screen.
Another brand that uses non-intrusive popups is Frank Body, who specializes in a coffee scrub for all-natural skincare.
Their popup is located in the bottom right-hand corner and offers 10 percent of the first purchase, which should pique the interest of many shoppers.
But just like the example from Pilgrim, it doesn’t dominate the screen and still allows for a seamless browsing experience.
And for those who simply aren’t interested in the offer, they can get out of the popup either by clicking on the “X” or “Maybe later”—in which case, it disappears.
The bottom line here is that popups can be a tremendous asset and work well for accelerating the growth of your email list. You just need to design them in a way that they’re non-intrusive and help rather than hurt the digital shopping experience.
Do that, and you should be in good shape.
Personalization is a sales and marketing approach that started off small but has spread to numerous types of campaigns.
And email is no exception.
“Ninety-four percent of customer insights and marketing professionals across multiple industries said personalization is ‘important,’ ‘very important,’ or ‘extremely important’ for meeting their current email marketing objectives.”
One particular way you can implement personalization into your email marketing is with advanced page-specific targeting where you display a customized optin based on a shopper’s behavior.
This makes it easier to reach the right shoppers at the right name, thus increasing their odds of opting in.
A good example of a brand that does a great job at this is Apuls, an online retailer that sells quality training equipment and supplements at an affordable price.
Here’s what their homepage looks like.
Now, let’s say that a shopper is specifically interested in buying supplements and clicks on that link in the navigational menu.
From there, they want to know more about magnesium supplements from Apuls, so they click here.
At this point, they’re taken to the page for magnesium supplements.
Considering a shopper has reached this particular page, Apuls can surmise that they likely have an interest in dietary products.
As a result, they feature this targeted popup based on that information, which gives shoppers a chance to win a dietary supplement package worth $3,000.
I think this is an excellent way to optimize your offers to smaller segments of shoppers, which greatly increases their odds of opting in.
It’s just a matter of choosing the right conditions for offers to be triggered—something that can be done with many email list-building tools, including Sleeknote.
If you have a sizable social media following, you can leverage it to build an email list quickly with minimal effort. All you have to do is add sign up CTAs to your profiles.
Here’s an example from Dollar Shave Club’s Facebook page.
It’s positioned front and center, so users see it as soon as they land on the page.
That way, anyone who follows their brand on Facebook or simply stops by their page has the potential to become an instant email subscriber and can be funneled into their optin list.
And fortunately, setting up a CTA on Facebook is dead simple.
Just check out this quick guide from dotdigital Group for a step-by-step walkthrough.
Another idea is to incorporate email optins into your social media posts.
Take this Instagram post from GreenBlender, a company that sells smoothie recipes, fresh ingredients, and superfoods, for example.
Here they have an offer where users can download their free eBook by clicking on the link.
After doing so, users arrive on this page where they enter their email address and ZIP code before downloading.
If you already have a built-in audience through social media, why not tap into it and increase your subscriber base?
Whenever there’s already a level of rapport like this, a good percentage of your social media followers should be interested in signing up.
And this can instill an even deeper sense of loyalty.
If you want to pique a shopper’s interest, a good way to go about it is to incentivize your offers.
There are a lot of ways to do this, but I find that some of the most popular perks include giving shoppers a discount or offering free shipping.
That’s what women’s activewear company Sweaty Betty does with their offer.
Here’s what shoppers see toward the top of their site.
And here’s the offer they see after scrolling down toward the bottom.
It’s pretty enticing and gives shoppers 15 percent off their first full price order, as well as free shipping and returns.
And this can make a big difference in motivating shoppers to take action and sign up.
If they were only lukewarm on the idea initially, adding incentives like this could be just what it takes to get them on board.
So rather than using a bland, boring optin that simply says something generic like “Sign Up,” do something to sweeten the deal and make shoppers feel compelled to subscribe.
You want to be cognizant of your profit margins when determining your offer, but the increase in your number of sales and customer lifetime value should usually justify this move.
Here’s the scenario.
You have a shopper that has been browsing through your e-commerce site and has added an item to their cart.
They’ve decided to go through with their purchase and are on the checkout page.
This is a time when they’re often receptive to offers like signing up for an email list.
Just put yourself in their shoes for a second.
They have a fairly strong level of interest in your brand and products.
After all, they’re just about to complete a purchase.
So this is the perfect time to let them know about new products, exclusive offers, discounts, etc. they can gain access to by signing up.
That’s why it’s smart to experiment with adding an optin to your checkout page.
As long as you incorporate it in a way that’s seamless and flows with the rest of the checkout process, a good chunk of customers will go ahead and become subscribers.
Luxury shoe brand Jimmy Choo does a great job of this on their checkout page and allows customers to painlessly sign up by entering their email (something they need to do anyway to make a purchase) and click on the box, thereby agreeing that they want to receive notifications.
Jimmy Choo makes it super easy and requires minimal steps to avoid any friction.
And if they’re not interested, all they have to do is not click the box.
As a final note, I don’t recommend having the box pre-clicked because this goes against guidelines from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which mandates that people opt-in manually.
This means it’s technically illegal if you’re selling to customers located in the European Union or the European Economic area.
This last strategy is a little unconventional but makes perfectly good sense if you think about it.
If a shopper clicks on your “About” page, it means they’re interested in learning about your brand, story, culture, and so on.
So it’s not that much of a stretch to assume they’d also be interested in joining your online community and receiving updates from your brand.
That’s why I think placing an optin box in this location is a logical move.
After a shopper has learned a bit about you and what differentiates your brand from other competitors, you can nudge them to sign up.
Men’s grooming company Beardbrand pulls this off perfectly on their “About” page, where they introduce key team members and provide links to their social media accounts.
Here’s what shoppers see above the fold when arriving on this page.
And here’s the optin they see toward the bottom that encourages them to join the Beardbrand community.
Notice that they also incentivize the offer by letting shoppers know they’ll get into Beardbrand’s 5 Day Grooming Bootcamp to take their beard to the next level.
This, combined with the community aspect, should get plenty of shoppers on board and provide the motivation they need to become subscribers.
And this is certainly a formula you can mimic and use in your own list building efforts as well.
Just be sure the copy you use focuses on inclusivity and jives with your brand identity.
Email has been and continues to be one of the absolute best channels for generating leads, nurturing them, and establishing long-term loyalty.
And that’s unlikely to change any time soon.
As long as people keep routinely checking their email, it’s going to be a viable medium.
If you were wondering how to build an email list for free, the six simple strategies I outlined here should point you in the right direction.
At the end of the day, finding success just boils down to presenting your newsletter in logical locations with a lot of visibility and using the right incentives.
With a little experimentation, you should be able to come up with a winning formula that helps propel your email list so that you continually pull in new subscribers.
There are many ways to nurture B2B leads and build a strong rapport with them until they’re ready to buy.
But hands down one of the most effective continues to be email marketing.
If you can collect their email address, you can add them to your newsletter and send them targeted content to familiarize them with your brand, highlight the benefits of your product or service, and build a solid relationship.
So, even if they’re a little unsure initially, this gives you the chance to win them over in time.
And when it comes to collecting emails, a well-crafted B2B popup is arguably the best way to go about it.
Here are six of my favorite B2B popup examples you can learn and draw inspiration from.
Contently is a complete content marketing platform “that powers the creation of personalized content across every stage of the customer journey.”
Here’s what their popup looks like.
And here’s why I like it.
First of all, it’s extremely visual with an eye-catching image placed front-and-center.
This is important because we discovered through original research that popups that contain images have an average conversion rate of 3.80%, while those without images only convert at 2.07 percent. That’s a whopping 83.57 percent higher.
So, making a snappy-looking image like this one from Contently is a no-brainer when creating a B2B popup.
Next, there’s an excellent header.
Saying “Everything you need to succeed at content marketing” is simple, to the point, and instantly piques the attention of visitors.
It addresses the “what’s in it for me?” aspect that everyone is interested in, which helps lower their guard. In turn, this should get a considerable percentage of visitors to seriously consider the offer rather than instinctively exiting the popup.
Finally, the CTA absolutely nails it.
Saying “Get a Free Content Consultation” lets visitors know exactly what step they need to take and what they’ll get by doing so.
In this case, they’re taken to this page where they’re asked to fill out their contact information, along with some basic company information so they can get a free content consultation from an expert.
So, the main takeaways here are to make your B2B popup visual-centric, use a strong header and CTA, and generally keep it simple so visitors can figure out what you’re asking without demanding too much cognitive bandwidth from them.
Here’s another B2B brand that provides content marketing consulting, along with social media strategy, digital marketing, and customer experience strategy.
It’s very comprehensive.
Again, this popup has a strong visual component with the image on the left-hand side standing out. For me, that was the first thing my eyes were attracted to.
And the copy right below the image lets visitors know exactly what Convince and Convert are offering—their B2B influencer guide.
The main header on the top right-hand side expands on the offer, letting visitors know what’s in it for them, whereby getting the B2B influencer guide, they can learn how to boost their brand awareness and generate more leads.
And the text below that elaborates more, going into greater detail.
So, the header and text act like a great one-two punch that should grab a good percentage of their visitors’ attention and get them legitimately interested in the offer.
Lastly, Contently has a strong CTA that follows best practices like featuring a button with plenty of contrast and using action words.
Notice that there’s nothing vague about it. The formula for this popup is simple, but it does everything it needs to grab the attention of visitors and get them to sign up.
Okay, admittedly I may be a little biased with one as it is from Sleeknote. But objectively speaking, this is one of the best B2B popup examples I’ve come across recently. So, I couldn’t help but share it.
The number one thing this popup has going for it is the value proposition. It lets Sleeknote visitors know they’ll get access to ultra-insightful future posts and a lot more.
We first pique their interest with this engaging header.
And just below it, we elaborate, letting visitors know some of the epic things they’ll get by subscribing, such as lifetime access to our best marketing resources, along with three specific posts so they’ll have a better idea of the kind of content we create.
The CTA is good and features a high contrast button that uses the same purple color you’ll find throughout Sleeknote so that it stays “on brand.”
And one other thing is the small text below the CTA that goes into even more detail saying, “You’ll get actionable strategies, free resources, and news from us once a week. Unsubscribe anytime.”
I think this really helps flesh everything out and provides the added bit of information many visitors need when deciding whether or not to subscribe.
I should also point out that we make it super easy to exit out of this popup, which is important for preventing disruptions and annoying visitors.
That’s a big deal because a popup should never lower the customer experience. It should enhance it.
Whenever a visitor exits, the popup turns into a “teaser” at the bottom right-hand of the screen that they can easily re-open if they change their mind later on and want to subscribe.
I find that using a teaser like this is a great way to raise the overall conversion rate without creating friction with visitors or being punished by Google for using an interstitial.
For more on teasers, check out this Sleeknote post, which includes some great examples.
Let me start off by saying that this is by far one of the most simplistic B2B popup examples I’ve encountered.
MobileMonkey gets right to the point with their popup, quickly spelling out exactly what their offer is and why visitors should be interested.
Now let me highlight the strengths of this popup. To begin, they create a sense of urgency by using “THIS WEEK ONLY!” in all caps for their main header.
As you’re probably aware, urgency can have a major impact on conversions, with one study finding that it can potentially increase overall sales by as much as 332 percent.
You want to be ethical of course and not use underhanded, manipulative tactics, but basic techniques like this can most definitely motivate more visitors to opt-in.
The following section beneath that saying “Get MobileMonkey’s Stay Connected Special Edition” brilliantly communicates their offer, while staying concise with the wording.
Here they simply let visitors know that for this week only they can get access to a special edition of their app by signing up.
And after that, they say “FREE FOREVER,” also in caps, which is huge for really piquing their visitors’ interest.
I know that I personally perked up when I saw that it was completely free with no strings attached.
This is followed by some additional text that attaches even more value to MobileMonkey’s UVP.
And at the bottom is a straightforward CTA, letting visitors know what to do next.
Put it all together, and this B2B popup does an excellent job of getting visitors interested in a great offer and succinctly highlighting the benefits, along with what they need to do in order to take advantage of it.
The only thing that would make this popup better is if they included a nice image somewhere on the right-hand side.
This is a media company that’s one of the best resources for everything social media marketing related. I find myself browsing their site quite frequently, in fact.
And I like Social Media Examiner’s popup for four main reasons. First, it looks great.
It instantly grabs the attention of visitors, and the combination of the green background, yellow CTA, and image on the left-hand side really pop.
So, rather than feeling at best inconvenienced and at worst, repulsed, which is how I personally respond to not so well designed popups, this one makes me glad that I stumbled upon it.
And if you can nail the visual component of a B2B popup, as Social Media Examiner does here, you’ve already won half the battle.
Second, it features a really nice offer that delivers real value.
Although a free industry report by no means reinvents the wheel, it definitely has value that can help business owners step up their social media marketing game and grow their companies. So, visitors quickly know what’s in it for them.
Third, they use quantifiable numbers to A) lend credibility to the report and B) let visitors know what’s inside.
In the text below the header, it says “400,000 are already using these insights,” which establishes instant social proof and lets visitors know that the report is legit.
It also says it includes “60+ charts to stay ahead of the social media game,” which as a fan of visual data is something I can really appreciate. And I’m sure many other people feel the same.
Fourth, there’s a killer CTA where the yellow button beautifully contrasts with the green background, and it tells visitors precisely what action they need to take.
I also thought that the little PDF icon to the right of the text was a nice touch.
This B2B popup example checks all of the boxes and is one you can draw a lot of inspiration from.
ConversionXL is the go-to conversion optimization platform for many businesses and offers some of the most in-depth online courses for enhancing every aspect of a website.
So, it only makes sense that they would create a rock-solid B2B popup that would entice visitors to provide their email address.
And here’s what’s great about it. The first thing that I notice is that it features a distinctive round design that I don’t see used very often.
That right there should help grab the attention of many visitors, especially when a rectangular design is the default.
Here ConversionXL is literally thinking outside the box.
The next element to point out is the clear, concise header saying “TAKE OUR FIRST LESSON FOR FREE: DIGITAL PSYCHOLOGY.”
It’s a definite attention grabber, and clearly stating that it’s free should be enough to get many people to give the offer serious consideration.
Just under that, ConversionXL provides some extra details, letting visitors know exactly what they’ll get in the free mini-lesson and that it features their Senior Behavior Scientist, Brian Cugelman, which quickly adds more credibility.
And lastly, there’s a fantastic CTA, which features a red button that creates contrast and stays on-brand with ConversionXL’s color scheme.
Also, notice how they don’t overthink it with the wording. It simply says “Get access now,” which lets visitors know what will happen by clicking the CTA.
This is tangible proof that you shouldn’t try to “get too cute” with your popups. Just stick with best practices and focus on offering real value to your visitors, and you should be in good shape.
As you can see with these B2B popup examples, there are some definite patterns that go into creating a winning popup.
Mainly, it involves:
It’s also nice to throw in some social proof whenever it makes sense to add validity and show that your offer is legit.
And if you want to give visitors a second chance to sign up if they don’t opt-in right off the bat, I suggest using a teaser, which you can create with Sleeknote.
That way the visitors who do exit aren’t lost forever.
Just use these B2B popup examples as inspiration to fine-tune your own popups and take your opt-in rate to the next level.
If you’re running and growing an online store, you’re likely building an email list.
And if you are, you might have noticed something marketers rarely mention…
Not all list building strategies are relevant to online retailers.
Sure, writing guest posts and creating lead magnets are excellent list building strategies (to name a few). But how many busy e-tailers have the time to invest in them?
In truth, you don’t need 100+ ways to grow your email list. Rather, you need a few strategies that you can master and continually optimize over time…
And that’s what you’ll learn today.
In our new list building guide, we’ll share everything you need to grow, manage, and, more importantly, monetize a growing email list.
Chapter 1: List Building Basics
In this chapter, you will learn what an email list is and why you need to build one even if you’re new to online marketing.
But first things first.
An email list is a collection of individual email addresses that you have permission to send email marketing campaigns to, generally stored within an email service provider.
Users may choose to opt into an e-commerce email list for several reasons, including but not limited to:
While users have their reasons to sign up for an email list, you may be thinking: “What’s in it for me as an e-commerce marketer?”
Is it because everybody’s doing it?
The answer is both yes and no—for at least two reasons:
But there’s a more important reason why you should be building an email list: Not everyone who visits your site is ready to buy from you.
Different prospects are at various stages of the buyer’s journey. Some already know a lot about your products, whereas others only heard about you today.
With a well-segmented email list full of high-quality leads, you can persuade every prospect at each stage of your sales funnel.
Further, you can create space to convert subscribers into buyers and buyers into repeat customers.
While there are many ways to do this wrong, there is a handful to make it right. And that’s what we’re covering in the next chapter.
Chapter 2: How to Build an Email List from Scratch
There are countless ways to build an email list.
But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from analyzing 1+ billion popup sessions, it’s that there are a few that work better than others.
So, with that in mind, here are 15 list building strategies that top e-commerce brands are using today.
Giving visitors a discount in exchange for their email is a fine line.
Offer something for free too often, and visitors will come to expect it. But avoid it altogether, and they’ll likely lose interest in your brand, or worse, move on to a competitor.
One way to strike a balance, without discounting for everyone, is to offer discounts to certain user segments such as new visitors.
That’s what Danish ceramics manufacturer Kähler does when offering discounts:
Kähler knows that new visitors are unlikely to buy on their first visit. So, to nurture them further, they capture their email and market to them later through email.
Another user segment to consider targeting, aside from new visitors, is visitors viewing a specific page—like your checkout.
With an average of seven out of every ten visitors abandoning their cart, it makes sense to offer abandoning visitors a personalized, checkout-specific incentive to complete their order.
Milledeux, a children’s retailer, offers a 15% discount to visitors exiting their checkout:
The best part?
Milledeux reduces cart abandonment and captures more leads to market to later with email.
Increasing a prospect’s average order value without coming off as “salesy” isn’t always easy.
But it’s a LOT easier when offering a page-specific discount based on basket size.
Here’s how it works:
When a website visitor adds a product to their basket—say, a pair of socks—you invite them to add more to get a discount using a page-specific popup.
Targeting visitors based on their basket size increases your average order value and creates a better, more personalized browsing experience for visitors.
You’ve likely read not to offer a newsletter to new website visitors.
But it’s important to understand that rarely is the newsletter itself the cause for low conversion rates. Rather, it’s about the newsletter’s positioning.
If your copy intrigues and informs the reader of the benefits they’ll get from joining, offering a newsletter is often enough to build a good email list.
Many brands nail their newsletter’s positioning, but one of my favorites is Poo~Pourri:
With witty copy and a creative popup design, Poo~Pourri pulls readers in with the allure of new products, super-secret sales, and more.
Bottom line: If your newsletter is that darn good, then tell your readers. That’s often enough.
We’ve all heard about content upgrades.
Yes, they’re useful and can increase conversions by as much as 28.83%…
But can they work for online retailers, too?
Absolutely.
While browsing Italian holidays on Hideaways, an online travel agency, I noticed they offered an Italian phrasebook on certain pages.
Hideaways can market Italian-focused offers to subscribers via email, and subscribers can get personalized offers based on their browsing preferences. Win. Win.
To leverage content upgrades for your business, you need to tag new subscribers and segment them in your email service provider (ESP).
Let’s be honest: No one wants a brand to ask them to join a newsletter they’re already on.
Yet, many online retailers retarget returning visitors—even though they already have their email.
That’s not a good place to start a new relationship.
Be the exception by excluding existing email subscribers from seeing any newsletter popups. Then, create a campaign that invites them to browse a popular product page, join a giveaway or another action that moves them down your funnel.
For example, if you’re an apparel retailer, you might welcome returning subscribers with a popup asking them to browse your newest arrivals.
It’s a small change, but as we’ve seen with many customers, it makes a big difference, both to the user’s experience and your bottom line.
It’s no secret that Black Friday is one of the busiest times of the year for retailers…
And most profitable.
According to one recent report, the average adult drops $483.18 on Black Friday, alone.
That’s a lot of dough to capitalize on during the holiday season.
Unsurprisingly, many online retailers build as much anticipation before the big day.
And it makes sense:
Building anticipation by informing prospects of what to expect—like how much they will save—increases the likelihood they’ll splurge on the big day.
Leather goods-maker, Bellroy, runs a unique Black Friday campaign every November…
And it’s a great way to get more subscribers.
First, they create a Facebook lead ad, teasing a subscriber-exclusive offer for Black Friday.
When you click the link in the ad, Bellroy redirects you to a dedicated landing page telling you to, “Put yourself on the list.”
In their copy, above the optin form, they open a curiosity gap by teasing a one-day-only promotion. Here’s an excerpt:
The best part of this strategy is you can use it for ANY holiday—Cyber Monday, Fourth of July, Christmas Eve, to name a few.
Just remember to deliver on the big day. No one wants to feel short-changed when it comes to getting a bargain.
Your order confirmation page has the potential to be one of the best lead generating pages.
I mean, think about it.
A customer has just said yes to buying from you, so making another request—like asking them to join your list—is a no-brainer.
Offering a discount is best avoided, given that the customer just bought from you. So asking them if they would like deals on similar offers is a great way to increase signups.
Here’s an example of what a campaign like that might look like:
Another powerful incentive is to offer points to redeem for future purchases if you have a loyalty program. Not only is it a great way to get more emails, but it’s a perfect chance to boost customer retention.
You’re likely familiar with upselling as a way to increase a buyer’s average order value.
But what you might not know is that you can also upsell items that are out of stock AND grow your list.
Too good to be true?
Think again.
Before moving its inventory to Amazon, FiftyThree had an online store.
Here’s an example of the product page for their digital stylus.
Like many online retailers, they promoted related items below the fold, which, for the above product, included replacement tips and erasers.
But here’s the kicker:
The replacement tips and erasers were often out of stock.
However, if you clicked “Notify me,” FiftyThree triggered a popup where you could enter your email and get notified when they were back in stock:
The best part was, they also included a checkbox to get permission for promotional mailings. Meaning, even if you never bought the above items, you were likely to buy something eventually.
Collecting emails for out-of-stock items is a great way to grow a list of targeted prospects. And it’s one few online retailers are using to their advantage.
It’s easy to assume that anyone looking to contact you is already a subscriber.
But let’s be honest, that isn’t always the case.
One of my favorite, underutilized list building strategies involves asking for a user’s email on your contact page.
Cotton Bureau is a perfect illustration of what we call “contact page list building.”
When you go on their contact page, there are the usual input fields you would expect from a contact form such as “Name,” “Email,” “Subject,” etc.
But when you scroll down to the submit button, you see the following:
Not everyone will subscribe, of course. After all, that wouldn’t be realistic. But as far as low-hanging list building goes, it’s worth testing.
Sam found the following list building strategy while researching his post on Harry’s marketing.
Let’s say you’re an online retailer, and you don’t ship internationally, but you’re planning to someday. What do you do if a prospect, living abroad, wants to buy from you?
One strategy is to inform them you don’t ship abroad. Another more practical approach is to ask if you can email the prospect if/when you begin shipping to their country.
There are two ways to approach this. Either through a customer service representative and manually adding the prospect to your list as Harry’s does:
Or, more efficiently, through an email popup. Tuft & Needle have one on their product page that shows ONLY to users outside of the United States.
It’s not for everyone, of course, especially if you’re not looking to grow. But it’s perfect if you’re looking to gauge interest in emerging markets—and build a list of targeted prospects.
You’ll likely agree with the following:
That’s why everybody loves giveaways.
While it’s common to run giveaways on social media, it’s more effective to host them on your website.
When you run a giveaway on your e-commerce site, you:
First, make sure you pick a relevant prize, such as a selection of your products or a gift card that users can redeem in your online store. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an email list full of freebie-seekers.
Next, create a giveaway popup to grab your visitors’ attention without disturbing their browsing experience.
Here’s a brilliant example by Jysk Vin:
What makes this giveaway a great example? The following:
Running an on-site giveaway helps you grow your email list fast—without spending a fortune on ads.
There’s one list building strategy we’re seeing more and more online retailers use due to its effectiveness…
And that’s using quizzes and surveys.
Beardbrand is no stranger to this strategy. Since implementing it, they’ve generated 150,000+ leads from this strategy alone.
Here’s how they’re using it:
When you arrive at Beardbrand’s home page, there’s a call-to-action above the fold, inviting you to take a quiz to learn the type of beardsman you are.
When clicked, Beardbrand asks you a few questions about your beard preference. Then, before revealing the results, Beardbrand asks you to enter your email to join their newsletter.
And it’s clever. Because Beardbrand disguises their request as a question, you think it’s needed to get your results, but it’s not—it’s optional.
Whether you enter your email or not, Beardbrand gives you your results.
Fabletics are another brand using quizzes to grow their list.
After completing their survey, they ask you to enter your email in exchange for an “exclusive offer”:
And it’s super-effective for three reasons:
If you’re not building your list through compelling quizzes, you’re missing out. If the above brands are anything to go by, they work like gangbusters.
Most online retailers have an optin form on their website footer.
And if you do, too, you’re in good company.
The problem, though, is few brands take full advantage of it.
Take ASICS Tiger, for example:
As much as marketers might want to believe, nobody wakes up in the morning, wishing for more newsletters in their inbox.
But saving money or getting money off a future purchase? Now THAT is something anyone can get behind.
That’s what furniture retailer Chairish do.
Rather than write generic copy like, “Join Our Newsletter”—a practice you need to avoid at all costs—they invite users to get money off a future purchase.
It’s a simple tweak in your copy. But time and time again has shown that it’s often the littlest changes that make the most significant difference.
If you have an iPhone, you’re familiar with red notification badges. They’re impossible to ignore, and clicking on them, even to disable them, is unavoidable.
Yes, they’re annoying. But notifications are surprisingly effective. Research has found they activate our brain’s dopamine pathways, making them super addictive.
It’s no surprise, then, that many online retailers use similar technology to engage users.
Our old friends at Beardbrand combines a badge notification on their site with a click-activated popup:
Users see a red notification badge, feel compelled to click it, and see a popup asking them to subscribe.
Granted, it won’t work for everyone, but for those who are curious (or accustomed to it), it might be enough for them to click and subscribe to your brand.
Chapter 3: List Building Best Practices
So far, we’ve discussed the importance of list building and 15 ways you can grow an email list today.
In this chapter, we’ll share five list building practices you need to know to get more subscribers and higher conversions.
It’s a challenge many marketers face…
You want to get more visitor information beyond name and email address…
But you’re also aware that more input fields mean fewer conversions.
One way to get more visitor information—without seeing a drop off in conversions—is by using what is called a “Multistep Popup”:
In the first step, you ask for a website visitor’s necessary information like their name and email address, similar to how you would with a regular popup.
Then, after the visitor enters their details, you follow up with questions about their gender, interest(s), age, and more, to enrich that data.
The best part is, even if they exit on the following step(s), your email service provider (ESP) still captures their name and email address.
Pretty clever, eh?
Did you know that you can personalize your popups for visitors who view certain product categories?
For example, if you sell clothing for both men and women, you can create two campaigns targeting each gender.
One for men…
And one for women:
You can even add a hidden field to each campaign to send the gender to your ESP without having to ask visitors for it.
When collecting emails, you want to target and personalize your popup to each visitor.
With geo-targeting, for example, you can target visitors from a certain geographical area using a super-specific message:
You can also personalize popups based on geo-targeting AND basket size, as we discussed earlier, to reduce abandoned carts:
The more personalized your popup, the more likely visitors will engage with your call-to-action.
Many marketers avoid collecting email addresses on mobile because they’re afraid Google will punish them for hurting the user experience.
But you have nothing to worry about if you know how to use mobile popups the right way.
The goal, with mobile users, is to create device-specific email popups, including:
With limited screen space, you need to ensure that each line of copy earns its place on the form.
You know the importance of testing your advertising efforts.
So it should come as no surprise that you need to test your popups too.
But what should you test?
Well, besides testing colors, incentives, and headlines (like most marketers do), you should also test timing.
We recently ran an experiment to see if we could increase the conversation rate for our blog’s email popup.
The first popup (the control), had a time-based trigger, meaning it showed seven seconds after a user visited a blog post.
The experimental popup, however, had a scroll-based trigger, meaning it showed after a reader scrolled 35 percent down the page.
The result was surprising.
The experimental, scroll-based popup, outperformed the control by 62 percent.
The popup itself was the same, but the timing made a huge difference.
My point?
Always test your popups beyond the basics.
You might be surprised by what works and what doesn’t.
When using popups to collect emails on your site, you want them to match your site’s design.
One way to find great colors for your popup is to use a color palette like Adobe Color.
To discover a color scheme, upload a screengrab of your website—or the page you will show the popup on—to learn which colors appear in the screenshot. With this information, you can quickly identify colors that go well with your site’s design and use them in your popup.
A great example of a brand using their website’s design in its popup is Platinum Trading Academy:
Their popup uses the same color palette as the website but with a lighter background color to make it stand out.
When your popups match the design of your site, they’ll come off as less intrusive, which, in turn, will improve your site’s conversion rate.
Did you know a popup’s content doesn’t have to stay inside the box?
You can experiment with different shapes to make your popups more unique and eye-catching. The more distinctive popups are, the more likely they will stand out.
Fortunately, they’re just as easy to create as square popups. You create images in different shapes and then add them as floating images to your popup.
Here’s a unique example I created recently:
By having the images in different shapes around the popup’s edges, you can showcase more product images without covering any of the copy in your popup.
To learn more about how to create images in different shapes using Photoshop, read this in-depth guide.
Writing persuasive copy doesn’t always come easy.
But it’s an essential aspect of creating a high-converting popup.
Below, I’ve put together a few best practices and copywriting tips to help your fingers move across the keyboard more easily.
There are many ways to write a good headline. But above all, you need to communicate value. Specifically, the value the reader will get if they take action.
One of my favorite copywriting techniques is taking the value you’re offering and turning it into a headline.
If you want to offer visitors a chance to win a pair of sneakers if they sign up for your newsletter, your headline might ask:
It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
Sure, there are many types of headlines that work just as well, but if you’re unsure how to start, this is the way to go.
The body copy of your popup has to build on the headline and convince visitors to sign up.
Here, you need to focus on what’s in it for the reader.
You can use different incentives, such as discounts, competitions, freebies, and more.
Let’s continue with the sneaker competition example:
Remember to mention to your participants that you will also add them to your newsletter (if that’s the case).
Your call-to-action copy needs to be perfect.
It’s your final chance to convince visitors that taking action is the right thing to do.
Again, you need to include value in your CTA. And make it actionable.
If your visitors sign up for a chance to win something, that should be the focus of your CTA:
Try to get visitors to agree with your CTA, and you’ll get tons of new signups.
Here are all of the above put together in a popup:
If you position your offer correctly and add value to it, your visitors will be lining up to join your newsletter.
So, there you have it: the definitive guide to e-commerce list building.
We learned a lot from writing this guide, and we hope you got a lot out of it, too.
You know the old saying: “It all starts with an email list.”
As the era of third-party data comes to an end, your email list becomes more important than ever.
Not any email list will do, though. You need a list full of relevant and interested email subscribers. And well-thought-out newsletter signup forms are the key to achieving that.
If you need inspiration for crafting a high-converting lead capture machine, read on to see the 15 best signup form examples from top e-commerce brands, and what you can learn from them.
What Is a Signup Form?
1. Allbirds
2. Recess
3. Pit Viper
4. Message
5. Georg Jensen Damask
6. Kapten & Son
7. Stelton
8. WoodUpp
9. MeUndies
10. Death Wish Coffee
11. Charlotte Tilbury
12. Hollister
13. Rituals
14. Poo Pourri
15. United by Blue
A signup form is a type of form that allows visitors to join your marketing list by submitting their email address or phone number.
Signup forms help e-commerce marketers collect valuable information about prospects that they can later use in their marketing automation.
Traditional signup forms consist of simple input fields, such as email address and first name, whereas new-age forms often contain interactive elements, like gamification or videos, to increase the number of signups.
Newsletter signup forms come in many forms and shapes, including email popups and slide-ins…
…sidebar campaigns…
…embedded forms…
…floating bars, and much more.
No matter the format you choose, there’s a lot you can learn from these 15 brands that approach email signup forms the right way.
Although it’s common to incentivize email signups with a discount code, it’s not the rule.
On the contrary, when overdone, discounts may reduce the perceived value of your products, causing people to expect a new incentive each time.
If using discounts all year round isn’t a sustainable strategy for your brand, you’ll like how Allbirds collects emails on its site:
When you scroll down to the bottom of the company’s homepage, you see a signup form asking if you want “first dibs.”
No discounts or free shipping. Just the benefit of joining Allbirds’s email list: being the first to hear about new limited-edition products and other fun updates.
To help you commit even more easily, Allbirds notes that you can opt out anytime. If you’re looking for a simple signup form that’ll stay on your website footer all year round, follow Allbirds’s example.
Design and copy are both important in website popups. However, my next example, from Recess, favors the former over the latter.
Similar to Allbirds, Recess has an email form at the bottom of its homepage, and it fits the brand’s aesthetics perfectly.
For reference, Recess has a beautifully designed homepage with a unique font and lively colors.
Surely, the copy could use some work but, overall, Recess’s signup form is consistent with the brand’s personality.
If you’re thinking of embedding an email form to your homepage, as Recess does, try blending it in with your website and its surrounding elements.
You don’t necessarily need to wait until shoppers scroll to the bottom of your website before asking them to join your email list.
Pit Viper, an eyewear retailer known for its unique website design, uses an email signup form in the middle of its homepage.
It’s a unique one, for sure, and not just for the sake of its retro design.
Pit Viper’s form copy contains humor from its headline to placeholder text. It also hints at the popularity of the company’s email list by suggesting its list is teeming with subscribers.
“Your mom” jokes may not be your brand’s thing, but you get the idea. In the world of generic, boring forms, a little humor can go a long way. All in all, Pit Viper’s form example is another testimony for matching your form’s design and copy with your brand’s personality.
Placing your signup forms in a fixed position, such as in the footer or as a page-break, is only one way of collecting emails on your site.
Although optin forms like the above are quite unintrusive, you risk your forms going unnoticed by most of your visitors. Luckily, there’s a way to make your email signup forms stand out without hurting your visitors’ shopping experience.
The fashion retailer Message knows this well. That’s why, when you visit its shop, they first greet you with a teaser, previewing its offer:
Only after you spend a few seconds on the homepage looking around, this form gently slides in—still, without disturbing you or taking up the entire screen:
The form design is minimalistic and the message is straightforward. The brand’s incentive is crystal clear, too: sign up and get a 10 percent discount code.
By showing a teaser first and using a slide-in animation, Message draws attention to its signup form without intruding on shoppers.
While Message goes for simplicity, Georg Jensen Damask pays special attention to aesthetics.
Similar to the previous example, the company greets new visitors with a subtle teaser at the bottom of its homepage, inviting you to “be the first to know.”
After you spend a few seconds on the page, this elegant signup form slides in:
Notice how the form’s color scheme, fonts, and design style perfectly matches with Damask’s website.
You also see a second form step after submitting your name and email address in the first step.
Rather than overpopulate its signup form with long marketing consent text, Damask saves the legal formalities for the second step. You’ve already sent your email address and name, so ticking off a checkbox is a no-brainer.
Multistep forms, like Damask’s, are ideal for collecting information without distracting people from the original goal.
Aiming for simplicity (and higher conversions), most signup forms contain one or two input fields.
Our research also shows that popup conversion rates start dropping significantly after two input fields.
On the other hand, you want to collect more data about your prospects, so you can target them with relevant and personalized offers.
There are two workarounds for this problem, and Kapten & Son chooses the first one. Following best practices, Kapten & Son first shows visitors a teaser of its offer:
After giving you some time to look around, the company shows this email popup in the middle of the page:
The form is simple and clear. It consists of an image, two input fields, and the promise of a discount code.
But that’s not all.
By adding two small radio buttons to this form, Kapten & Son segments its new subscribers by gender. It’s a super simple question and radio buttons make it ridiculously easy to answer.
If you have more (or tougher) questions to ask new subscribers, go for the second option instead, and use forms that consist of multiple steps. You will get richer lead data without sacrificing conversions.
Discount popups are pretty much the industry standard for collecting emails today. But if you don’t feel comfortable handing out coupon codes upon each signup, they are not your only option.
Stelton, a Danish houseware brand, can back me up on that. Firstly, Stelton welcomes website visitors with a straightforward teaser.
Stelton has no time to lose, so it invites you to click the teaser and shows this slide-in right away:
The form design is simple and the number of input fields is optimal.
Choosing another popular incentive, Stelton gives you a chance to enter its monthly giveaway by joining its email list.
Rather than pick a one-off, giant, irrelevant prize for its giveaway, Stelton gifts the winner one of its products. Since it’s more affordable than, say, a brand new iPhone, Stelton can easily repeat this strategy month after month.
What’s more, the image of the prize and its monetary value make the giveaway more attractive, helping the company collect more emails with this form.
Giveaways, like Stelton’s, work like a charm in turning visitors into top-of-the-funnel leads.
Other brands, like WoodUpp, go straight for the middle of the funnel in their signup forms to collect warm leads. Here’s how WoodUpp does that.
The teaser copy clearly tells what to expect from WoodUpp’s signup form:
And this is what the form looks like:
WoodUpp’s incentive isn’t a tangible product, but a nice €400 store credit. In other words, it’s a gift that requires you to return to WoodUpp’s online store and spend (ideally €400 or more) on its products.
WoodUpp’s signup form is a brilliant example of how to capture ready-to-buy email subscribers.
It’s not only the incentive or the placement of your signup form that determines its success. Your form’s design and copy can make or break a conversion too.
MeUndies clearly cares about both.
The company’s email form pops up out of nowhere, a bit too early for my taste. But other than that, I like what I see.
The form design is simple and its playful colors align well with MeUndies’s brand personality.
The incentive is summarized in one line, and in the form of a question, rather than a call to action that reads “Take 15% off your first order.”
MeUndies doesn’t need more than your email address to sign you up, so the single input field guarantees higher conversion rates. And the marketing consent checkbox reaffirms your decision to get “the best emails in town.”
All in all, MeUndies has a great signup form with an eye-catching design and simple, yet powerful, copy.
While MeUndies goes for the bare minimum, Death Wish Coffee injects persuasion techniques into its signup form.
There are a few things Death Wish Coffee does right here, so let’s take a closer look.
First of all, the hypothetical question “who doesn’t like free cash?” quickly grabs the reader’s attention. Next, by calling its discount offer “free cash,” Death Wish Coffee helps you visualize the monetary benefit of signing up for its emails. Finally, the part that reads “sign up now before it disappears” drives urgency and scarcity.
Besides the persuasive copy, notice how Death Wish Coffee asks for your coffee preferences so they can target you later with relevant promotional emails.
A lot is going on in this form, but Death Wish Coffee is onto something clever with its urgency-driven copy and segmentation.
No matter how effective they are, most email signup forms lack creativity. Or worse, some of them even lack basic manners.
You’ve surely seen those popups with condescending opt-out buttons that read “No, I Hate My Life” just because you didn’t want to join a brand’s email list. These and similar popup mistakes not only hurt your conversions but also cause visitors to abandon your site.
Charlotte Tilbury is aware of this trap and knows how to avoid it.
Its signup form is simple and elegant. It offers you a small discount and early access to offers and product launches in exchange for your email address.
The counterpart of its positive “Sign Up Now” CTA reads “Not This Time.” This is brilliant because it mimics a polite way of turning someone down in real life. The opt-out copy also hints that you might be interested at a later time, so there’s no need to burn all bridges.
If you want to go with a double-CTA signup form, follow Charlotte Tilbury’s example.
Not all signup forms are meant to bring more newsletter subscribers. Many e-commerce brands also use forms to get more signups for their customer loyalty clubs.
Hollister is one such brand and its signup form is worth a mention.
With this white-and-blue email form, Hollister promotes its loyalty program, Hollister Club Cali.
The design elements that extend the form’s boundaries make the popup visually appealing. And the copy focuses on the benefit of joining Hollister’s customer club.
Similar to Death Wish Coffee’s “free cash” approach, Hollister highlights the monetary value of submitting your email address. You’ll get at least €10 just by signing up because “this club is money”.
If you’re trying to get more loyalty program members, take inspiration from Hollister’s signup form.
Most signup forms, including the best examples I’ve featured in this post, simply consist of text and images.
Rituals, on the other hand, goes the extra mile in its signup form to make it much more eye-catching and engaging.
At first glance, it simply looks like a beautifully-designed email popup with a single input field that promotes Rituals’s loyalty program.
In fact, the company’s signup form contains a video featuring an imaginary loyalty club member enjoying her favorite Rituals products:
By using Sleeknote’s video feature, Rituals makes its signup form stand out with its design. Plus, it shows the company’s products in action without saying much.
When used right, signup forms can do much more than just collecting email addresses, and we’ll see that in this example.
Similar to all other brands in this post, Poo Pourri welcomes you with a well-designed popup, offering a 10% discount on your first order.
In return, it only asks for your email address. Things get more interesting when you submit your email address and move to the next step.
In the success step of its popup, Poo Pourri confirms your subscription, thanks you for joining, and then, does something unusual.
The brand asks if you’d like to receive your coupon code delivered to your phone as well. If you’re a frequent mobile shopper, having the code as a text message can come in handy.
And if you’re a brand like Poo Pourri, which collects phone numbers for SMS marketing, this tactic can surely help you.
Although Poo Pourri’s idea of collecting phone numbers as an additional conversion is brilliant, the execution could be improved.
Take a look at how United by Blue does something similar with a completely different approach here.
It’s a textbook email capture form with a discount offer, good design, and clear copy. But fascinatingly, you get an additional incentive to submit your phone number.
Your email gets you a 15 percent discount code, and your phone number unlocks a giveaway entry for a chance to win a $200 gift card. It’s a much stronger incentive than getting your coupon code delivered to your phone, and it’s executed well.
To improve this signup form further, you can divide it into two steps, where you ask for the email address first, and then collect phone numbers in step 2.
That way, you can collect email addresses and phone numbers at the same time—without the latter affecting conversions for the former. Check out this recipe to learn how you can do that step by step.
When it comes to signup forms, there’s no one-size-fits-all success formula.
But an eye-catching design, persuasive copy, the right placement, and a compelling incentive can contribute significantly to your form’s success.
Take inspiration from these 15 signup form examples while building your own, and make sure to A/B test different versions to find out what works best for your website visitors.
What makes a good email popup? That’s a question many marketers have. And if you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’re looking for the answer, too.
The reality is, email popup best practices goes beyond which colors to use or discount size. If you want to turn website visitors into relevant leads, you need to go beyond that.
In this post, I’ll share 9 email popup best practices you can follow to increase your on-page conversion rate … without hurting your on-site user experience.
As a marketer, you likely already know the importance of testing your advertising efforts. Your email popups are no exception. But you might be wondering, “What should I test?”
Besides testing basic elements like button color and form design, it’s worth testing a popup’s timing.
Here’s how it looks:
The original popup (the control), had a time-based trigger, meaning it showed seven seconds after a user visited a blog post. The experimental popup, however, had a scroll-based trigger, meaning it showed after a reader scrolled 35 percent down the page.
In sum, always test your popups’ timing. You might be surprised by what you learn.
The success step is the last step users see when they opt in through a popup.
Many businesses thank new subscribers for joining. And that’s better than nothing. But encouraging engagement—like driving traffic to a popular product page—is far more effective (and oftentimes, lucrative).
Or, you can tell new subscribers to check their inbox if you promised to send them something by email, like a discount code or a resource:
Telling visitors to check their inbox or visit another page on your site, will increase engagement and more importantly, keep your brand top of mind, longer.
Humans respond better to images and video than they do to copy.
In fact, as much as 94 percent of first impressions on websites are design related.
Adding visuals into your popups, then, increases the chances that visitors will respond to your offers and completing the desired call-to-action.
One way to make your popups stand out visually is to use floating images.
Here’s an example from Vissevasse:
Floating images are great for popups because having the image outside the form creates more room for mandatory input field(s) and your message.
I mentioned before the importance of timing your email popups. But targeting, that is, who you show them to, is equally important.
You should avoid showing the same popup to all website visitors. Everyone is different, after all, and so your popups should be, too.
When you’re collecting emails on your site, avoid showing a popup to visitors who have already subscribed. Further, make it specific and relevant to the individual visitor by adding extra conditions.
For example, you can use geo-targeting to only show a specific popup to visitors from a certain geographical area.
If you want to be even more specific, show your popups to abandoning cart visitors that have a certain basket size:
Watch the video below to learn how to trigger campaigns based on your site’s data.
[Embed video here.]
Many marketers avoid using popups on mobile because they’re afraid to violate Google’s interstitials policy. But it’s not mobile popups that are the problem; it’s how they’re used.
The key is to create a customized email popup for mobile users.
This includes:
Given the limited screen space to work with, you need to ensure that your popup’s copy is short and concise.
Here’s an example of a mobile-optimized email popup:
It’s good practice to replace background images with a solid color in mobile popups. Background images can easily look overwhelming with on a smaller screen, making it harder to read.
The teaser is a small bar that shows at the bottom of the screen when your popup has yet to be triggered or after it’s been closed.
It’s an effective tool to drive curiosity while visitors browse your site and draw them to your offer.
On mobile, the popup will only trigger when visitors click the teaser, ensuring a smooth and user-friendly experience.
Whether you’re using a teaser on mobile or desktop, the headline of your teaser is important. This is especially true on mobile since the popup won’t show unless visitors click the teaser.
After analyzing 1+ billion mobile popups, we’ve found that there are a few teaser headlines that work better than others:
No matter which type of headline you choose, make sure you deliver on the promise.
Wanting to learn about our audience as much as possible, us marketers are often tempted to add multiple input fields to our popups. But more input fields reduces the likelihood of conversions.
Often, an email address is all you need to get value from a visitor. If you have their email address, you have a direct line of communication. Plus, you can always ask for more information such as gender, preference and more.
Another, better option, is to use multistep popups to collect information:
This involves asking for the visitor’s name and/or email address in the first step. Then, in the followup step, enrich their lead profile by asking for more information about their gender, interests, age, and more.
If visitors drop off after filling in the first step, you’ll still have their email address and any information they gave in the first step.
This may seem obvious, but if your popups aren’t as effective as you’d like them to be, try writing better copy.
I know. Telling someone to simply write better copy isn’t good advice.
So, let me go through the three most important copy elements in an email popup and tell you exactly what to write and how.
The headline in your popup has one purpose:
To capture the attention of your visitors and encourage them to read on.
So how do you write an attention-grabbing headline?
Well, one way is to include the value of your offer in the headline and turn it into a question visitors can’t say no to.
Let’s say you want to offer visitors a chance to win a pair of sneakers if they sign up for your newsletter.
If you’re unsure where to begin, you could try the above and see if it affects your conversion rates.
Next is your body copy.
The body copy of your popup needs to convince visitors to sign up.
Why should visitors give you their email address? What’s in it for them?
Tell visitors what they get in exchange for their email address and keep it short. No one has time to read a novel about how great your newsletter is.
You can use different incentives such as discounts, competitions, freebies, or just list the benefits of your newsletter (more on incentives later on).
Here’s an example of the sneaker competition:
No matter what incentive you use, you should make it clear that people are also added to your newsletter list when they sign up. Don’t surprise them with it later.
Your call-to-action copy is probably the most important in your popup.
It’s your last chance to convince visitors that they’re doing the right thing by signing up.
I’ve said it a million times before, but don’t write sign up.
No one signs up to get emails. They sign up for the value in your emails.
Whether it’s exclusive offers, inspiration, or freebies, communicate this value in your CTA and inform visitors what to expect when they click the button.
Let’s use the example with the sneakers competition.
Because people sign up for a chance to win the sneakers, that should be the focus of your CTA copy:
Let’s put all of the above into action and see what it could look like:
If you position your offer in a way that has value to your audience, your conversion rates will soar.
When you want people to do something, you need to give them an incentive.
And this is especially true when it comes to email popups.
Visitors won’t part with their email address unless you give them a good reason to do so.
One of the most common incentives to offer in an email popup is discounts.
And while discounts can be effective, they’re not the only incentive that drives good conversion rates.
Here are some other powerful incentives for collecting email addresses:
…your newsletter.
By that, I mean the value of your newsletter.
If your newsletter is as good as you think it is, you don’t have to offer free products or discounts. Just tell visitors about the benefits of your newsletter and what they can expect to get from it.
For example, you might send home decor inspiration, hair tutorial videos, special member deals, and so on.
Here’s an example from RICE where the incentive is the newsletter value:
Make your copy fun to read and let visitors know what to expect when they sign up, and you’ll quickly get more email conversions.
Email popups are powerful when they’re made with the individual visitor in mind.
Create different types of email popups for different visitor segments and you’ll be able to capitalize on your website traffic better than ever—on both desktop and mobile.
For ecommerce brands, the best way to avoid a fright this October 31st is to nail your Halloween campaigns.
Spooky season is one of the year’s biggest shopping occasions, with the National Retail Federation (NRF) predicting a record $10.6 billion in consumer spending for Halloween 2022. Over two-thirds of Americans planned to celebrate the occasion, with per-person spending expected to exceed $100.45.
(To put that in context, it’s more than the average American spends on Super Bowl and Independence Day-related purchases.)
Take a look at the most popular product categories…
…and you’ll see Halloween presents opportunities for a wide range of brands.
So it pays to come up with slightly more creative messaging than “No tricks, just treats”.
To help you out, we’ve rounded up nine of our favorite Halloween popup examples from real-world brands like BlackMilk Clothing, Killstar, and ModCloth.
Let’s get into it…
As with any seasonal shopping event, the first step to a successful Halloween is to top up your email list. Because the more addresses you capture, the more people will see your Halloween email marketing campaigns.
Seeing as we’re talking specifically about Halloween, your standard popups won’t cut it.
Give them a seasonal makeover, just like this example from clothing and lifestyle brand Killstar:
Remember to give your audience some sort of incentive to sign up.
Killstar offers a pretty hefty 15 percent discount for joining its email list; many brands provide smaller discounts, or offer a different sort of incentive altogether—such as free shipping, a free gift, or early access to new products.
Be sure to calculate your customer lifetime value before deciding on your email capture offer; it’ll help you grow your list sustainably (i.e. without giving away more than you can afford).
Ever thrown a Halloween party but nobody came?
Umm, yeah, me neither (cries).
Anyway, if you were planning to organize a big bash for October 31st, you’d probably start by gauging interest upfront. Once you’ve got a bunch of confirmed attendees, you can relax, safe in the knowledge you won’t be doing the Monster Mash alone again this year.
That’s essentially what BlackMilk Clothing did with this Halloween popup example:
By prompting customers to register for updates about its Halloween launch, the brand can feel confident that those shoppers will rush to purchase the collection when it drops.
And because there’s no sense in leaving these things to chance, BlackMilk captured both an email address and a phone number, giving it the best possible chance of reaching customers on launch day.
This is a smart tactic, with 95 percent of marketers agreeing that some form of multichannel strategy is important for their organization.
Another key point about this popup:
The countdown timer creates a feeling of scarcity and urgency. It’s effectively saying: if you don’t register, you might miss out when our Halloween collection arrives.
All of which means BlackMilk didn’t even need to offer a discount, or free shipping, or any other kind of promotion to capture customers’ contact details.
One way to drum up excitement for your Halloween launch is to email and/or text customers when your collection drops, a la BlackMilk Clothing.
But that’s not the only viable approach.
Another equally effective tactic is to let customers pre-order your soon-to-launch Halloween products, like Goldilocks Goods did in this popup example:
Notice how the brand adds scarcity into the mix by warning customers that pre-orders are only available for a limited period.
And that’s not the only benefit of pre-ordering.
It also acts as a kind of soft launch for your new product or collection, allowing you to assess customer interest before you decide to make a major investment in manufacturing or ordering seasonal products.
Because the last thing you want is to spend big on a bunch of Halloween inventory, only to have it eating up space in your warehouse when November arrives.
For all our talk of digital detoxes and getting off social media, the amount of time we spend online has slightly increased in recent years, from an average of 6.19 hours in Q3 2015 to 6.4 hours in Q1 2023.
Must be good news for ecommerce brands, right?
Not necessarily. Turns out that while we’re all extremely online, the length of an average “session”—that is, the time someone spends browsing a specific website—is on a downward trajectory, falling by 7.5 percent between 2021 and 2022.
What does this tell us?
Consumers are becoming more impatient. They’re less inclined to spend valuable time clicking around your website hunting for the perfect product.
So it’s your job to help them find your most attractive inventory, fast.
As October 31st looms ever larger on the horizon, consider using popups to steer shoppers in the direction of your Halloween collection, like Blue Banana did with this Halloween popup example:
It’s up to you how early you implement a popup like this.
If Halloween is a massive deal to your audience, there’s no harm in launching your seasonal popups way in advance of the big day—we’ve seen plenty of brands pushing Halloween messaging as early as mid-July:
So don’t feel you have to wait for Autumn to arrive to pull the trigger on your Halloween campaign. Give the people what they want!
According to the NRF, 69 percent of Americans planned to celebrate Halloween in 2022.
That’s a lot of people. But it also means that almost one-third weren’t intending to get involved in the festivities.
Guess some people just hate having fun.
Fact is, Halloween isn’t for everyone, so don’t try to (metaphorically) force pumpkins, black cats, and witches hats down people’s throats.
Instead, take a leaf from Blade & Rose’s book by allowing your audience to qualify their interest in spooky season:
If a visitor clicks “No thanks”, you know not to hit them with any Halloween-themed messaging next time they land on your site.
Despite all the ghosts, ghouls, and goblins, Halloween is meant to be fun.
So why not take the opportunity to experiment with some playful popups?
Here’s a simple example from the folks at HalloweenCostumes.com, who added a spin-to-win element to their email capture popup campaign:
The idea is pretty simple: you click “Spin”; the wheel whirls around and lands on a random prize; then you enter your email address to claim your winnings.
But simple marketing campaigns are often the most effective, with an analysis of 513+ million popup displays revealing that spin-to-win popups see an astonishing average conversion rate of 30.3 percent—compared to just 3.8 percent for traditional email capture popups.
Even if your brand is a little too serious for this type of frivolity, Halloween is a fantastic opportunity to throw off the shackles and test some more light-hearted messaging.
We’ve already seen one example of how Halloween gives brands carte blanche to flex their creative muscles. This doesn’t just apply to the types of popups you run; it also relates to the tone of your marketing copy.
In our next Halloween popup example, women’s clothing brand ModCloth truly leaned into the seasonal theme:
Barring the surprisingly run-of-the-mill call to action, every part of the copy in this campaign is practically oozing Halloween spirit.
And why not? It makes sense to get your customers in the mood when they’re shopping for Halloween-themed products.
Did you know delivery cost is the joint-most common consideration for consumers when deciding whether or not to buy from a given ecommerce site?
That’s right: when they’re weighing up their purchase decisions, shoppers are more likely to be swayed by the cost of shipping than the price of the product itself!
This just goes to show the value of using free shipping as an incentive.
Halloween Express clearly understands the power of free shipping. In our next example, the retailer adds an on-click popup to its product pages:
When you click the prompt, it expands into a popup offering free shipping on orders of $49+ to shoppers who hand over their email address:
While we’re on the subject, it’s worth noting that on-click popups can be extremely effective.
Given their discrete nature, they inevitably attract less attention than traditional popups, but that’s not necessarily a problem. In fact, it can be a benefit—for two main reasons:
Thanks to reason #2, on-click popups see significantly higher conversion rates that other triggered popup types:
Image source
So they might generate fewer overall impressions, but just as many—if not more—more leads. It’s all about quality rather than quantity.
Earlier in this article, we mentioned how much it sucks to be left with a ton of unsold seasonal products.
It’s not just that you haven’t recouped your initial investment; those products will go on costing you money in storage costs until you eventually sell them.
And given that Halloween products are only relevant for one day a year, you shouldn’t expect to shift them any time soon.
For that reason, many brands make the savvy decision to launch Halloween sales days—or sometimes mere hours—before October 31st arrives.
That’s precisely what stationery brand Baron Fig did in our final Halloween popup example:
The use of a Buy X, Get Y incentive makes sense here, because Baron Fig obviously wants to shift as many Halloween products as possible in a short space of time.
Used intelligently, onsite marketing can expand your marketing list, guide first-time website visitors toward relevant products, and target loyal customers with promotions they’ll love.
But let’s be honest: we’ve also seen countless examples of terrible onsite campaigns. Campaigns that interrupt the user journey and cheapen the whole shopping experience.
That’s why you need Drip.
We’re not your average popup or form-building tool. Our platform lets you drag and drop your way to fully customizable popups, slide-ins, and sidebars that perfectly match your branding and voice.But don’t take our word for it. Check us out for yourself by signing up for your 14-day free trial!
It’s a dilemma for most online marketers… You want to capitalize on the rise of mobile traffic, in terms of conversions … but you also don’t want to give mobile users a bad user experience or violate Google’s interstitials guidelines.
The good news is, converting mobile users and staying on Google’s right side doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive—you can “eat your cake and have it too.”
So, with that said, here’s how to convert mobile visitors into subscribers without hurting the user experience.
Most online stores have multiple product categories. This is straightforward when browsing on desktop, but on mobile, it’s harder to navigate due to the limited screen space.
One solution, then, is to simplify mobile browsing by using a popup to guide users to popular product pages.
Georg Jensen Damask, for example, shows mobile users a “teaser” in the bottom left-hand part of the screen. When users click it, the retailer invites users to explore their tablecloth selection.
Georg Jensen Damask prides itself on luxury products with stylish designs, and as you can see in the popup, they put a lot of focus on creating inspiring product images.
When you sell high-end products, like Georg Jensen Damask, you can assume visitors want inspiration for how to best use the product they’re looking at.
With this type of popup, Georg Jensen Damask teases their products with four different product images—each with a different style to cater to the visitors’ individual preferences.
It’s sometimes difficult incorporating product images into your mobile popups given the limited screen size. But Georg Jensen Damask shows that it can be done in a beautiful, simple, and elegant way–without hurting the user experience.
During the fourth quarter of 2017, 24 percent of all digital e-commerce dollars were spent via mobile devices.
But asking mobile users to buy is not a given. The more visitors have to click on mobile devices, such as on product pages, the more likely they will jump ship before making a purchase.
To minimize the number of clicks on mobile, try offering an integrated size guide on your product pages.
That way, potential buyers avoid having to return to a page they were viewing to find their right size.
With a click-triggered popup, you can show a size guide on a product page and allow users to close it when they’re done with it.
With this strategy, Matalan reduced the number of clicks it takes to find the right size to two. (Notice the placement of the size guide button above the “Add to Bag” button.)
The placement of the size guide button is clever because, on mobile, we move our eyes from top to bottom as we scroll. So, when you’ve clicked the size guide and found your size, what’s the next thing you see?
The add to cart button, making the user journey smooth and intuitive for the visitor.
You know the importance of creating hype when hosting a sale on your site.
Just think about Black Friday. Why do people line up hours ahead of opening hours?
Because they were told to do so.
Maybe not directly, but when you tell people there’s a sale going on, it automatically triggers their FOMO.
That’s the kind of hype you want to create with any sale on your site. There’s a simple way you can drive more traffic to your sale on mobile and that’s using a welcome bar.
Skoringen, for instance, invites mobile visitors to check out their summer sale:
The welcome bar contains all the necessary information needed for visitors to take action: a catchy headline, supporting copy, and an actionable call-to-action button.
And the best part?
The bar only covers a fourth of the screen space, making it Google-friendly.
So far, we’ve talked about how to amp up mobile sales.
Now it’s time to take a look at how to convert mobile visitors who aren’t ready to buy yet.
While there are several ways to ask for an email address, one effective strategy is to combine a discount offer with urgency as Lyckasmedmat does on their mobile site:
The teaser creates curiosity (“15% off chocolate”). Then, when mobile visitors click to learn more, they see the details of the offer and how long they have to claim it before it expires.
By adding a countdown timer to their mobile popup, Lyckasmedmat triggers FOMO and increases the likelihood of visitors signing up.
It also makes the offer more exclusive due to the time limit.
It’s no secret that everyone loves free stuff.
And giving an email address in exchange for a potentially high gain is a small price to pay. (Why do you think people pay to join the lottery?)
There’s no guarantee you’ll win, but the slight possibility is enough to convince almost any online shopper to try.
Travel agency, In-Italia, knows that their mobile visitors love traveling. But they also know that buying a vacation is not something they do spontaneously.
So, they host a vacation giveaway to invite their mobile audience to sign up for their newsletter:
When opting in via a giveaway, visitors are likely to imagine what it will feel like to get their hands on the prize—regardless of what you’re offering.
That means the people who joined the competition are more likely to buy the product they could have won (or another product) if you send them an offer right after the competition ends.
So, remember to follow up by email with everyone who didn’t win. By offering them a chance to win and visualizing the prize, you’ve shortened the journey from idea to action.
Asking for feedback isn’t always easy.
But it is necessary.
Getting insights on products and features from the people using them is the only way to find out how to improve (and there’s always room for improvement).
Feedback is especially important when it comes to mobile.
With the limited screen space, it’s harder to build smooth mobile experiences. So, when you do, make sure you get feedback from your visitors.
You can do as Copenhagen Airport, and ask your mobile visitors to rate their experience and comment on it:
They recently launched a new booking page and wanted to know what their mobile visitors thought of the new page.
With a simple dropdown and comment field, mobile visitors can quickly add their rating and write a comment without having to go through a third-party survey page.
When you’re collecting feedback, the fewer clicks users have to make, the more likely users are to give feedback.
It’s not just clever, it’s effective.
There’s one problem all online marketers experience sometimes:
Technical issues.
Whether it’s a button that doesn’t work, a bug in your checkout flow, or your entire site succumbing to heavy traffic, we’ve all been there—and if you haven’t, you will in the future.
What’s important is what you do about it when it happens.
You let your visitors know you’re having issues, of course, and that you’re working to fix it.
Here’s how Lynton handled a problem they had with their telephones:
They’re not only transparent and give visitors a heads up, but they also provide an alternative solution while they’re working to fix the problem.
With the lack of patience mobile users have, it makes a world of a difference when you’re upfront and let visitors know what’s happening.
Social media and mobile go hand in hand.
Ninety-six percent of US Facebook users access through mobile and the same goes for 91 percent of Danish Instagram users.
That’s why a lot of e-commerce businesses use social media to drive user engagement.
In many cases, social channels are used to drive traffic to your site. But it also works the other way around.
For example, if you sell products that have a long decision stage, first-time visitors are most likely not ready to buy yet.
So, if you sell products, you can assume first-time visitors are looking for inspiration. They’re trying to determine whether the product is right for them. And that’s where it makes sense to send mobile visitors to your Instagram profile (or other) to get inspiration.
Here’s how WoodUpp encourages new mobile visitors to follow them on Instagram:
On their Instagram profile, they showcase beautiful product images AND encourage customers to share photos of the products they’ve bought for social proof.
When you inspire, you’ll also be the first brand potential buyers think of when making a purchase decision.
And if you use this strategy, make sure to have a link to your site in your Instagram bio.
With online businesses vying for mobile consumers’ attention, it’s becoming more important for marketers to capitalize on the growing mobile traffic.
Mobile popups are not a thing of the past. They’re very much part of the future. And if you want to engage your mobile audience it’s time to jump on the bandwagon.
Don’t be afraid of Google. When you customize your popups for mobile, you’ll better the mobile experience on your site and your mobile visitors will thank you for it.
Before you start reading this post, I want to address the elephant in the room: People hate popups.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Sleeknote, we’re a popup builder, so we live and breathe popups. But honestly, we hate annoying popups too — the ones that are intrusive, generic, and irrelevant. Those that hurt the user experience so badly that you reach for the close button and never look back.
People hate popups because most marketers misuse them, or unknowingly fall into the common traps that I’ll talk about today.
No matter how much or little experience you have with popups, you likely know that good design and copywriting contribute to a popup’s performance. This post won’t be about those two because Rikke and Sam already covered them in earlier posts.
I simply want to show you the seven most common website popup mistakes I’ve come across, why they hurt your conversions, and what you can do (better) instead, with real-life examples of high-performing popups.
Nobody wants to be treated with disrespect, especially while looking for a place to spend money. Yet, many marketers use condescending call-to-action (CTA) buttons in their popups, hoping to persuade more visitors to take action.
The main idea is to make the opt-out button unattractive so the visitor wouldn’t want to choose that option, like in this example:
(Disclaimer: We use this software every day and love it. But that’s not the point.)
While the first opt-in button cleverly focuses on the value and reads, “Get More Time,” the second CTA that closes the popup is “No, I want to waste 1 day per week.”
What used to be a highly popular practice among SaaS companies and bloggers, this type of negative copy that reads, “I want to lose customers” or “I don’t want to make money,” is still common in website popups.
The e-commerce equivalent of these buttons is usually “I hate discounts,” or “I don’t like free stuff,” while the idea is the same. With this much negativity and belittling in your copy, you risk annoying your visitors, or worse, losing them to a competitor.
If a visitor doesn’t want to follow your CTA, consider other possible reasons behind it—maybe they don’t have the time or aren’t ready to take action. I have two better ways to frame your opt-out buttons without irritating your visitors, the first one by Wool and the Gang:
In this email popup, the company invites you to “join the gang,” but if you’re not feeling ready yet, you can simply click the opt-out button “Not Right Now” and close the popup.
Similarly, Georg Jensen Damask uses a double CTA in this cross-sell popup where they recommend an extra pillowcase when a customer adds linens to their cart:
Georg Jensen Damask’s first CTA button takes you to pillowcases, while the second button reads, “No thank you, take me to my cart.” If the customer simply isn’t interested in Georg Jensen Damask’s suggestion, they can close the popup and complete their purchase.
It doesn’t take much to reframe your negative CTAs and correct this critical popup mistake.
It’s a challenge all online marketers face: you want to learn more about your visitors, so you add more questions to your popups. But with more input fields comes more annoyance and fewer completions.
Our data suggests that conversions drop significantly when popups have more than two input fields.
When they see a lengthy opt-in form, many visitors close the popup or maybe even leave your site. And you lose an opportunity which might have otherwise been interested in your offer.
One solution to this conversion-killer is, unsurprisingly, to limit the number of input fields in your popups. Try to capture the essential information (e.g., email address or phone number) and consider if you can survive without a first name, like in this example:
An even better alternative to the above is to ask your questions in multiple steps. This way, you can collect rich lead data without hurting your conversions.
Check this multistep popup example from Joyous Health, where the company collects emails for its business program:
In this first step, Joyous Health simply asks for your name and email address. When you click the CTA button “Learn More” to submit your information, you see the second step where the company asks if you’d like to receive some of its promotional emails:
If you’re in e-commerce, you can use the second step to segment your new signups, and ask for gender, age, country, or interests, and easily grow a segmented email list without hurting the user experience.
While your CTA buttons and input fields have a huge impact on popup conversions, when and where you show your popups are just as important for their performance.
Think about the product recommendation popups asking you to check out alternative products while you haven’t had the time to look at the items you were considering in the first place.
Intrusive popups and untimely welcome mats might help you convert a small portion of your visitors—but often at the cost of annoying a bigger percentage.
To prevent this common mistake, you can use different triggers on different pages to decide when visitors should see your popup.
For example, if you have a popup on pages with long content, such as blog posts or product listing pages, you can use a scroll trigger and set it to show after a visitor scrolls 35 percent of the page. (Hint: According to our data, 35 is the magic number.)
We use a scroll trigger on our blog because we know that if a visitor is interested enough to read through a blog post, they’ll likely join our email list too.
On the other hand, if you’re promoting bestsellers or recommending similar items on your product pages, you can use a timed trigger and show your popup after a visitor spends, say, eight seconds on the page, as we do on our feature pages:
This way, you allow the visitor to browse through your products before interrupting their shopping experience.
Many marketers underestimate the importance of close buttons in their popups and resort to tiny, invisible, hard-to-click “X”s that frustrate visitors and even cause them to leave for good.
Or worse, some marketers decide to abolish the close buttons altogether, hoping that visitors will figure it out by themselves.
While some visitors can close your popup through the escape key or by clicking outside the box, it ruins the user experience for many.
As this is one of our pet peeves at Sleeknote, we don’t allow our users to publish popups without a close button. Here’s an example of how one of our customers, RushOrderTees, uses a visible close button in its popup:
In another example, Just Spices uses a close button that’s both easy-to-see and blends in nicely with the popup design:
It’s a small but important point many marketers ignore in their popups. Remember, if visitors can’t close your popups, they’ll likely close down your website.
I’m not sure which one is worse: a popup that targets the wrong visitor segments at the wrong time or a single, generic, irrelevant popup that shows to all visitors on all pages.
Maybe you’re asking your existing subscribers to opt in to your newsletter again and again, or informing American customers about shipping delays in the UK, or worse, you’re showing the same popup on every single page.
Take this example where I clicked through one of this company’s emails and landed on a page where they asked me to join their newsletter again:
I’m not only on the company’s email list, but I also arrived here straight from one of their emails, as the UTM tells.
Take another example, when I visited this website for the first time and was immediately asked to join the company’s loyalty program.
I’m not sure how I qualify for a loyal customer, as a first-time visitor, but I simply closed the popup and left this store because I wasn’t the right person and it wasn’t the right time.
A better way to approach popups is to differentiate between first-time visitors, returning subscribers, and existing customers, and create multiple popups that target each visitor based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
For example, you could target new visitors with a giveaway popup…
…while promoting new arrivals to returning subscribers:
More targeted popups mean higher conversions and happier visitors, and they don’t take much.
Most website popups appear out of nowhere, the minute you visit a page. This often creates a bad user experience, especially on small mobile screens.
What’s more, with this approach, marketers miss out on a huge opportunity. They overlook what happens when a visitor closes your popup to take a look at your store, decides that they’re interested in your earlier offer, yet, they can’t find it again.
The solution? Use a teaser.
If you’re unfamiliar, a teaser acts as a preview of your popup and shows before and after visitors see the full version of your popup.
In other words, when a visitor sees your popup and closes it, the form minimizes to the teaser position and stays there. So when a visitor is ready to claim your offer, they can easily reopen the form and interact with it.
By using a sticky teaser, you give control to the visitor, so they can engage with your popups as much or as little as they want, and that guarantees a better user experience.
Gamification is popular among marketers, and website popups are no exception. Spin-the-wheel type popups often frustrate users with small, predetermined discounts, and they disappoint marketers with more spam leads than ever.
It’s not that all marketers knowingly deceive people. Oftentimes, it’s a matter of failing to deliver on your word. For example, if you’re inviting visitors to contact you on a phone number when your support team is already home, you likely let your prospects down.
By creating two popups that show at different times, you can easily solve this problem—one popup inviting visitors to call you during office hours…
…and a second popup asking prospects to fill out a form to be called when you’re back:
The best part is, you can set up a recurring schedule for your popups and automatically activate and disable them without lifting a finger.
If you’re offering discounts or free shipping for orders over a certain amount, you might already be writing it in your popups with small letters. However, these footnotes are easy to overlook and create disappointment among your new subscribers who don’t fulfill the requirements.
A better way to prevent frustration is to show your discount popups only to visitors that qualify for it. With SiteData, for example, you can show your popup to visitors that have a cart value of $50 and above. This way, your popups will be more targeted and less frustrating.
Whether you’re guilty of one of these seven website popup mistakes or you want to improve your popup conversions, you can grab these low-hanging fruits no matter what popup builder you’re using.If you’re feeling limited by your popup tool or want to test a more powerful alternative, you can start a 7-day free Sleeknote trial and play around as you wish.
You don’t have to be American to have heard of Walmart greeters—the blue-vested retail employees who greet shoppers the moment they walk through the door.
Although greeters are being phased out, they’re a sound concept. They give the store a friendly feel, help customers find what they’re looking for, and they’re even happy to offer tips on restaurants and other services to out-of-town visitors. It’s great branding and it drives sales.
Popups are the e-commerce equivalent of the traditional Walmart greeter. They guide your visitors on their path to conversion, offering assistance when needed. Plus, they help you collect more leads and drive more sales.
At Sleeknote, we know popups better than most. In fact, we recently analyzed over one billion popup views. For instance, we found out that popups with countdown timers convert at a rate of more than eight percent.
Who wouldn’t want eight percent more conversions on their Shopify store?
However, down the years, we’ve seen some pretty dreadful popup examples, and you probably have too. Popups that didn’t just fail to convert you, but actively put you off buying.
With that in mind, here are seven best practices to help you create high-converting Shopify popups.
1. Get Your Timing Right
2. Give People a Reason to Engage
3. Don’t Be Greedy
4. Stand Out From the Crowd
5. Create Multiple Popup Formats
6. Give Shoppers Space to Engage
7. Use Exit-Intent Popups Intelligently
As I’ve already noted, popups aren’t a license to print money.
In fact, one major study from Nielsen Norman Group found that modal popups—those that show up when you first land on a page, forcing you to close them before interacting with the site’s content—are the most hated form of online advertising among both mobile and desktop users:
Even retargeting ads aren’t that unpopular, and they’re basically tantamount to online stalking.
Why do people loathe modal popups so much? As far as I can tell, there are two main reasons:
That second point is key. After all, why would I hand over my email address if I’ve not even taken a cursory glance at your content?
That’s why timed triggers are so valuable.
If you’re unfamiliar, a timed trigger lets you show your Shopify popup based on how much time a visitor spends on a page. That way, they can at least confirm they’re in the right place for a few seconds before your popup appears.
While you don’t want to jump the gun, you also don’t want to leave it too long. There’s no point having a 30-second timed trigger on a page that most people only read for 29 seconds or less.
So what’s the magic time for displaying a popup on your Shopify store?
According to our research, popups shown after eight seconds convert at a rate of 3.62 percent—higher than popups shown before or after.
Glaucon, the Ancient Greek philosopher, declared that humans are selfish, self-interested, and egoistic.
If Glaucon is to be believed, whenever we do the “right thing”, it’s not because we really want to—it’s because we fear the consequences of being caught doing the wrong thing.
Whether or not you share his pessimistic view of humanity, it’s a fact that most visitors to your site aren’t going to give you their email address unless there’s something in it for them. That “something” might be:
Here’s a great example of this in action from Danish fashion brand Miinto:
First, you’re presented with an unobtrusive yet compelling offer—the chance to win a £100 voucher. Click that panel and you’re presented with an email capture form. Simple but effective.
However, your “offer” doesn’t necessarily need to cost you money. For instance, if you’re trying to drive newsletter signups, you can set out the specific benefits of subscribing, like:
Ultimately, the right “offer” will depend on your brand and audience. Test multiple options to learn what works best for you.
I’m sure Greek philosophers had lots to say about greed, too. But this is a simple point so I won’t labor it.
Naturally, you want to capture as much information as possible from your e-commerce leads. But do you really need to know their mother’s maiden name and their dog’s inside leg measurement?
Asking for too much information upfront will harm your conversion rate.
One study found form completions drop off dramatically when forms have more than three fields. What’s more, our own research found popups with two input fields convert at a rate of 3.31 percent—or 206.48 percent higher than those with three fields.
Unless you’ve asked a friend to print this article out for you, it’s safe to assume we’re all web users.
That means we’re bombarded with popups, not to mention countless other ads and marketing tools, every day. If you’re going to generate real results, your popups need to stand out.
Clearly, in order to craft a top-performing popup, you first need to understand what an average (or bad) one looks like. Here are some typical popup characteristics, plus pointers on how to differentiate yourself:
“Popups” aren’t just a single entity. There are multiple popup types, and the type that performs best for one brand might not work as well for you.
So it makes sense to try out as many formats as possible, right?
Fortunately, there’s plenty of scope to do just that. Just consider the online shopping experience of an average customer. They might:
There are so many opportunities to target them with popups throughout that journey. How about:
Now, I’m not suggesting you need to hit every customer with every one of those popups, every time they visit your site. But testing will show you what works (and what doesn’t).
I started this article talking about Walmart greeters, and I’m going to circle back to them for a second.
Greeters are good because they take a softly-softly approach. They wouldn’t be good if they started shouting about the store’s fantastic products and offers the second you crossed the threshold.
Shopify stores are really no different—yet that point seems to be lost on a lot of retailers. Every time you immediately display a popup when someone lands on your site, you’re basically yelling in their face.
One way around this is by adding timed triggers, which we’ve already discussed in this article. Another option is to use a scroll trigger.
Scroll triggers are pretty much what they sound like. Rather than being triggered when a user spends a certain amount of time on a page, they show up after that user scrolls a certain way down the page. That way, you’re only reaching out to people who’ve shown a certain level of engagement.
Unsurprisingly, as with timing, scroll depth is an important factor in popup effectiveness. Wait too long and you’ll effectively disqualify a big chunk of your website visitors. But do it too soon and you risk scaring them off.
Fortunately, we’ve crunched the numbers on this as well. Our analysis showed popups triggered at a scroll depth of 35 percent have the highest conversion rates, whereas those triggered at depths of 25 percent and 70 percent perform worst:
On average, an astonishing 88 percent of online shopping orders are abandoned, although rates are even higher in some industries.
That means cart abandonment is almost certainly costing you a lot of money.
One way to claw back some of that lost cash is through exit-intent popups which appear when a user signals they’re about to leave a page or bounce off your website. A well-timed popup can be all it takes to persuade a shopper to complete their transaction right now.
These popups are most effective when targeted at your shopping cart or checkout page. When a user moves the cursor outside the browser window, your popup will be triggered, presenting them with an incentive to remain on your site or give you their email address. That incentive could be:
However, you need to be smart about the way you use these powerful popups.
If a user is still actively shopping around on your site, they don’t need to be told they’ve got items in their cart. It’s interrupting their experience and nagging them to take immediate action, which might annoy them to the point of leaving.
While data can tell us a lot about the most effective ways to utilize Shopify popups, a lot of it comes down to common sense.
Don’t hit shoppers with a different popup every time they click through to a new page.
Don’t allow popups to adversely affect a user’s shopping experience.
Don’t demand unnecessary information from them.
And, perhaps most importantly of all, make them relevant. Create popups that delight your customers and present them with something they actually want, rather than causing unwanted noise.
Get those simple but important things right and you can look forward to a significant uptick in conversions.
How does it feel watching visitors load their carts on your Shopify store only to leave without buying? I know, it’s painful.
Beyond your hurt feelings, cart abandonment means loss of revenue and profits, but you’re not alone—cart abandonment is a problem every Shopify store faces.
According to Baymard Institute, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.8 percent. This means seven out of 10 shoppers load their carts and leave without completing their purchase.
One of the most effective ways to combat cart abandonment is to use abandoned cart popups. With timely popups, you can convince some of the leaving shoppers to stay on your site and complete their order.
Here are seven Shopify abandoned cart popup examples you can use as inspiration to build your own popups.
No one ever says no to saving money. That’s why discounts are among the most popular abandoned cart offers.
What’s more, discounts help persuade buyers who abandon their carts due to high costs.
According to one survey, 60 percent of shoppers abandon their carts because of high costs such as shipping, fees, and more.
Knowing this well, Eye Love, a Shopify store that sells eye products, offers a discount to its first-time customers with this popup:
Eye Love is aware that a sitewide discount can eat into their profits. That’s why the company only offers the discount to its first-time buyers.
An eye-catching headline that reads “10% Off” easily grabs visitors’ attention, and the words “Check out now” carry urgency. For a buyer, this may imply that this deal is only available for a limited time.
Thanks to this email popup, Eye Love has the opportunity to contact the prospect to take feedback, send new product offerings, deliver news, and more.
The popup has a benefit-driven call to action (CTA) and a minimalist and simple design. Plus, it’s easy to close with a visible “X” button.
If you’d like to improve Eye Love’s popup, you can use a contrasting color in the CTA button to make it stand out in your popup, like in the example below.
Sometimes, shoppers need to see what they’re leaving behind. In this Shopify abandoned cart popup example, Leesa, a mattress manufacturer, does just that.
The company’s popup uses the image from the product page you’re viewing. Furthermore, the background color makes the copy, image, and CTA button obvious.
While the copy is short, as it should be, it provides the hook that can attract a shopper to come back to complete their purchase.
By asking a question that’s hard to say no to (“Want $100 off your Leesa Mattress?”) Leesa invites reads to take action to claim their discount.
The CTA text is prominent and benefit-driven. Below the CTA button, Leesa offers an optout option that reads “I’m not interested in a discount and I know I won’t see this offer again.”
Notice how the last part of this popup copy is designed to trigger fear of missing out (FOMO) among the readers. Once they close down the popup, they can’t claim the $100 discount again.
Not every shopper leaves their cart because they’re unhappy with your store or products. Sometimes, shoppers just add products to their cart with a future purchase in mind.
In such a case, your discount offer might be insufficient to convince them to buy right now. Instead, you can offer to save their cart items to an email.
This is what Paul Evans, a leather shoe and belt maker, does with its popup. Paul Evans offers to save shoppers’ carts to email so that they can finish their purchase later.
One thing Paul Evans has done well is the display of its products. The copy in the popup is minimal and presents a clear offer to the visitor. What’s more, the black CTA button has high contrast that makes it visible on the popup.
For buyers who may want to see more products on the website, Paul Evans cleverly uses a “Continue Shopping” button at the bottom of the popup.
We all want to improve our health. That’s why the supplements market is booming.
But even a brand like 1 Body that sells supplements isn’t immune to cart abandonment.
After all, there are enough supplement manufacturers that give buyers many options.
The first thing you’ll notice about this abandonment cart popup is the background image portraying a (likely) healthy person exercising out in nature.
The background successfully depicts what 1 Body’s shoppers are looking to achieve. And although the background image is serene, 1 Body does a good job of adding copy that contrasts with the image. You’ll see that the texts have different colors at parts of the popup to ensure high visibility.
Diving more into the copy, this popup uses a big and bold font to display its main offer: free shipping. This is difficult to miss for anybody as the eyes naturally navigate to the biggest font on the popup.
Once shoppers see the offer, their eyes naturally navigate to the CTA where they can take action. With a dark blue color, the CTA button has a high contrast with the background.
More interestingly, 1 Body uses a countdown timer in this popup to provoke urgency and FOMO to convince abandoning shoppers.
Finally, to make it even easier for its shoppers to take this offer, 1 Body openly writes the code on the popup.
Three Drops of Life is a Shopify store that sells water bottles, essential oils, and more. It employs a simple and minimalist design that goes straight to the point without distractions.
This popup example has a 10 percent discount as its main incentive. In addition to that, it offers free shipping.
Similar to 1 Body, Three Drops of Life uses a countdown timer in its popup to evoke a sense of scarcity and finishes the popup with a benefit-driven CTA button.
You’re likely using your brand’s colors and style on your website pages and other marketing materials. But, how about your popups?
In this example by INIKA Organic, a company that creates skincare products with natural ingredients, the company uses a reflection of its brand:
The popup is as simple as a popup can be. It also features minimal copy that promotes its message.
Since the shopper is about to leave the page, the first line should quickly grab their attention. If you’re telling a shopper not to leave yet, there has to be a reason.
In the following line, INIKA Organic tells the visitor why they should wait: They can get a 10 percent discount and free shipping for the products in their cart. To claim that, visitors just need to follow the benefit-driven CTA and complete their order. As simple as that.
Electric bikes are typically high-price items with a longer buying cycle. To help reluctant shoppers a quicker decision, Rad Power Bikes offers a $75 discount in its abandoned cart popup:
It’s a well-designed popup, thanks to the compelling background image. Throughout the popup, Rad Power Bikes incorporates the same color scheme into its copy.
With the headline “Wait!” the company grabs the leaving shoppers’ attention and invites them to see its offer. And the offer itself is big and bold, which makes it unmissable.
Finally, Rad Power Bikes makes things easy by writing out the discount code that the shopper can use immediately.
Shopify abandoned cart popups are a great tool to convert shoppers who may leave their cart and never return.
There are many reasons people load their carts and decide to leave without completing their purchase. To create effective Shopify popups, you need to know why shoppers are leaving.
After discovering these reasons, you can create offers that will likely convince them to check out their cart items. Look at these examples and implement their strategy in your own popups.
Website popups are a marketer’s best friend, allowing us to capture leads and target them with conversion-oriented messaging.
Figures show the average email popup converts three percent of website visitors, rising to a whopping 60 percent or more.
In other words, if your site attracts 10,000 people monthly and you run a top-performing email popup campaign, you can expect to capture over 3,000 email addresses a month.
Just think what you could do with all that juicy data.
Of course, not all website popups are that effective. I’ve seen my share of popups and some of them are just plain bad—they’re generic, they look hideous, and they interrupt the user journey.
What separates the best popups from the rest? Personalization.
A personalized popup reaches the prospective customer at exactly the right time, understands their preferences, and serves them with an offer or recommendation that’s simply too good to ignore.
They also play into consumer preferences, with research from McKinsey & Company revealing that:
Fortunately, Drip makes it simple for marketers to craft personalized popups based on real-time visitor data.
Our tools unlock practically infinite popup personalization opportunities. But because I don’t have practically infinite space or time to write this article, I’ve rounded up seven of my favorite personalized popup examples for your enjoyment and inspiration:
Unless you exclusively sell high-ticket, long-lifespan products—like mattresses or couches—returning customers will be an extremely valuable audience for your ecommerce site.
When a shopper returns to your website after making their first purchase, they’re well on their way to becoming a loyal customer.
And loyal customers are an absolute goldmine of opportunities. They’ll buy from you repeatedly; convert at a higher rate; tell friends and family about your products; and 56 percent will even choose you over a cheaper alternative.
But there are no guarantees in marketing.
Just because someone has bought from you before, that doesn’t mean they’ll do it again. There are plenty of other retailers who’d love to steal them away from you.
If you’re going to drive repeat purchases from returning customers, it’s in your best interests to point them toward your best and brightest products.
One tactic is to target them with a personalized popup that:
With this popup, you’re effectively telling customers: “We value your business—and we’re excited for you to see our new collection.”
You’ve persuaded a potential customer to visit your website.
They’ve clicked around and found a product they love. They’re about to add to cart—only to realize it’s out of stock.
Stockouts are annoying for consumers—but they’re a nightmare for retailers. You’re not just losing a single sale; you’re potentially missing out on a whole lifetime of future revenue.
A 2021 survey from McKinsey revealed that just 13 percent of shoppers who experience out-of-stock products will wait around for the item to return, with 32 percent saying they’d buy it from another retailer instead.
I know what you’re thinking: “If a product’s out of stock, can’t I just remove or hide it?”
Maybe. But if you’ve got thousands of items in your ecommerce store, each with multiple colorways or other variations, it becomes a little more complicated.
But it’s not all bad news: two-fifths of respondents to McKinsey’s survey revealed they would switch to a different brand or product if the item they originally wanted was out of stock.
That’s why you should add a related product popup to any out-of-stock product pages:
If you can point the disappointed customer in the direction of a similar, in-stock product, you’ve got a fighting chance of retaining their business.
Of course, not all your marketing efforts will be geared toward existing customers. If you’re going to hit your growth goals, you’re going to need to attract and convert plenty of new customers too.
That can be easier said than done. Generally speaking, new customers convert at a lower rate than returning ones.
Research from Episerver revealed that 92 percent of consumers visit a brand’s website for the first time for reasons other than buying. Instead:
So should you just accept that first-time visitors are unlikely to convert? Or target them with messaging that moves them along the path to purchase?
I don’t know about you, but I prefer option #2.
One approach is to create a personalized popup that only displays to first-time website visitors and showcases your most attractive USPs:
Naturally, you’ll have to decide which USPs to include in your popup.
But I like the above example because it removes a potential barrier to purchase: if the new customer in question doesn’t like their purchase, they can try it out at home for 30 days and get a full refund, free of charge.
Given that cart abandonment can happen because customers feel the returns policy is unsatisfactory, it’s easy to imagine this popup resonating with new website visitors.
Let’s stick with cart abandonments, because they’re another major headache for online retailers.
According to the Baymard Institute, almost 70 percent of all shopping carts end up being abandoned. Sure, some of those customers might go on the convert at a later point. But a lot will simply bounce, never to be seen again.
What’s going on here? Are consumers playing games with you? Do they just love the act of clicking “add to cart”?
Actually, there are a whole lot of reasons why potential customers might drop out during the checkout process. And, according to X Delivery, some of the most common causes are related to shipping:
This tells me two things.
Firstly, you should absolutely use personalized popups to target customers who are “in the act” of abandoning their shopping carts.
And secondly, you should offer free shipping in your abandoned cart popup.
Still not convinced? Here’s one more statistic for you:
Free shipping offers are far more effective at driving conversions than price-related discounts.
That’s right. According to Retention Science, conversion rates for free shipping promotions range from 0.22 percent – 1.9 percent, compared to just 0.1 percent – 0.8 percent for “percentage-off” discounts.
So free shipping-based offers are an impactful way to reduce cart abandonments.
That’s all well and good. But wouldn’t it be just peachy if you could leverage consumers’ love of free shipping to drive upsells too?
Turns out, you can—and personalized popups can make it happen.
Before I dig into best practices for free shipping-based upselling, let’s discuss how not to do it.
Imagine you’ve just arrived on a category page. At this stage, there’s nothing in your shopping cart. Yet you’re instantly served with a popup that says something like: “Spend $100 more to qualify for free shipping.”
Spend $100 more? You haven’t spent anything yet—you’ve barely had the opportunity to look around.
Spammy tactics like this give popups a bad name. At best, they interrupt the buyer’s journey; at worst, they make you look pushy and desperate.
That messaging feels a lot more compelling if you’ve already added an item or two to your cart and are approaching the free shipping threshold.
Better still, personalize it further by suggesting products that align with the customer’s previous browsing or buying habits:
Upselling is one way to increase revenue without having to generate more site traffic.
Another approach is cross-selling—adding to an existing sale by recommending one or more complementary products. Done well, it can have a powerful impact on your bottom line, with research from McKinsey revealing that cross-selling and category-penetration strategies boost sales by 20 percent and profits by 30 percent.
As with any type of popup, the key to this approach lies in targeting customers with the right messaging at the right moment.
You don’t want to derail the path to purchase by hitting them with a cross-sell popup before they’ve added-to-cart.
And you definitely don’t want to interrupt them while they’re midway through the checkout process. Remember, the shopping cart abandonment rate is almost 70 percent, so your sole focus at this stage is to convert them as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Instead, wait until they’ve completed the transaction, then serve them with a personalized popup featuring relevant, related products:
You’ve probably heard that adding lots of input fields to a website popup will torpedo your conversion rate.
Our data definitely backs this up. We analyzed one million popup views, filtered out those with 2,000 views or fewer, and segmented average conversion rates by the number of form fields:
So there you have it. One and two-field forms convert at a similar rate. But conversion rates drop off a cliff if you add a third input field (and fall even lower if there’s a fourth or fifth field).
That’s a shame, because it only allows you to capture the most basic customer data—most likely name and email address.
But wait: there’s a twist to the tale.
Sure, website visitors don’t like popups packed with lots of fields.
But our research also found that when a popup has multiple steps, three-quarters of leads who complete the first step will input more information in the second step.
Let’s consider how that might look.
You could have a popup that asks visitors for their name and email…
…followed by a second step that asks for their product preferences:
Why does any of this matter?
Because it allows you to immediately serve them with a popup directing them to your most relevant products, based on the preferences they just gave you.
How’s that for a personalized shopping experience?
Understanding the most effective types of personalized popups to drive sales and revenue is only one part of the puzzle.
Having the technical skills to build and implement dynamic, engaging, on-brand popups is a whole other challenge.
But there’s a simple solution: Drip.
Start out with our pre-built popup templates then customize to your heart’s content—buttons, fonts, colors, and styles.
Choose who you target, when, and with what messaging. Want to engage a customer who hasn’t purchased in a while? Hide signup forms from loyal customers? Target new visitors with an exclusive offer for first-time buyers? Drip makes it easy.
Find out for yourself by signing up for your 14-day free trial today.
If you’re in e-commerce, you’re probably trying different strategies to reduce cart abandonment.
Maybe you haven’t reached the results you’re aiming for or you want to achieve even lower cart abandonment rates.
You know the importance of well-written abandoned cart emails and how they can boost your conversion rates.
But are you making the most of your on-site messages to stop abandoning visitors?
With timely cart abandonment popups, you can convince more visitors to stay on your site, collect warm leads, gather valuable insights, and increase your sales.
The best part is, you don’t have to discount your products or offer free shipping to every visitor in order to achieve these goals.
In this article, you’ll read seven little-known strategies to convert abandoning visitors into customers. Plus, I’ll show you my favorite cart abandonment popup examples from top e-commerce brands.
Visitors might leave your site without completing their order for several reasons:
But the number one reason for cart abandonment, according to Baymard, is unexpected extra costs, such as shipping.
Offering free shipping on your site doesn’t only increase conversions, but it also urges visitors to spend more.
In fact, 93% of consumers tend to buy more products if the online store offers free shipping.
If you already offer free shipping, you might be thinking that it’s enough to write it down on your product pages.
But free shipping is only an incentive if you nudge visitors with it when they’re about to leave their cart.
So if you’re offering free shipping, make sure you always remind your visitors about it with a timely popup.
Here’s the popup Kate Spade displays when you’re about to leave your basket:
With the title “Congratulations!,” the company gets your attention and informs you that you qualify for both free shipping and free returns.
Even though they include in the checkout details that you don’t have to pay for shipping, Kate Spade makes sure that you are aware of it before you leave your items behind.
Given that not all e-commerce brands are as big as Kate Spade, you might consider offering free shipping only for expensive purchases.
If you’re a Sleeknote user and add the SiteData condition to your campaigns, you can detect a customer’s basket value and trigger a free shipping popup for visitors with over a certain amount of basket value.
Here’s how such a campaign might look like:
Change your campaign’s condition to exit-intent and you can convert abandoners with a tempting offer before they leave.
Try our tested and proven cart abandonment popup recipe and start recovering lost sales today.
Most of the purchases on your site will take more than one session to complete. That’s a given.
After all, first-time visitors aren’t always ready to buy.
Instead of asking them to buy on their first visit, you can ask them to take another action, such as leaving their email address in exchange for something valuable.
Hosting a giveaway is one effective way of getting more visitors to sign up to your email list—without spending a fortune on gifts or lowering the perceived value of your products.
You might be thinking that on-site giveaways are only useful for collecting email addresses.
And you would be right in thinking so. But giveaways are especially effective when promoted to visitors abandoning their cart.
Wallstickerland illustrates this well:
Translation: “Wait … Don’t miss out on our competition to win a gift card worth 1,000 DKK for Wallstickerland!”
If you choose to leave your cart items behind, the company gently recommends you “not to miss out” on their giveaway.
This way, they trigger your fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) and give you a strong reason to leave your email address.
Plus, they get warm leads that they can follow up on with both abandoned cart emails and promotional emails when their giveaway ends.
Another approach you can take is nudging your visitors to complete their purchase within a time limit in order to participate in your giveaway.
For these type of cart abandonment popups, a countdown timer is a must-have to drive a sense of urgency and scarcity.
Even though abandoning visitors are not ready to buy from you, they are already in the decision stage of your sales funnel. Why? Because they took an important step in becoming a customer by adding an item to their cart.
Maybe the timing or the price wasn’t right for them.
This means that even if they didn’t buy the product at this moment, they might be interested in the item in the future (especially if/when it goes on sale).
So why don’t you let them know when your next big sale is approaching?
That’s exactly what Chubbies does when you’re about to abandon your cart:
The company lets you know when the sale will take place and what you should expect from it, even if you’re not ready to buy at this point.
But here’s the twist: They add a second layer of discounting to it if you place an order today.
If they had only announced the next big sale in their cart abandonment popup, it would delay your purchase rather than incentivize you to buy now. Why? Because if you know there’s a big sale approaching, why should you buy anything now?
That’s why if you complete your order today, they offer you an extra 15% on top of a big sale.
(And it sounds too good to miss.)
With this popup, Chubbies not only aims to reduce cart abandonment but also turn buyers into repeat customers.
If you want to use this strategy, you can improve this popup by;
Personalization is no longer a luxury for e-commerce sites. It’s a must.
Online consumers expect and desire a more personalized shopping experience and they’re willing to share their data in exchange for it.
Many e-commerce sites welcome their return visitors with personalized copy or make relevant product recommendations. But few marketers go above and beyond to personalize their on-site messages.
We know from customer data, and our own experiences, that online stores that provide personalized offers achieve higher conversion rates.
By personalizing your cart abandonment popups, you can remind abandoning visitors what they are about to miss out on.
Here’s a brilliant cart abandonment popup example from Pandora:
When you add a product to your cart and go to leave their site before buying it, Pandora displays a popup with the picture of your cart item.
They also trigger your FOMO with the headline “Don’t miss out on this great style!”
Showing the number of people viewing that item, they both point to the product’s scarcity of availability and add social proof to it.
Plus, they add a link button that reads “Find Your Local Store,” in case you want to visit a physical store and complete your purchase there.
Using the SiteData condition, you can personalize your cart abandonment popups based on the visitor’s basket items and convert them with a highly-relevant offer.
Although clicking the “Add to Cart” button carries greater purchase intention, it doesn’t mean that the visitor is 100% sure about buying the product.
You might assume that your site visitors leave their carts due to reasons unrelated to your products:
But what if the problem is directly related to your products?
Maybe the visitor couldn’t find what they were looking for and didn’t feel comfortable completing the purchase at this point.
Even if you provide your visitors a seamless site navigation, you should still consider that they may not always find the right product for them. So try offering them an alternative solution, instead.
Here’s how Højmark, a Danish travel agency, does that:
Højmark knows that different visitors have different needs. Instead of letting go of the visitors who can’t find their ideal vacation, the company offers them a custom quote.
Setting this campaign to work on exit-intent, Højmark converts visitors who can’t find a vacation that fits their needs by suggesting them an alternative.
If you want to personalize your custom offers based on the users’ visiting behavior, you can use the SiteData condition.
If a visitor adds items to their cart from a certain category before leaving your site, you can customize the contact form to fit their needs.
For example, if a visitor has cart items in the hiking category, you can frame the campaign copy as “Let our team of hiking experts offer you a custom quote…”
This type of cart abandonment campaign especially works well if you’re selling expensive products, offering wholesale, or handling custom orders.
You might think that the only purpose of cart abandonment popups is to convince your visitors to stay on your site and to complete their purchase as soon as possible.
And you’re not wrong in thinking that.
In an ideal world, you would capture and convince all of your abandoning visitors to buy from you. But in reality, it takes more than that.
If you convince abandoning visitors to leave their email addresses, you can target them later with highly specific email campaigns. But in order to do this, you need to give them a valid reason to opt in.
Frame your campaign copy around the benefit you provide your visitors in exchange and they’ll be more likely to opt in.
Many e-commerce marketers use discount codes as an incentive and it surely is a great offer. But how can you stand out if everybody else is doing it?
Maybe you want to try something else or maybe you can’t afford to discount your products.
Luckily, there’s another value you can offer to abandoning visitors: saving their cart.
Here’s how your campaign might look like:
There are multiple reasons why online shoppers abandon their carts and lack of time is among the most common reasons.
Offering your abandoning visitors to save their cart will help you build an email list with warm leads that you can target with personalized email campaigns.
Make sure you hide this campaign from your existing subscribers so that they don’t see an invite to join a list that they’re already in.
You’re likely working hard to collect valuable feedback from your customers and trying new methods to get positive testimonials.
But oftentimes, the critical feedback you need to grow your business will come from unsatisfied prospects.
If a visitor is leaving your site after adding an item to their basket, that’s a problem you need to work on.
And if you never ask, you’ll never know.
Asking short and simple questions to abandoning visitors can help you collect valuable insights on why your visitors leave their carts on checkout pages.
If you’re suffering from high cart abandonment rates or if you want to improve your conversions, try running a campaign where you ask your visitors why they’re leaving.
This way, you can find out the biggest barriers to purchase on your online store and use those insights in your cart abandonment popups.
Take this example by Novasol:
When Novasol ran this campaign on their site, they gathered more than 18,000 responses.
Why?
Add a URL condition to make sure your campaign is only visible on relevant pages, such as your checkout page, and show it only to abandoning visitors by using the exit-intent condition.
There’s a common misconception that a good cart abandonment popup must promise visitors a discount code.
As you’ve seen in the examples above, you don’t necessarily have to discount your products in order to convert more abandoning visitors into customers.
Try these seven strategies to grow your email list, collect feedback, and increase your sales—without sacrificing the perceived value of your products.
Mobile popups work.
Sleeknote customers, for instance, achieve an average mobile conversion rate of 5.23 percent. So, there’s definitely traffic to capitalize on.
Yet, many e-commerce sites don’t use them because they’re afraid of hurting the mobile user experience—or getting punished by Google.
But let me make something clear:
It’s not either-or.
You can create beautiful, non-intrusive mobile popups that convert mobile visitors into leads and customers. And you can do it without annoying your website visitors.
So, in this post, I’ll give you 7 mobile popup best practices to help you create high-converting, Google-friendly mobile popups.
The most important rule, when creating mobile popups, is to ensure that they don’t trigger automatically and block the mobile screen.
It’s intrusive, to begin with, and certainly not good for conversion rates.
That’s why we created the teaser.
On mobile, the teaser will show first and the popup will only trigger if a visitor clicks to learn more. The teaser’s copy is important if you want to encourage mobile visitors to click through and see your offer.
Hideaways excite mobile visitors by including the value of their offer in the teaser:
Questions also work well in mobile teasers, such as “Want to win a trip to Piemonte?” or “Want 20% off your purchase?, for example.”
The teaser is less intrusive than a popup, but to make it even less intrusive, you can delay it to give visitors a chance to browse certain pages, first.
Write a compelling headline for your teaser that invites mobile users to click. Moreover, remember to include the value of your offer and keep it short. Tip: Try placing your teaser at the top of the screen and see what effect that has on your conversion rates.
When you write copy for mobile popups, it needs to be short and to the point.
This is the case for any popup—mobile or desktop—but it’s especially important on mobile because the screen is smaller.
If you add a lot of copy to mobile popup, users will have to scroll to get the message—and that’s bad for conversion rates.
Now, you might feel tempted to use bullets for brevity, but DON’T.
Bullets take up a lot of space on mobile, so conveying your message in a short paragraph is better if you want to convert mobile visitors.
Begin with a headline to capture attention and then include a sentence to elaborate as I’ve done in this example:
If you want to motivate mobile users to take action, you can copy the above approach and write mobile-specific copy.
With our mobile popup editor, it’s easy to customize popups for mobile without having to create separate popups for mobile and desktop.
Here’s a quick demonstration:
When you target certain visitor segments with specific messages and adapt the copy to match that segment, you create a better user experience—and get more signups.
Customize your offer and message to mobile visitors, but keep your copy short and to the point. If your offer is good, you don’t need to explain it in detail.
We usually advise using images in popups because they help the visitor visualize the offer.
But mobile is the exception.
Images take up a lot of space on mobile and that leaves little room for the rest of the message.
Furthermore, background images can quickly make mobile popups look “busy” and take focus away from the call-to-action.
So, instead of using images in your popups, get creative with font sizes and styles, and colors.
Take a look at this example from Wool and the Gang:
Their popup has a colorful design that matches the message (the Funfetti collection). They also use different font sizes to create breaks in the copy and make it more readable.
Experiment with different colors and fonts that match your site’s design. If you need help identifying the right colors, use Adobe’s Color Picker and upload an image of the page you want your popup to show on.
Many marketers use the same number of input fields in their mobile popups and their desktop popups.
But while it’s a common practice, it’s not always a best practice.
Desktop popups can be bigger due to a design that allows for more input fields than mobile popups.
So, instead of using the same popup on desktop and mobile, customize the mobile version and limit the number of input fields.
Or, you can use multistep popups to get more information from visitors without hurting the user experience, as Apuls does:
In the first step, Apuls asks for general information about the visitor. Then, in the second step, they ask visitors to add their favorite forms of exercise. This is valuable information for Apuls who uses this information to send targeted newsletters to subscribers based on their interests.
The best part of multistep popups is, if the visitor drops off after filling in the first step, their signup is still registered with the information added in the first step.
Ask yourself what information you need from mobile visitors. Is it the same as desktop visitors? Then, if you have more than two input fields, consider using multistep popups instead.
It’s important to think about the mobile user’s journey when creating mobile popups. Put another way, you need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to enter their information.
So, aside from limiting the number of input fields, you also need to optimize certain input fields.
When you ask for a visitor’s phone number, for example, you could add a numeric input field instead of a text input. That way, when visitors click to fill in their phone number, the number pad is triggered instead of the regular mobile keyboard.
It may seem like a small tweak, but it can have a great impact on conversion rates.
Use numeric input fields when you ask for numeric information. This will ensure a much better mobile user experience.
It’s common to use radio buttons when asking mobile visitors to choose their gender, interests, age range, etc. upon signup.
But radio buttons on mobile are small. Trying to hit the right radio button is hit-and-miss, at least when I’m browsing on mobile. And I’m guessing I’m not the only one.
So, instead of using radio buttons for single-select options in your mobile popups, try dropdowns:
They take up less space, and it’s easier for mobile visitors to hit the right option—in the first try.
When you use dropdowns on mobile, we recommend using a font size of at least 14px. Otherwise, the text can be hard to read on mobile screens.
Consider using dropdowns instead of radio buttons for your mobile popups. It makes it easier for visitors to hit the right options.
Mobile visitors aren’t equal. So, they shouldn’t all get the same message.
When consumers browse online, they expect a personal experience. In fact, 61 percent of mobile shoppers say they’re more likely to buy when they receive customized offers.
So, create individual offers for different visitor segments.
New visitors might be interested in seeing your most popular products and learning more about your business. Returning visitors, on the other hand, might be more inclined to buy something if they get the right offer.
Here’s how Commedeux rewards returning mobile visitors with a free gift:
Notice how the free gift is contingent on a purchase. It’s a smart way to encourage returning visitors to buy. And you can easily track the success of your popups and determine which offers work best for which visitor segments.
Targeting mobile visitors with mobile-specific popups can do wonders for your conversion rates. Yet, it can feel overwhelming to have to create separate popups for mobile and desktop.
But with the above best practices you can have a mobile popup ready in no time.
Contrary to popular belief, popups are for more than collecting emails. When used right, popups can be versatile tools, helping you achieve different conversion goals.
A compelling headline, eye-catching design, and persuasive copy are, doubtlessly, essential for high-converting popups. Yet, popups often perform better when they include an incentive, and discounts are among the most typical incentives in e-commerce popups.
To help you create effective discount popups, I’ll share seven different ways to use them on your site, with 14 high-converting discount popup examples from our favorite e-commerce brands.
“Get 10 percent off your first order.”
Introductory discounts like the above are e-commerce marketers’ go-to incentives simply because they’re highly effective in turning website visitors into email subscribers and customers.
Welcome discounts not only encourage mid-funnel prospects to place their first order, but they can also help you grow your email list with interested leads. Even if your new subscribers don’t become customers immediately, you can nurture them with different offers and targeted email campaigns.
With a simple, attractive discount popup, you can incentivize new signups the right way. Take this example by Brain Effect, a German supplements e-tailer:
Brain Effect’s discount popup works well for at least a few reasons:
Brain Effect knows that a discount code may not always convince visitors to opt in for promotional emails. That’s why in the popup copy, they also mention that you’ll get exclusive tips when you join their newsletter.
Olivers, a Danish pet food company, has a similar offer in its discount popup, but with a twist:
Olivers wants to segment its new subscribers so that they can target them better with their email marketing. That’s why, after grabbing your attention with a 10 percent discount, they ask if you have a dog or a cat as their last question.
Although adding more input fields to your popups might decrease your conversions, a simple checkbox like the above might work well for easy questions.
But if you need to get more information from your new leads or have questions that take more time to answer, you’ll like the next section.
Just because you’re giving visitors a discount code, it doesn’t mean that they’ll be willing to fill out long and detailed optin forms. In fact, our data shows that more input fields often mean fewer conversions.
But this doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t ask for more visitor information in your popups. By using multistep popups, you can collect visitor information in two steps and enrich your lead data—without taking a hit on conversions.
Sohu Shop is a company that does that right. When you visit the website, the company invites you to sign up through this popup and save 10 percent off your next order:
Framed as a “welcome gift for you,” Sohu Shop’s offer is easy to claim. All you need to do is to enter your email address, and you’re done.
However, Sohu Shop wants to learn more about its new subscribers too, so in the next step, they ask two more questions, asking your name and interests:
Even if visitors don’t fill out the second step, they’re still registered as new subscribers. And if they do, Sohu Shop can target them better with its emails.
Another company that leverages multistep popups is Wedio. However, Wedio simplifies the process even more for its visitors by asking only one question per step.
Once they get your email address with the promise of a 15 percent discount, they ask yet another simple question:
If you want to play it safe, as Wedio does, keep the number of input fields to a minimum in each step of your discount popups.
If you ever signed up for an email list to get a discount, you know it feels like ages until you get the code delivered to your inbox.
Although many e-commerce companies choose to send out discount codes via email, they overlook how dependent they become on their ESPs (and they underestimate the impatience of online shoppers.)
Asking new leads to check their inboxes can create friction in the buyer’s journey, but there’s a solution. You can reduce friction by showing your discount code in the success step of your popups. This way, visitors can obtain their code without leaving your site, and use it right away without any distractions.
Nordic Beads is a company that uses this strategy. When you visit the website and click the popup’s teaser, you see this form:
In it, Nordic Beads invites you to sign up for its email list in exchange for product updates, good offers, inspiration, and a 10 percent discount.
Once you submit the form, the success step appears, thanking for the signup and delivering on the company’s promise with a discount code:
“The code disappears when you close this box, so remember to copy it or write it down.”
Thanks to the company’s clear instructions and quickly-delivered coupon code, it becomes easy for visitors to use the code without wasting time.
If your primary conversion goal is to get more orders (and not necessarily new leads,) you can take a safer approach, as Dalton Cosmetics does.
Similar to Nordic Beads, the company welcomes new visitors with a popup and a special offer. However, unlike the former, Dalton Cosmetics openly write the discount code so you can get started without signing up.
It’s a smart tactic to try out especially if your products have a shorter buying cycle or are more affordable.
There are different ways to reduce the friction caused by your discount popups. My suggestion is to play it safe and do both: write your coupon code in the success step and send it in an email.
Although discounts are excellent incentives for consumers, they’re not always affordable for e-tailers.
Maybe you can’t afford to discount your products all the time or are worried that discounts may reduce your products’ perceived value. For one reason or another, you might be reluctant to offer discounts on your store, and you’re not alone.
Luckily, there’s still a clever way to leverage discounts without hurting your profit margins: offering discounts for a limited time only.
With a time-bound or amount-limited discount offer, you can also drive urgency, and nudge prospects to take action. Take this example by Wool and the Gang:
With a basic yet eye-catching popup, Wool and the Gang announces a 30 percent discount on one of its product categories. When you read the popup copy, you learn that the discount is only valid until midnight. So if you’re interested in this offer, the time limit gives you a compelling reason to shop your favorites before it’s too late.
(If you want to take this approach one step further, add a countdown timer to your discount popup and drive more urgency.)
While Wool and the Gang limits its deal by time, Miinto offers a limited amount of discount codes every day, and promotes it with this popup:
“Get a VIP Discount Code: We’re distributing 300 15% discount codes every day. Join our newsletter now and get your code on September 16th.”
Through this brilliant discount popup, Miinto collects emails with the promise of a VIP voucher—one of 300 available. The company smartly uses a GIF to demonstrate the scarcity of discount codes and makes visitors take action.
Both examples are great alternatives to test out if you’re not a fan of permanent welcome discounts.
While one alternative is to limit when visitors get a discount, another strategy is to decide which visitors should get it.
Following the latter approach, you can offer discounts to those who deserve it, based on how they interact with your store and products.
For example, if a visitor is about to leave your site with an empty basket, they may not qualify for a discount code.
However, you can persuade a prospect with a high cart value with a well-deserved discount popup, like this:
If one of the brands in your store is currently on sale, you likely promote it with a popup.
But rather than show this popup to all website visitors, you can promote the brand-specific discount to visitors that have items from that brand in their cart, with a popup like this:
This way, you can better target visitors that are likely interested in your discounts without hurting the user experience for the rest.
Cart abandonment is a tricky matter. While a discount code, like the above, might convince some visitors to stay on your site, it won’t likely work on top-funnel prospects who aren’t ready to buy from you yet.
Another way to combat cart abandonment is to turn abandoning visitors into email subscribers first. This way, even if they don’t use the discount code immediately, you can continue to market to them through email.
With an effective cart abandonment popup, you can offer abandoning shoppers a special discount when they sign up for your email list, as MESSAGE successfully does:
The company uses a simple and clear headline, and explains how and when you can claim your discount. Moreover, MESSAGE chooses a value-driven CTA button, instead of “Sign Up.”
Another company that uses this strategy is Beady, but its popup copy takes a different angle:
When you’re about to leave its website, Beady, first, tells you to “hold on
” and asks “Don’t you want to save 10% now?” rather than merely writing “Save 10% now.”
It’s hard to say “no” to this question, and Beady knows this well. And if you want to save 10 percent on your order as the company suggests, all you need to do is fill out two input fields.
Although discount popups can help you collect more emails and reduce cart abandonment, these aren’t their only use cases.
If you’re offering discounts on specific products or categories, you can promote them across your store with timely sales popups and guide your visitors to relevant pages.
Check this example by Ny Form:
Ny Form’s sale popup has a different color scheme from its website design, which helps the popup stand out. The company also visually shows the sale without using many words—all it takes is a bold headline, the discount level, and a CTA button.
Ny Form’s type of discount popup is ideal for big sales campaigns. If you’re only offering discounts on specific brands or categories, however, you can take a different approach, as Skobox does:
In this popup, Skobox has only one focus: promoting the brand that’s currently on sale. That’s why the company simply informs you that all products from that brand are down by at least 20 percent.
Skobox also refreshes your memory with an image showing a product from the brand. If you’re interested in this brand, you now have a valid reason to click through and shop from the sale.
There’s more than one correct way to use discounts in e-commerce. Whether you’re trying to collect more emails or convert more visitors into customers, discounts can be the nudge you’ve been looking for.
The key to using discounts, though, is to offer them at the right time, to the right visitors, and popups are the perfect tool for that.
I hope these 14 discount popup examples, used by our favorite e-commerce brands, can inspire your own.
Growing your customer base is often one of the most important aspects of creating a profitable ecommerce business, no matter the niche.
With digital marketing more necessary than ever, keeping track of leads and contacts is a lot easier with the help of email capture tools. These tools provide a digital bridge between your website and those interested in you or your product.
And as ecommerce stores evolve, so do the tools that help them grow.
In 2023, there are a number of email capture tools that will help ecommerce stores capture more leads, grow their customer base, and increase sales.
Let’s dive in and explore what it means to capture email and seven of the most popular email capture tools for ecommerce.
Email capture is a process where a website collects an email address from visitors and stores it in a database.
In the old days, the database might have been a simple spreadsheet. But now, with email capture tools, it’s easier than ever to collect and store an individual’s information.
You have probably seen pop-ups before, like this one from Oodie:
Ecommerce brands use pop-ups like these to capture emails from visitors to their sites.
This information is then used to send out marketing emails, newsletters, and special offers.
And the role of email capture tools is to help create pop-ups like this.
You can think of email capture tools as the foundation for any successful email marketing strategy. To send out emails, you have to first capture emails.
With features like pop-ups, forms, click-to-subscribe buttons, and countdowns, email capture tools help you do just that.
Some email-capturing tools include the ability to send emails as well, while others focus solely on capturing emails.
Those who focus solely on capturing emails must integrate with another email marketing platform in order to be effective.
The integrations are relatively easy most of the time, but if you don’t have an existing email marketing platform, we recommend choosing an email capture tool that offers both capturing and emailing capabilities.
After all, why not cut out the middleman?
To help you, we will give you both options! Those that can do it all, as well as those that only focus on capturing emails and require integration with an email marketing platform.
Let’s get started!
Let’s look at each of these 7 email capture tools in more detail, and go through what they offer.
Drip is a comprehensive all-in-one marketing automation platform that helps you capture emails through forms, popups, and other interactive elements.
Unlike other marketing automation platforms, email capture isn’t an afterthought with Drip — the same time and attention is afforded to email capture as it is email marketing. Drip provides complete customizable freedom, as well as tons of ready-to-use templates to use.
These email capture templates include spin-to-win, exit-intent, mystery offers, and urgency pop-ups. If you choose one template, you can still customize it any way you want to give it your own personal touch.
Once you have captured your emails, you can segment your lists into different segments, send personalized emails, do A/B tests of different versions, and track the performance of your campaigns.
Drip has native integration with all of the major ecommerce platforms including Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. On top of that, it integrates with hundreds of other third-party providers, making it one of the most versatile email marketing platforms out there.
What’s best, as Drip is also a marketing automation platform, you won’t need to integrate it with anything but your ecommerce platform to get up and running.
Drip comes with a simple pricing plan, offering only one plan that starts from $39 a month for 2500 contacts, and goes up depending on the size of your email list. No matter the size of your email list, you get a 14-day free trial that you can cancel at any time.
[Note for Yogesh: Put first embedded CTA box here]
OptiMonk is an email capturing tool that specializes in creating popups, surveys, and header bars to grow your email list. To start with, you can select from one of their hundreds of ready-to-use templates, or create email capturing widgets from scratch.
You can select from different types of widgets, including popups, side messages, surveys, gamification, and sticky bars. OptiMonk also offers analytics and A/B testing capabilities to help you optimize your campaigns. You can track the performance of each widget, as well as split-test different versions.
Optimonk doesn’t provide the ability to send emails out, so it’s best used as a complement to other email marketing platforms.
Optimonk integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento, as well as all major email marketing platforms including Drip, ActiveCampaign, and Omnisend.
Optimonk monthly plans range between $39 a month to $249 a month. They also have a fully free plan, with limitations of 15,000 pageviews a month, and a max of one domain. Once your pageviews grow, you have to choose one of their paid plans.
Popupsmart is an email capture solution, designed for building email lists via popups. It comes with over 35 free templates, that you can use as is or further customized to your liking.
As with other email capture tools, Popupsmart includes different widget types to start with, such as get free shipping, webinar invitations, free ebooks, and more.
You also get access to analytics, so you can see how each widget is performing. You can split-test different versions of widgets, to see which one works best for your business.
Popupsmart doesn’t have the ability to send out emails, so to use it effectively, you have to integrate it with an email marketing platform.
Popupsmart doesn’t have the capability to send out emails, so you have to integrate it with an email marketing platform to use it effectively. It has native integrations with major email marketing platforms, as well as ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and ClickFunnels.
Popupsmart has four different plans to choose from, the cheapest one is free. The free plan has a limit of 5,000 pageviews a month, and the ability to create one popup. If you cross that line, you have to opt for one of their paid plans.
Getsitecontrol allows you to capture emails with different types of popups, including surveys, contact forms, special deals, and discount offers.
For the popups, you can enable triggers like time, scroll depth, or page visit to show the popup. Triggers help you get the most out of your popups, as you can target the right people at the right time.
One standout feature of Getsitecontrol is its extensive analytics for all of the popups.
Real-time results are available for things like sales (when integrated with an email marketing platform), devices used to see the popup, daily views, and email signups.
Getsitecontrol doesn’t have the option to send out emails (only capture), so you have to integrate it if you want to send out the emails. It integrates natively with the ecommerce platform Shopify, as well as with multiple email marketing platforms, including Drip, Benchmark Email, Omnisend, and many more.
Getsitecontrol has three different plans to choose from, with prices ranging from $9 a month to $29 a month. They don’t offer a free plan, but they do have free trials for their paid plans.
Wisepops is an email capture solution for your website, offering the ability to create and customize popups, notification bars, and other widgets.
It comes with an intuitive popup editor, allowing you to customize the look and feel of your popups. You also have access to different templates, which you can use as is or further customize.
Wisepops has some interesting personalization features, such as targeting and segmentation. You can show different popups to different people based on their location, device type, or behavior on the website.
Wisepops offers only one plan, with prices based on your monthly page views, starting at $49 and going all the way up to $299. They offer a 14-day free trial to get started with.
Nextsale is a lead-capturing tool that enables you to create widgets for capturing emails. With its drag-and-drop widget builder, you can fully customize the popups you show on your website. Or you can select from one of their available templates.
You can target the popups based on visitor behavior, like their IP address, device language, and geolocation.
Something worth noting is that outside of the email capturing features, Nextsale also has tools for capturing phone numbers for later targeting with SMS marketing.
Nextsale has five plans to select from, the cheapest one is free and offers free popups up to 1000 page views a month. The paid plans range from $39 month to $249 a month, and all of them have a 10-day free trial.
Bloom is a WordPress plugin specifically designed to capture emails with forms and pop-ups.
Bloom has over 100 pop-up and form templates to select from, which you can use as is or customized further.
Here is an example of their email-capturing pop-up:
You can create and save your own templates, so you never have to start from scratch again.
Other notable features include the ability to split-test different designs and track your results.
You get access to basic analytics that include your average conversion rate, amount of email subscribers gained, average list growth, and more.
Bloom integrates natively with WordPress sites.
Bloom is part of the Elegant Themes product group, and to access it, you have to opt for all of its products. If you’re building an ecommerce store within WordPress, it does include everything you need. You have two options in terms of pricing: the yearly plan, which is $89 a year, or lifetime access for $249.
The use of email capture tools is becoming more and more popular amongst ecommerce stores, driven by the high return on investment that email marketing can offer.
With over 4 billion daily email users, it’s crucial to use email marketing to succeed in the ecommerce market.
To capture emails, brands can use email capturing tools, which can be integrated into popular email marketing platforms.
Or you can use a platform like Drip, which does it all.
Drip is an email marketing platform that helps to capture emails, build lists, segment and personalize your content, and send out automated emails. It is a comprehensive solution for all your email marketing needs.Drip offers a 14-day free trial to get started and a native integration with platforms like Shopify.
Everyone loves Christmas, right?
Consuming your body weight in eggnog and roasted meats and vegetables; spoiling your friends and family (and yourself); spending valuable time with your nearest and dearest. What’s not to like?
But the festive season isn’t just about unbridled celebration.
In a survey of 10,000 consumers in 12 markets, Ipsos grouped open-ended responses into broad “conversational clusters.” The biggest cluster, “joyful,” was totally in keeping with the traditional festive spirit. But the fourth-largest cluster was far less positive: “anxious.”
Fact is, consumers have a lot on their minds right now. Many of us are still slowly adjusting to a post-pandemic world. High inflation is tightening purse strings. And buying exactly the right present for your parents, your partner, and your second cousin’s toddler can be a thankless—and stressful—task.
Anxiety breeds uncertainty. And uncertainty means more convoluted buying journeys and a higher rate of cart abandonments. All of which is bad news for retailers desperate to end the year on a high.
So what can you do to make consumers’ lives easier (while persuading them to part with their cash)?
Website popups are the perfect solution, allowing you to…
…and much more besides.
With that in mind, I’ve raided our best practice vault and studied some of our favorite brands to pick out some of the most inspirational, engaging, high-converting Christmas popup examples.
1. Create a Popup Advent Calendar
2. Recommend Gifts With a Sidebar Popup
3. Add USPs to Popups
4. Run Exit Intent Popups
5. Spell Out Your Shipping Policy
6. Use 1-2 Data Capture Fields
7. Gamify Your Popups
What could be more festive than an advent calendar?
Although they’re more of a European tradition, advent calendars are still pretty popular in the US, with one-third of American households planning to have some sort of advent calendar in 2022.
It doesn’t take a marketing genius to work out that the day-by-day action of opening an advent calendar is a perfect fit for a daily deals-style ecommerce campaign. The process is pretty simple:
Here’s an example of how that might look, built with our simple-to-use popup maker:
Of course, an advent calendar campaign isn’t just about rewarding customers with a one-off discount. It’s also an opportunity to bring them back to your website day after day—which means more sales and revenue.
Want to know the best news?
Sleeknote makes it super simple to run advent calendar campaigns. Check out our step-by-step guide to create your own.
I’ve already alluded to the fact that Christmas shopping is pretty darned stressful for a lot of consumers.
When it comes to buying gifts online, one study found that 25 percent of shoppers worry about purchasing apparel in the wrong size, while 18 percent fear their gifts may turn up late.
And that’s just scratching the surface, with the same survey revealing a host of other gift-buying stresses, including:
Unfortunately, as a retailer, there’s not much you can do to stop Uncle Frank sending his nephew’s gifts to Springfield, Missouri rather than Springfield, Massachusetts.
But you can definitely point shoppers in the right direction by using sidebar popups to provide product recommendations:
In the above example, the recommendations are segmented by price. But there’s really no limit to the types of recommendations you can offer. Try recommending product types by:
Even better, test multiple product recommendation popups to find out what works best for your audience.
With roughly 1.3 million ecommerce companies in the US and Canada alone, consumers have never had more choice at their fingertips.
This is both a blessing and a curse for ecommerce marketers.
On the one hand, if the barriers to entry weren’t so low and the opportunities so attractive, your brand might not even exist.
But on the flip side, it means you’re almost certainly in a highly competitive niche. Unlike in the “old days”, when your biggest rivals shared your zip code, today they could come from anywhere in the US—or even further afield.
Let’s be honest: if you’re competing solely on price, you’re locked in a race to the bottom. There’s always going to be someone prepared to undercut you.
For that reason, you need to give each and every consumer who visits your website a compelling reason to purchase from you.
Once again, a website popup is one of the best ways to make this happen. Because they’re so eye-catching, there’s a strong chance people will sit up and take notice.
So what do shoppers want to hear? That might vary from market to market, but a good starting point is to answer your audience’s most common questions, such as:
Here’s what that might look like:
The above example shows a USP-related popup on an imaginary product page.
This raises an important point: what’s the best place (and time) to display your website popups?
It’s about striking a balance between maximum exposure and maximum action. Naturally, you want lots of people to see your key festive messaging. But you also want to display it at the most impactful moment—such as when they’re weighing up whether to buy a product.
As ever, my advice is to test, test, and test some more. Because no two audiences are exactly alike. See what works best for your audience and do more of it.
While we’re on the topic of popup timings, one of the most effective times to display a popup is when the user is about to navigate away from your website.
Think of exit intent popups as the onsite equivalent of abandoned cart emails. You know the customer is about to leave, so you make a last-ditch, Hail Mary attempt to convince them otherwise.
Even as an avid popup enthusiast, I have to admit that exit intent popups can be annoying.
You’re trying to go about your day, then BAM, a popup gets in the way. There are times when I’ve vowed never to visit a specific website again because the exit intent popups were so intrusive.
For that reason, I only recommend adding these popups to your most valuable, action-oriented pages.
Don’t place them on your homepage. If customers are considering leaving before they’ve got any deeper into your site, they almost certainly aren’t ready to buy anyway. So it makes no sense to pester them.
Instead, save them for your product and checkout pages.
Another key point: exit intent popups need to add value.
Don’t just beg and plead with customers to change their mind; give them a concrete reason to stick around and buy. For example, acrylic wall art brand Bumblejax uses exit intent popups to promote its free shipping and first order discount promotions:
Shipping can be a key deciding factor for consumers at any time of year.
There’s plenty of evidence to back this up. For instance, a study from Retention Science found that online shoppers are twice as likely to respond to “free shipping” offers than promotions offering a percentage discount on a product. Moreover, an estimated 56 percent of all shopping cart abandonments come about through shipping-related concerns.
As December 25th approaches, shipping becomes an absolute deal breaker. Simply put, if the customer can’t get hold of a product fast enough they’re definitely going to look elsewhere.
But it’s not just about delivery speed—price is an important factor too. According to Think With Google, 75 percent of holiday shoppers plan to buy from retailers that offer free shipping.
The message here is clear:
This information is so important in the lead-up to Christmas that I recommend adding it prominently to every page—preferably in the form of a sitewide banner popup:
Not only does this approach encourage shoppers to buy while they still have time, but it also helps you avoid complaints from customers with unreasonably fast (or cheap) shipping expectations.
When it comes to capturing customer data, we marketers can be a greedy bunch.
We always want more, because we understand that data holds the key to delivering highly personalized (and highly persuasive) campaigns.
But there’s a problem: we’ve run the numbers, and it turns out that multi-field popups are about as popular as a glass of eggnog that’s been left out of the fridge overnight.
In our analysis, we looked at one million popup views, filtered any with fewer than 2,000 views, and analyzed the conversion rates for popups with between one and five input fields.
The results were conclusive: popups with one or two fields convert best, just like in this Christmas popup example:
Interestingly, we discovered that two-field popups actually convert at a slightly higher rate than single-field popups, but only by 3.32 percent.
So it’s clear. If you’re looking to build your holiday mailing list or capture names and email addresses ahead of the January sales, one or two form fields is the way to go.
I’m not trying to sound like Scrooge, but Christmas shopping can be a drudge. It feels like there’s always one more present to buy.
So why not brighten up the shopping experience with a little gamification?
Of course, gamifying the shopping experience isn’t just about putting a smile on your customers’ faces; it’s also about driving sales and revenue. According to our data, when it comes to running giveaway-based incentives, gamified popups convert at an impressive rate of 20.76 percent, compared to just 7.66 percent for non-gamified popups.
What marketer would turn their nose up at a campaign in which one in five people converts?
If you’re not sure where to start with gamification, let me point you in the direction of the classic spinning wheel popup, as demonstrated by 0utdoor apparel and footwear brand ArdMoor:
The idea is simple. Customers enter their email address in return for a spin of the wheel, which gives them a chance to unlock a discount or free gift.
Even if we suspect the result is predetermined, many of us just can’t resist hitting that “spin to win” button.
There’s another important point that I’m yet to mention:
If your popups look terrible, no one’s going to interact with them.
Fortunately, Sleeknote makes it devastatingly simple to craft attractive, on-brand popups in just a few clicks. Start off with a pre-built template, then customize fonts, buttons, and styles to your heart’s content—all without forcing you to write a single line of code.
Sounds good? See for yourself by starting your 7-day free trial.
As the big day nears, you’re likely fine-tuning your Black Friday emails and boosting your ad spending to increase website traffic.
After all, you want to leverage this year’s social-distancing-friendly, all-online Black Friday experience by attracting more shoppers to your online store.
That’s why, this year, it’s more important than ever to focus on what happens after potential customers swarm your site.
By using targeted, personalized popups that show at the perfect time, you can make the most of your Black Friday traffic and turn visitors into buyers with the right incentives.
If you’re looking for new ways to increase your Black Friday sales, keep reading to learn about the seven must-have Black Friday popups (and how you can use them the right way).
1. The Email Popup
2. The Pre-Sale Popup
3. The Discount Popup
4. The Product Recommendation Popup
5. The Upsell Popup
6. The Cart Abandonment Popup
7. The Customer Service Popup
It all starts with an email list.
Not just any email list, though. To get the most conversions from your subscribers, you need a segmented email list, full of people who are willing to hear about your Black Friday offers.
The weeks before Black Friday should be the time when your email popups shine on your site. How you incentivize new signups is up to you, but here are two strategies that worked for our customers in previous years.
Black Friday works on a first-come-first-served basis. If you’re late to the party, you miss all the good deals.
Use this high demand to your advantage and promise your new signups to be the first to know about your Black Friday deals.
Make sure to highlight the exclusivity of your offer in popup copy, too. Here’s how that might look:
Email your list one day before you go public with the sale and give them early access to Black Friday. As easy as that. 🚀
If jumping the queues, skipping the lines, or being the first-to-know aren’t big enough incentives, you can offer an additional discount to your new signups.
With an extra discount, as small as 5 percent, you can collect more emails and bring more orders in, without hurting your profits.
Check out this popup example:
You can experiment with free gifts, giveaways, free delivery codes, and much more as your popup incentive.
Hide your email popup from existing subscribers to ensure a better shopping experience. You can then target them with a popup informing when your sales will start, which brings me to my next point…
While an email popup is a must-have to get new subscribers before Black Friday, a pre-sale popup is another essential one to leverage your existing subscribers.
With a pre-sale popup that creates excitement among your subscribers, you can build anticipation for your upcoming Black Friday sales.
By using a countdown timer in your pre-sale popups, you can inform visitors of when your Black Friday campaign will start and set expectations in advance.
If you don’t want to spoil the experience completely, you can feature a sneak peek at your offers and add some mystery to your popups:
If you want to go one step further, you can create a calendar event for your sale and add it as a link to your call to action (CTA) button.
This way, your subscribers can add the event to their calendar and be reminded of it without much effort (which means a sure sale for you. 😉)
When you add a countdown timer to your popups, you decide what happens when the timer ends. You can choose to disable the popup at the end of the timer and we’ll automatically deactivate your popup, so you don’t have to look back.
When the big day arrives, you naturally want to welcome visitors into your store the best way possible.
(Well, not exactly like this.)
You can use discount popups to guide your visitors in the right direction and send them to the pages where Black Friday is happening.
By creating one or more simple discount popups, where you promote your offers and send visitors to the right pages, you can give potential shoppers a place to start.
Here’s what your discount popup might look like:
While a countdown timer helps inform shoppers in a pre-sale popup, in this case, the timer highlights the urgency and scarcity of the offer.
By using a countdown timer in your discount popups, you can visualize the end date of your sale and make visitors take action. It’s the perfect tool for promoting limited-time offers, such as Black Friday sales.
Upload custom fonts to Sleeknote to make your discount popups stand out even more on your site.
While a simple discount popup like the above does the job of directing visitors’ attention to your sales, an even better way of doing that is to give people a concrete starting point.
With personalized product recommendation popups, you can invite visitors to check out your bestsellers, promote almost-sold-out items, or curate products that are a Black Friday bargain.
Take a look at this example:
Or even better, you can add dynamic product recommendations into your popups to make sure that you don’t promote out-of-stock items:
With targeted recommendation popups, you can promote the items that are on sale and increase conversions from visitors to customers on (and after) Black Friday.
If you’re using Shopify, you can create a custom collection for Black Friday and add it to your popups with a few clicks of a mouse.
Black Friday shoppers are all in for spending money, with the promise of saving money.
When a visitor shows interest in your store on Black Friday, your goal should be to leverage their buying intent and turn them into customers with helpful, non-intrusive popups.
What’s more, you should also try and take them to a higher price point, while you get their attention. Upsell popups are the perfect tool for that.
You can simply recommend products that go well with what’s already in a visitor’s cart or incentivize high-value purchases with free gifts or delivery.
The key to upselling without overwhelming your potential customers is to be relevant to the shopper’s behavior and interests. For example, if a visitor has items worth $10 in their cart and you’re trying to take them to a $100 basket value, you’ll have a hard time convincing them.
Or, if the visitor is browsing low-priced kitchen accessories while you recommend them high-end living room furniture, once more, you risk losing them for good.
The solution? Show the right visitor groups the right upsell popups they need to see.
For example, you can create an upsell popup promoting free shipping for orders over $100, but only show it to those who have over $50 in their cart:
Since discounts are overused on Black Friday, extra benefits, like the above, can help you sell more, without annoying shoppers.
Use SiteData merge tags to personalize your popups based on how much more a visitor needs to spend to qualify for free shipping.
Online shoppers have little time (and patience) on Black Friday. When there’s another offer that catches their attention, they’ll leave.
With persuasive cart abandonment popups, you can intervene before visitors leave your store on Black Friday and convince them to buy from you before it’s too late.
Since profit margins are thin on Black Friday and your products are already discounted, you can incentivize abandoning shoppers in a new way—be it with an extra product sample, fast shipping, or a free resource.
And if you don’t want to offer any additional benefits, you can use the scarcity angle to convince them to stay, with a popup like this:
Remind shoppers that Black Friday is ending soon or the product they’re viewing may sell out, so you can drive FOMO without incentivizing abandoning visitors.
Set up an exit-intent trigger with one click to catch visitors right before they leave your site on Black Friday.
An often-overlooked type of popup during Black Friday is service popups.
Like any other time (if not more on Black Friday,) you need to be ready to help your potential customers with any questions they may have about your sale or products.
One way of doing that is to create a contact popup where you offer shoppers a helping hand, be it about Black Friday deals, your returns policy, or choosing the right product.
Another essential service popup you might need during Black Friday is a status message. Since many websites experience server issues or payment problems on Black Friday, you should inform your customers about technical issues with a popup that shows on relevant pages.
Even if, fingers crossed, nothing goes wrong, you can use service popups to let customers know when to expect delivery or how your returns policy work—during or after they buy from you.
Here’s how it looks like up close:
A SleekBar that takes up little space on your website is ideal for informing visitors about your service messages, without stealing the focus away from your Black Friday sale.
Use page-level targeting to show your popup only at the cart or checkout step, so you don’t take the attention away from your sale.
Contrary to popular belief, Black Friday popups don’t have to be aggressive, intrusive welcome mats that only promote discounts and deals.
When used right, Black Friday popups can help you grow a segmented email list, engage your existing subscribers, promote your offers, and increase Black Friday revenue.
Recreate these seven must-have Black Friday popups on your store today and you’ll be ready for the big day.
When used correctly, website popups can be extremely powerful.
Not only for collecting emails, but also for turning visitors into first-time customers, and buyers into repeat purchases.
With targeted website popups that offer visitors an incentive, such as a 10 percent discount or a valuable lead magnet, you can grow your email list with quality leads.
This gives you a chance to continue the conversation with email marketing and turn subscribers into customers.
And if you’re one of the 270,000 e-commerce sellers who chose Magento for their online business, you’re in luck.
I’ve made a list of some of the best Magento popup examples to make sure you don’t lose out on any more customers.
1. Timberland
2. Sigma Beauty
3. Graze
4. Christian Louboutin
5. Lamin-X
6. Helly Hansen
If you like good shoes, you’ve probably heard of Timberland.
Owned by VF Corporation, Timberland is marketed towards people looking for high-quality, durable footwear appropriate for the outdoors.
If you want a customer to submit their personal information willingly, you need to prove the value of the action you want them to take, and Timberland understands this.
It clearly mentions the benefits of signing up for the Timberland newsletter to entice visitors. Moreover, the whole thing is summed up in four short bullets that use power words such as “VIP access,” “personalized,” “exclusive,” and “early access.”
That’s not it. Timberland also leverages high-quality visuals to boost its popup conversion rate. This makes sense considering popups with images convert 83 percent better than popups without images.
Instead of a solid-color background, Timberland has four models donning the company merch, complete with a complementing font and color palette. Adding a dash of orange directly puts the spotlight on the 10 percent discount, the “Subscribe” call to action (CTA,) and the benefits.
If popups with image backdrops aren’t your cup of tea, you can combine a solid-color background with an image, as Timberland does on its Dutch website:
This email popup has an aesthetically-pleasing image on the left and a solid color background for the newsletter benefits. The rest of the popup elements remain the same as the previous one.
Sigma Beauty strives to transform your beauty routine, and its website doesn’t disappoint, too.
Many consider Sigma Beauty as one of the best Magento websites because of its design aesthetic and navigability. While these factors stand true, I really like how the beauty company uses a discount popup so well.
Right off the bat, there are three important things about Sigma’s popup:
In our research, we found that having fewer input fields in your popups can lead to more conversions.
By asking for just an email address, Sigma Beauty removes a huge barrier to conversion. When combined with the promise of a 20 percent discount, the company’s offer to subscribe to its mailing list becomes even more tempting for the visitor.
With a consistent font and color scheme, making it pleasing to the eye, and a contrasting CTA button, the popup instantly catches the visitor’s attention.
All in all, Sigma’s Magento popup proves you don’t always have to go over the top to highlight your offer.
Graze aims to reimagine snacking by giving it a healthy twist.
To boost its sales, Graze uses a sales promotion popup that appears on your screen as soon as you add any snack to your cart.
This is smart since cross-selling only works as intended if you do it at the right place and at the right time. Otherwise, you’ll end up with an annoyed visitor who might just abandon your store altogether.
Graze’s popup has a scrollable “You may also like” section that shows four additional snack options with the same price point. Showing similar or relevant items, as Graze does, can increase your average order value, contributing to a successful cross-sell campaign.
A compelling incentive in your Magento popups, whether it’s a free sample, free shipping, or a free product, can also help get customers to spend more without hurting the user experience.
Next on our list of Magento popup examples is Christian Louboutin, the luxury shoe brand that branched out into handbags, fragrances, makeup, and men’s footwear.
Surprisingly, Louboutin’s website popup design is quite basic.
All it asks its visitors is to enter their email addresses and specify whether they want to receive updates about the women’s collection or the men’s collection.
No complex design elements. No stroke of its iconic red hue.
Admittedly, I have seen better-looking popups. But the main reason why I chose it is to emphasize the importance of transparency.
Louboutin’s popup tells the shopper what to expect (updates about new collections and latest trends) and assures them they can unsubscribe from the newsletter later. More importantly, it explicitly informs the shopper their data is being collected and may be shared with other Christian Louboutin entities and service providers.
While the popup may not stand out for its design, it wins my trust by being transparent. For an e-tailer, winning the customer’s trust is critical. Not only does it contribute towards repeat purchases, but it also builds credibility.
Lamin-X provides an entirely new market of lens, paint, and surface protection to the automotive aftermarket products industry.
Lamin-X also has two unique popups on its site. The first popup is a cart summary:
The modal appears every time you add an item to your cart, showing you the last item added to your cart and the order subtotal. Other shopping cart options like “Checkout” and “Continue Shopping” are also part of the popup.
A discreet yet enticing discount offer pops up on the left-hand of your screen. This second popup appears when you click the teaser:
This popup gives visitors a subscriber-only discount offer. To get the 10 percent discount coupon, you’ll have to enter your details and click the “Get Coupon Code” CTA, after which you’ll receive an email from Lamin-X containing the exclusive coupon code.
The popup also hints at additional offers offered by the company and explains terms and conditions concerning the coupon and free shipping. Doing this can prevent any misunderstandings down the line.
As I mentioned before, customers value transparency. So, be sure to make your offers and incentives as clear as possible.
Last on my list is the popular Norwegian sportswear brand, Helly Hansen.
Like its range of sportswear and workwear, Helly Hansen’s popup doesn’t disappoint.
Compared to my previous examples, Helly Hansen’s newsletter popup has more input fields. But if you look carefully, you’ll see that not all fields are mandatory.
Visitors can simply enter their email and country to subscribe to Helly Hansen’s newsletter. Filling in all the fields will give them personalized recommendations, promotional offers, news, and other online content about Helly Hansen.
Other than this, the popup follows the usual popup optimization best practices, such as adding a relevant image, including subtext that assures users their data is safe and that they can unsubscribe any time, and a uniform color palette.
While the CTA button catches your eye and is well-placed, I would choose something more impactful and urgent. More so because of the popup’s straightforward look and to-the-point text.
Phrases such as “Get Exclusive Access” could work better than a simple “Subscribe” to get more signups.
Every website visitor is unique. They have different tastes and preferences and are in different places in the buyer’s journey.
Your job is to help them throughout the way, removing any friction that could possibly stop them from moving to the next stage.
Luckily, popups can help—provided you use them well.
I hope this roundup of the best Magento popup examples has given you some useful ideas to help you achieve that. Take inspiration from our above list and create popups for your own Magento site today.
If you’re one of the many, many online retailers using ecommerce popups, you’ll know just how effective they can be.
There are dozens of studies out there providing popup conversion rate benchmarks, ranging from 3.09 percent all the way up to 11+ percent.
Not only do popups convert at a high rate; they also support an array of goals and use cases.
Are you trying to capture more ecommerce leads? Reduce cart abandonments? Point customers toward your latest products?
There’s a popup for that.
But with all that choice — and a wealth of customization options available — it can be tough figuring out where to start.
So we decided to make your life easier by rounding up seven of our favorite ecommerce popup templates (and explaining how to use them in Sleeknote).
Ecommerce popups are a type of onsite popup used to support common ecommerce goals like:
So, as you can probably imagine, ecommerce popup templates are pre-made — but fully customizable — popup designs you can use to create your own popups at scale, without requiring any pesky coding or graphic design work.
Sleeknote customers can access dozens of popup templates, helping them run product giveaways, promote flash sales, guide returning visitors, and much more besides. Read on for some of our favs…
Lead generation is a vital element of any ecommerce marketing strategy. If you don’t have a pipeline full to the brim with fresh leads, you’ll struggle to hit your growth goals.
But you can’t expect potential customers to hand over their names and email addresses for nothing.
That’s why we recommend combining an incentive-based lead generation campaign — such as a product giveaway — with a gamified popup example, such as a wheel-of-fortune spinner:
There are a couple benefits to this approach.
Firstly, gamification can make popups more compelling, with a study published in the Journal of Business Research claiming that:
“Gamification can positively affect brand engagement and further increase brand equity, and that gamification appears to be an effective technique for brand management.”
What’s more, product giveaways are a smart incentive because they give the prospective customer the chance to win a physical, tangible prize. That feels a lot more exciting than a run-of-the-mill discount code.
Pro tip: Sleeknote allows you to edit the weighting factor and chance-to-win percentage of each segment on your wheel-of-fortune spinner, meaning you can tailor the outcome toward the results you’re aiming to drive.
Cart abandonments are an unavoidable part of life for ecommerce brands, with the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate standing at almost 70 percent.
That means the average online store is missing out on a ton of sales through shoppers abandoning their carts.
Imagine how much easier it’d be to hit your revenue goals if you could claw back some of that lost revenue?
One way to do that is through running a cart abandonment popup campaign that triggers based on the visitor’s behavior, such as:
But you can’t just show them a popup saying: “Please don’t leave!” You need to give them a reason to stick around.
For instance, try offering a discount code to potential cart abandoners, like in this popup example:
Sure, it might reduce your average order value. But even if it stops just 1 – 2 percent of cart abandonments, it could have a major positive impact on your revenue.
In our experience, ecommerce popups work best when they support the user’s journey, rather than interrupting it.
Which brings me nicely to our next popup example:
This is a category-specific popup, which references the types of products the customer is browsing at the time.
That makes the offer of a 10 percent discount code far more impactful. Because the average customer is more likely to respond to a discount on the specific products they’re viewing than a generic code.
This popup is a simple but effective example of how to make your shopping experiences feel more personal.
Get it right and you’ll delight a lot of customers, with up to 36 percent of shoppers insisting retailers should do more to provide personalized experiences—rising to 43 percent among households earning $100,000+ a year.
There’s nothing more frustrating than endlessly clicking around an ecommerce site, trying (and failing) to find the right product.
Frankly, most consumers won’t stick around if they can’t find what they’re looking for. And why would they? After all, there’s a lot of other online stores out there.
With research suggesting that 39 percent of online shoppers browse products but only 12 percent go on to add an item to their shopping basket, browse abandonment is clearly a big issue.
You can mitigate this risk by using popups to point customers in the direction of whatever they’re looking for through a simple multi-step quiz:
No more blindly clicking on irrelevant product or collection pages; instead, shoppers answer a few questions and are immediately shown a bunch of relevant products.
Best of all, you can combine this tactic with a lead capture element by offering to send bespoke product recommendations to the customer’s inbox:
That way, you get to improve your conversion rate while also growing your marketing list. What’s not to like?
For the most part, you likely don’t care what your customers buy, as long as they buy something.
But when you’ve sunk a bunch of time and effort (and money) into launching a new collection, you want to make sure it gets maximum attention.
In short, you need a popup that points website visitors straight toward all those shiny, new products:
This approach isn’t just about showcasing your latest collection. By highlighting your most attractive products, you stand a better chance of converting website visitors into paying customers.
In a similar vein, if you’re running a flash sale or some other limited-time promotion, it makes sense to get as many eyes on it as possible.
Not only can it boost your conversion rate, but it might also help you shift out-of-season stock—because you don’t want a bunch of old products gathering dust in a corner of your warehouse.
So why not try targeting visitors with a popup that directs them straight to your hottest deals?
Pro tip: Sleeknote allows you to choose who sees (or doesn’t see) your sale-related popups. So if you only want to target new customers, or email subscribers, or people who live in a certain location, we make it easy.
The average amount of time consumers spend on ecommerce sites has dropped across all device types in recent years:
This tells us one thing: it’s in your best interests to direct customers toward the products they’re most likely to buy, fast.
For that reason, it’s worth targeting shoppers with popups featuring your best-selling products:
Or even some customer testimonials would help drive the needle. Like this great popup from Pressed:
This is a classic example of social proof—the phenomenon by which people copy the actions of others to help them understand how to behave in any given situation.
In other words, a customer sees your best-sellers and social proof popups, then thinks: “If all those other people bought these products, maybe I should too.”
Not only that, but it’s also an example of personalizing your shopping experience.
Sleeknote allows you to choose the category pages on which this (or any other) popup appears, so you can present shoppers with products that match their preferences.
With 60 percent of consumers saying they’re likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a retailer, this approach can help you turn first-time buyers into long-standing customers.
Like the look of all those juicy ecommerce popup templates?
Eager to start using them on your own site?
Fortunately, Sleeknote makes it super simple to add all these templates (and more) to your ecommerce store. And, by starting a 14-day trial, you can access all the free popup templates you need to inspire your future onsite campaigns.
Start by clicking the Try Sleeknote free button at the top right of your screen:
Then create your trial account. Don’t worry — we don’t ask for any credit card information at this stage. And we don’t place any limitations on functionality, other than a cap of 500 email sends, so you can try out everything we offer.
From your Sleeknote dashboard, click to create a new Onsite campaign:
Then hit the button marked + New onsite campaign.
From there, you’ll be transported to a page displaying all our popup designs. By default, you’ll see a bunch of pre-designed templates, but if you’d rather start out with blank versions, just click the slider marked Themed templates:
As you’ll see, each themed popup example is titled by use case (like “Stop abandoning shoppers” and “Run a product giveaway”). Choose the template that best fits your needs then click Continue to launch our popup builder.
Pro tip: You can navigate through the popup builder using the top menu. Want to change something? Just click on a previous step:
Now, it’s time to customize your popup. Start by choosing where you want it to appear on-screen:
Then click through to the Design stage, where you can tinker with individual popup elements (like text, imagery, button colors, container layout, and more) using our simple drag-and-drop editor:
At this stage, you can edit two other elements:
Once you’re satisfied with your designs, click Continue to play around with your popup display settings, including:
Depending on your campaign type, you may also be able to edit field mapping, which determines how the information gathered in your onsite campaign is displayed in custom fields.
Finally, give your campaign a name, schedule it to display for a specific period (if relevant), then click Save. You can either activate your campaign immediately or turn it on later via the Campaigns section in your Sleeknote dashboard:
Regardless of the tool you use to create your ecommerce popups, it’s important to choose one that offers many templates for you to customize. Make sure you choose a popup builder that allows you to target and personalize your templates so they fit perfectly within your site.
Sleeknote has a fantastic popup builder, plus everything you need to follow up your sign ups with customized and automated email campaigns that help you build better relationships with your customers.
Itching to try all this for yourself? Sign up for your 14-day free trial.
For all of the contempt popups have historically received, there’s plenty of research that proves they can be an immense asset.
“They may be derided by a few customers, but test after test has shown that, with the right offer made to the right audience, popups can dramatically increase your email sign-ups, notes Mark MacDonald, senior content marketing lead at Shopify. “There are also tests you can run to heighten and personalize your offers while minimizing the perceived annoyance of a popup.”
Now I should point out that the average conversion rate across the board for popups is only around three percent. However, the best of the best have been known to reach conversions of up to 40 percent.
This shows the disparity there can be when using popups and how crucial it is to run a smart, efficient campaign where you continually experiment to see which techniques work best.
For this post, I’m going to take an up-close look at some Shopify popup examples to see which tactics top brands are using to maximize their number of opt-ins and reel in high-quality leads.
I’ll also point out the key strengths of each example so you can take the same concept and apply it to your own campaign.
1. Pipcorn
2. Tigerlily
3. HELM Boots
4. SoYoung
5. Beardbrand
This is a brand that sells top quality “heirloom snacks,” where “seeds are passed down generation to generation, saving the best seeds.”
Some of their top sellers are sea salt popcorn, cheddar cheese balls, and lime zest corn dippers.
The moment a shopper lands on Pipcorn’s website, they’re shown this popup.
Although this style would technically be classified as an interstitial because it takes up the entire screen —something I generally suggest avoiding because it can be disruptive—I think Pipcorn does a great job with it.
Here’s why.
First, shoppers can still see the website in the background because the popup is translucent, meaning that it doesn’t upset the flow, and shoppers don’t become disoriented by it.
Next, this popup is simple and clearly written and includes some enticing offers.
At a glance, shoppers can see that Pipcorn will give them 15 percent off for signing up, and they’ll also receive product and news updates.
If it’s a brand they have a genuine interest in, this combination of a discount and exclusive information can serve as a strong incentive to sign up.
Finally, shoppers can quickly and painlessly exit the popup with no hassle.
They can click the “X” on the top right-hand corner, or they can simply click anywhere outside of the optin box to return back to Pipcorn’s website and resume browsing.
And this is something I think is incredibly important when using popups.
After all, you don’t want to create friction and potentially lose shoppers because they have difficulty navigating out of your optin.
Instead, exiting should be easy and intuitive, which Pipcorn has done a great job with.
Tigerlily specializes in women’s clothing, apparel, and swimsuits.
Their products are simple yet sophisticated and upscale.
Here’s the popup shoppers see after arriving on Tigerlily’s homepage.
There are a few different things that I like about it.
For starters, they have a professional-looking image that instantly lets new shoppers know about the types of products they sell.
I’m sure you know how vital the visual component is to e-commerce sales and marketing.
So including a strong image in a popup can be powerful.
Just like the rest of their brand, Tigerlily’s popup has a straightforward, minimalist feel to it, with sharp, tight copy.
And notice how the dark fonts and space between the copy and white background naturally draw shoppers’ eyes to the offer.
Having plenty of “negative space” like this is an effective technique for instantly bringing attention to the offer and letting shoppers know what’s in it for them by signing up.
Just as Pipcorn, Tigerlily doesn’t waste any time in letting it be known the benefits of optin in either.
But rather than offering 15 percent off as Pipcorn did, Tigerlily gives shoppers $20 on their first order for subscribing.
This shows there are different ways to go about offering incentives, and it doesn’t always have to be giving shoppers a certain percentage off.
Instead, you can deduct a set amount of money, like $20 in this case.
I also like that Tigerlily only has one field in their optin form that simply asks for a person’s email address.
As you probably know, there’s a correlation between having a lower number of form fields and higher conversion rates.
And it doesn’t get much lower than only having one field.
Also, like Pipcorn, Tigerlily makes it super easy to exit out of the popup.
Shoppers can either click the “X” on the top right-hand corner or simply click anywhere else on the screen.
Just like that, they’re back to browsing with zero frustration.
Austin Texas-based brand HELM Boots sells handcrafted premium leather footwear.
Explore their site, and you’ll quickly notice that they put a lot of time and energy into creating an enjoyable online shopping experience and have a definite attention to detail.
A few seconds after arriving, this popup appears.
The key words here are “a few seconds.”
Using a timed popup is a strategy that more and more brands are using these days, with many having great success with it.
Rather than hitting a shopper with a popup instantly, businesses like HELM Boots wait a few seconds or longer to give the shopper a second to get their bearings.
Another option is to wait until a shopper scrolls down to a certain point before displaying a popup.
For instance, they may scroll halfway down the page or reach a particular product before it appears.
I think both can be good options and are definitely worth experimenting with.
To learn the basics of timed popups, I suggest reading this post from Finalsite.
It covers the fundamentals and walks you through the general process and logic step-by-step.
Another thing I love about this popup is the ridiculous amount of incentive it gives shoppers for signing up.
By doing so, they get:
This blows the offers of many other brands out of the water, and I’m sure HELM Boots has maximized its subscriber base as a result.
I mean, who wouldn’t be at least a little interested in getting $50 off, along with free shipping and free returns and exchanges?
It’s a no brainer.
While not all brands have the financial wiggle room to offer $50 off and still make a reasonable profit, this shows the impact that targeted offers like these can have.
That’s why it’s smart to crunch the numbers and see how big of a discount you can afford to give to get shoppers to sign up.
When you consider the potential long-term value, deep discounts like the one HELM Boots offers may be worthwhile.
Besides that, it’s dead simple for a shopper to enter their information because all HELM Boots requires is their email address.
This is the same approach Tigerlily takes and one that should result in a higher percentage of shoppers going through with the optin process.
So always keep it as basic as possible, asking only for essential information.
Here’s a brand that sells “elevated lunch boxes, cooler bags, backpacks, and accessories constructed of raw linen and washable paper.”
All of the products are expertly designed and definitely have the “cool factor.”
SoYoung is one of the more interesting Shopify popup examples because they take a slightly different approach.
Rather than offering a discount, exclusive access, etc., they have a giveaway where shoppers can enter to win free loot.
SoYoung also uses a timed popup that doesn’t appear until after shoppers have scrolled down and checked out some of their products.
Here’s what shoppers see.
I’m a big fan of the bold, beautiful images that highlight SoYoung’s top products that can be won through the giveaway.
All a shopper has to do is click, “Yes, I want to enter!” at the bottom.
Or, if they’re not interested, they can simply click on, “No, I don’t want a chance to win.”
If it’s the latter, they’ll instantly exit the popup and can resume browsing as normal.
But if they are interested, they simply enter their email address, and they’re signed up for the SoYoung USA “Win All This” giveaway.
From there, subscribers can click on the link for contest rules to learn the details and get filled in on the specifics.
I really like this idea from SoYoung because it takes a different angle than what most e-commerce brands are using.
I think it’s a fun way to raise the interest level in their brand, while at the same time providing shoppers with a strong incentive for signing up for their email list.
And it doesn’t require a massive amount of money to run this type of giveaway.
You could do something similar by gifting the winner with a handful of your top products, which could potentially be done for under $500.
I also like the aesthetic appeal of their popup.
It’s very crisp and clean and uses beautiful product photos to showcase what’s up for grabs.
So if you’re looking to do something a little out of the box, this is certainly an avenue to consider.
If you’ve been reading the Sleeknote blog for a while, you probably know that we’re big fans of Beardbrand, a company that specializes in men’s grooming products.
There are just so many things they do well with their sales and marketing, which is a big reason why they’ve been so successful.
Beardbrand has also proven that they’re not afraid to be different and try out new strategies.
A good example is their optin popup.
Beardbrand understands the importance of creating a stellar digital shopping experience and didn’t want to do anything that could be remotely disruptive to it.
So rather than using a traditional popup, they took a unique approach that I’ve never seen before.
When shoppers land on their site, there’s a mail icon that’s lit up red, indicating there’s a message for them to read.
For those who are interested, all they have to do is click on the icon, and the optin popup appears, inviting them to join the Beardbrand newsletter.
This revolves around a concept known as a two-step optin form, which is gradually catching on with more and more e-commerce brands.
There’s a lot of interesting psychology behind it, which you can learn about in a previous post we wrote.
But at the end of the day, a two-step optin form resonates with a lot of shoppers because it’s non-intrusive.
Although it’s not for everyone, it’s an option worth exploring for many online businesses, and Beardbrand shows how to execute it well.
They also do a great job at sweetening the deal by letting shoppers know they’ll receive access to Beardbrand’s 5-day grooming boot camp to master their style, as well as be the first to hear about new products and receive exclusive content.
So there are several good takeaways you can learn from Beardbrand.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to designing popups.
These Shopify popup examples have certainly proven that.
However, there is a basic formula you can follow to pique the interest of shoppers and increase the likelihood of them taking action.
Some specific techniques include using clear, concise copy, creating a valuable incentive, incorporating visuals, and asking for only essential information.
Besides that, popups should never disrupt the shopping experience and should always be easy to exit.
If you do that, you should be in good shape.
Hopefully, the examples I’ve given here have provided some inspiration and got your creative juices flowing.
Now I suggest picking out the techniques you found most interesting and looking for ways to implement them into your own Shopify store to take it to the next level.
