Onsite Pop-Ups for Email Capture and Beyond
The post was written in collaboration with Jenna Ochoa, Partner Marketing at Justuno.
While header/footer sign-up forms and checkout flow subscription options are commonplace, some brands are failing to utilize, or under-utilizing, onsite pop-ups. There are a number of third-party tools available – like Justuno – that can power these pop-ups and seamlessly integrate with a variety of ESPs. Pop-ups can be used in a variety of ways and, when done right, lead to higher sign-up rates, higher conversion rates and generate a boost in revenue from first-time visitors.
“You can use pop-ups and website messaging in every stage of your marketing funnel – from acquisition to nurture – to create highly targeted and refined customer journey touchpoints that capture and convert leads faster than ever before.” – Jenna Ochoa, Partner Marketing at Justuno
Using Pop-ups To Drive Email List Growth
To ensure the growth and long-term health of your email marketing program it’s important to proactively implement high yield list growth strategies. The most effective way to infuse your list with high quality leads is through a lead capture pop-up on your website. An incentivized sign-up overlay drives higher engagement and same session revenue, in addition to building up a list of interested contacts for retargeting via email marketing efforts down the line.
3 Key Components for an Optimized Capture Experience
1) Audience Targeting
Lead capture pop-ups should exclude people who have already subscribed to receive your emails; this helps control margin by avoiding giving away unnecessary discounts and allows returning contacts to see more relevant content instead, whether on the landing page or in another pop-up. Improve the specificity of your overlay by targeting visitors based on UTM parameters. For example, excluding the pop-up from firing for contacts coming from the email source, or displaying specific messaging for visitors coming from a Facebook ad campaign.
2) Timing
Different display rules will work better for different brands, so spend some time considering:
- The pages you wish to display the pop-up
- How long someone needs to be on the page before seeing it
- How often contacts are eligible to see the pop-up
- How you’ll differentiate creative by device type
A/B testing the above elements will lead you to a data-backed optimal user experience and increase the conversion rate of your pop-up.
3) Promotional Strategy
In most cases, pop-ups that offer some sort of incentive for sign-up perform better than those that do not. For retailers this often takes the form of a percentage discount or free shipping. The incentive should be strong enough to entice an immediate sign up and ideally motivate an onsite conversion. However, be careful not to discount too steeply as this could attract sign-ups from contacts looking for a steal, and they’ll be unlikely to convert on full-priced items in the future.
When choosing an incentive, consider the level of your standard email promotions and the average cost to acquire a new customer. This will help you develop an offer in line with or slightly below standard promotions—but not as great as your biggest sales—and boost first purchase AOV.
Success Story
A travel retailer came to Tinuiti with a small list of email subscribers, limiting the ROI from their email program. Tinuiti implemented an incentivized pop-up for this client and saw a huge lift in KPIs across devices:
Desktop
- 67% increase in engagement (email sign ups)
- 33% increase in AOV
- 97% increase in revenue
Mobile
- 73% increase in engagement (email sign ups)
- 13% increase in AOV
- 84% increase in revenue on mobile
Pop-ups Beyond Email Capture
So you’ve optimized your lead capture pop-up and are driving sign-ups like never before. Now what? While pop-ups are clutch for driving email list growth, there’s a myriad of opportunities to get creative and drive conversions using this proven tool.
Post-Engagement Messaging
Retargeting subscribers with their welcome offer in a top or bottom banner while they’re still on site removes friction from the checkout process and shortens the path to conversion, therefore, increasing orders and revenue. This tactic can also be utilized upon click-through on an email that contains an incentive, like cart abandonment triggers, re-engagement messages, or flash sale campaigns, effectively reminding the visitor of their available discount or incentive in an unobtrusive banner.
Success Story
A Tinuiti client displayed the banner below one page after a lead form engagement with a reminder of the welcome offer, generating a 63% increase in revenue and a 21% increase in AOV for same session conversions.
Website Offers
Website messaging pop-ups are ideal for flash sales or new product launches. Leverage site banners and lightbox pop-ups to reinforce marketing messages and increase same session conversions. Sale banners promote any current onsite discount or sale with a reminder of the incentive and promo code (if applicable). This type of messaging is relevant to all audiences because it can provide added urgency to purchase regardless of where the customer is in their journey.
Mirroring the messaging from an email campaign is an easy way to ensure that as a visitor browses, they’re reminded of the deal as they shop your site. Expert tip: providing non-subscribers ungated access to these discounts not only increases the likelihood of ordering, but allows for the opportunity to convert them to an email subscriber via the checkout flow.
If your goal is to direct awareness to a new product or collection, website banners are an effective way of informing visitors without interrupting their shopping experience. If you don’t have an offer or discount running with the launch, add a CTA to your banner to direct traffic toward the ideal landing page to reduce the number of clicks required to shop exciting new product.
Exit Intent For Would-Be Cart Abandoners
Exit intent pop-ups for customers who intend to leave behind items in their cart can immediately increase the rate of same-session purchases. Make your cart abandonment offers more strategic by segmenting based on cart value. Providing different levels of incentive based on cart value can help increase AOV and decrease revenue loss.
Success Story
A Tinuiti client implemented an exit intent pop-up with an offer of 10% off for customers who had not yet purchased and had more than $49.99 worth of product in their cart. The pop-up had a 49% conversion rate and helped generate additional email subscribers via the checkout flow.
Elevate Your Pop-ups
Optimize your campaigns by developing mobile-specific design and logic, adding interactive content like gamification or countdown timers, or offering recommended products. Simple improvements like these can exponentially increase the impact of your existing pop-ups.
Mobile Specific Pop-ups: Be cognizant of the mobile experience by building audience rules specific to mobile users like displaying on the second or third page of the visit to improve UX and reduce SEO concerns. The design should also be created with screen size in mind; use large CTAs and consider a sign-up bar instead of a full-screen pop-up to mitigate disruption of the shopping experience.
Gamification: Captivate attention and increase engagement rates with a gamified pop-up like a spin-to-win. Be sure to make the winning offer the best one available on the wheel to avoid making contacts feel like they lost out.
Countdown Timers: Countdown timers add urgency and drive onsite conversions for post-engagement messaging and website sale pop-ups. This tactic is best used on desktop designs as it can often crowd or overpower the pop-up on mobile.
Product Recommendations: More robust pop-up tools are now offering dynamic product recommendations and AI to help take your content to the next level. Pass in a product feed to display products to upsell contacts on a complementary product, or cross-sell product across categories.
“After ingesting your product catalog, AI servers can learn your products and identify patterns within purchase behavior. Using an intelligent upsell / cross-sell feature allows you to leverage the purchasing behavior of your site’s customers to increase AOV. ” – Jenna Ochoa, Partner Marketing at Justuno
As with any marketing strategy, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to pop-ups, but these basic principles provide a foundation for effective lead capture, increased conversions and a positive customer experience.
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