As an eCommerce retention marketing agency here at Hustler Marketing, our experienced copywriters, designers and marketers create sign-up forms for email and SMS capture on several marketing platforms. Over the last few years, we have mastered the creation of powerful email popups that have allowed our partners to increase their lead generation and push conversions. Follow us along on this journey where we’ll share with you our best tips and tricks to optimize your email popup and keep those submit rates through the roof! 

 

Defining pop-ups

A pop-up is a small window that appears on your screen while browsing a website. They are a great way to ask for information about your shoppers and create new points of contact with your customers. Their main purpose is to help you gather new leads by growing your email and/or SMS marketing lists. However, their benefits are many:

1. Grab people’s attention
2. Improve conversion rate
3. They are completely customizable
4. Help personalize your marketing experience

 

Email Popup Types

There are different kinds of pop-ups and functionalities that you can leverage to increase your subscriber growth. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the most popular options available.

Regular Multi-Step Popup: Here you can have 2 or 3 steps. The first one is usually the email input step, the second one can be a phone number input and the last step will be the “thank you” or success step. This is great if you are looking to increase both your email and SMS lists.

 

Survey-like popup: This popup type is great for brands that are looking to expand the information they keep on their leads’ profiles in order to customize their marketing experience.  Don’t be afraid to ask for your customers’ age, gender, style, or goals, depending on what your brand offers, and use this data to create personalized flows and segments.

 

Floating button/teaser/dynamic popup: When a user goes into your website, sees the popup, and closes it, a little button will go to a corner of the screen so the user can open it up again and sign up instead of the popup being lost until their next session. We have seen great results with this dynamic popup. 

Key elements for a successful email popup

Attractive offers

A popup can be an intrusive experience for many. However, if your popup includes interesting information for your website browser, like a special discount,  they’ll be glad your sign-up form popped up on their screen. That’s the power of including an attractive offer on your email capture popup. However, this is actually very common. Since people are used to getting these, we need to find new and interesting ways to present our offers.

Strong headlines and engaging copy

Your popup copy will do all the heavy lifting when we talk about sparking action. So make sure your copy:

• Includes strong headlines that quickly grab the attention of your customers.
• Is clear and concise. Don’t over or underexplain anything. 
• Includes a clear, so the user knows exactly what you want them to do. 
• Sets expectations. Do not only mention the discount you are offering but make sure you tell your potential subscribers what they can expect to land in their inbox if they sign up.

Eye-catching design

Your popup needs to stand out from the crowd and grab enough attention to prevent visitors from hitting the close button before they leave their email and/or phone number. So, make sure your email capture popup design is on-brand. 

Your popup also needs a good and well-thought image-to-text ratio to avoid boring your customers with too much text or confusing them with too much imagery. Spend some time thinking about how you want to present your products, which are some of your best-performing pictures, and what you want to highlight in the design.

Our best tips and tricks for email popups (with examples)

Noticeable but not intrusive

This is a popup one of our Hustler teams created for a premium knife brand. Sharina, the account manager behind the brand, shared with us the elements that make this a very successful email capture popup.

• A teaser is used to be noticeable but not intrusive for the browsing experience of the users. This way, users can access the popup at their convenience. Also, the popup appears from the bottom of the page instead of suddenly popping up in the middle of the page, which is less disruptive.
• After testing different offers, a free gift worked better than a % discount. The said gift is illustrated in a fun and animated way, which gives the popup a nice push.
• The brand’s story inspired the design, so it’s coherent with the overall store’s image.

Want to know how this popup does? Here’s a screenshot of the results it has gotten in Klaviyo. 

On average, the submit rate for this popup is 7.25% which surpasses the 2,92% submit rate Klaviyo benchmark by 148%. Incredible!

Spark curiosity with a mystery discount

For this apparel brand, our best email strategists got together to create a mystery discount popup. Christina, the account manager for this brand explains the thinking behind it:

• The mystery discount drives website users to leave their contact information. Yes, they know they will get a discount if they subscribe, but the excitement of wondering: “will I get a 10% or a 20% OFF discount” is what intrigues people and makes the popup super well performing. 
• In terms of design, this resulted from a month-long A/B test between using product pictures vs. model pictures in the popup. In the end, the product version was the best performing one, making it the final option. This shows how important it is to get to know your customer and what they like.
• Finding a perfect combination of settings for the popup behavior is essential. Here at Hustler, we run frequent A/B tests to make sure we optimize these settings as much as possible.

The results? An average 6.8% submit rate (132% above the Klaviyo benchmark). Go mystery discount!

Make SMS opt-ins easier

If you’re starting to use SMS as a marketing channel, but you have already built up a list of engaged email subscribers, make it easier for them to sign up to your SMS program too. You can do this by creating a one-step popup that will appear only to your email subscribers. In the sign-up form, instead of having an input field for email and another one for SMS, keep just the SMS one, so your email subscribers are just one step away from becoming SMS VIP profiles.

How well does this popup work? Numbers never lie. The submit rate is 11.2%.

Pro-tips

1. Ask for extra information in your popup (age, size, gender, style, goals) in order to be able to personalize their marketing experience with your brand even further
2. Connect your super popup to a Welcome Series in order to push conversions from your new leads.

Do you want to learn more about the true power of Hustler popups? Find out how we got 8 eCommerce stores with an average 716% increase in sign-ups (and a 1,563% average increase in Welcome Flow attributed revenue). Or are you ready to take your list growth to a whole new level? Book a free call with us.