Remember, back in the 90s when pop-ups, well, popped up on your screen, we all felt like what the heck – how many times do I have to click that cross?

You know what they say about first impressions being the last!

That feeling exists even today because pop-ups are still regarded as a negative, a pain in the wrong place. Bleh…

It’s like muscle memory. See a pop-up, click that cross! Poof! You agree?

But you know what? We got this opportunity to test pop-ups with one of our clients and oh man! we were totally surprised with the results.

And of course, we got some pretty good insight, which we felt like sharing with you. This is really cool stuff for e-commerce store owners and marketers.

First up, we want to come clean and say that pop-ups DO work! Yep.

You need know-how to get them to work for you and that’s exactly what you will get here.

As we worked with our client’s pop-ups, we discovered four key steps or factors, if you like, that when done right will ring in the green. We like to call this the BIG FOUR.

So, here’s the recipe:

Step 1: Get that OFFER right!

Why?

If the offer is attractive, then it makes people pause to read it. What we found is that the right offer can even induce a non buyer to at least try out the product. Now that’s a great conversion!

Look, these days, not everyone signs up for everything unless there is really a strong WIIFM. So, great discounts and impressive bundles can do the trick! And if your margins are constrained, then free shipping or a free downloadable exclusive resource such as a guide can also be effective hooks.

The goal should be to enhance your audience’s experience.

Step 2: Get the TIMING spot on!

Nobody and we really mean nobody likes being interrupted. It’s like a bad taste in the mouth or reading a sentence with sloppy English. The only reason your audience is on your site is because they found something of interest.

So, let them spend some time feeding their interest. And the fodder is your content.

Psychology 101: If you push too hard, the resistance is harder.

Ideally, we found that pop-ups should be shown after a minimum of 30 seconds or when someone is about to exit the page.

We use KLAVIYO to manage pop-ups because it lets us set intervals and frequency of when to show the pop-up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3: The DESIGN

We’ll say it again – pop-ups are instinctively closed! So, yours has to grab attention. Ever stopped dead in your tracks when you see a beautiful lady and your jaw hangs down! Same thing with pop-ups.

Think of effective minimalism. Don’t overburden the pop-up with excessive content and neon lights. Make the offer stand out, instead. And now is certainly not the time to ask the customer to fill in several details. Just the name and email address will do.

Something like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 4: Understand your AUDIENCE

You’ve got the offer, timing and design right, so what’s next?

Firstly, accept the reality that some people WILL close your pop-up, regardless.

But that’s alright.

Heck, there will be some in your audience who are genuinely interested in your product but will still close it, purely out of habit.

Anyway, you don’t want everyone to subscribe because you run the risks of decreasing deliverability and increasing spam complaints.

You want only those people who are interested and want to engage with your content in your mailing list.

The upside to that is it helps to keep your email marketing list clean and tight.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, right? So, here’s what we did for our client and you’ll see the results for yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This client had linked all his ads to the funnel page instead of his Shopify store.

First, we looked at the setup of the flow and decided to add a welcome pop-up to the Shopify store.

With this setup the flow made around 3% of their total store revenue.

 

 

 

 

However, we felt that we could do one better.

So, we integrated the welcome flow to the funnel pages.

Truth be told, it wasn’t all that easy but we managed to get it done. And now check this out:

 

 

 

 

This 38K revenue accounted for more than 10% of the total store revenue!

Another important side benefit we got was that we collected, and still are, a lot more profiles than before.

And when did we show the pop-up?

In this case, we programmed the pop-up to show when the customer was about to exit the page.

This is not rocket science, but it also means a lot of testing, analysis and working with different creatives, which is time consuming and tedious.

If you feel that all this is too much for you, give us a shout out at Hustler Marketing.

We can deliver more conversions from your pop-ups and this will reap rich dividends for you in the long run.