eCommerce popups have a mixed reputation with regards to success rates. But, when used correctly, they can be your email marketing campaign’s biggest ally – and a huge subscriber driver.
eCommerce popup best practices rely on three key areas to inspire, rather than annoy, your audience.
In this blog, we’ll outline how getting your approach to popups right can crush your conversion rates, and build your subscriber lists.
Then, to top it off, we’ll demonstrate how Drop Zero Digital’s complete email marketing solution can help do it all for you.
But before we get into any of that, let’s take a quick look at why some people may be against using popups.
Why Are eCommerce Popups Getting a Bad Rap?
The familiar trope of popup nay-sayers is the annoyance factor. When improperly executed, popups can be a jarring experience for your prospects and actually harm customer retention rates.
There’s nothing more annoying than popups constantly disrupting your browsing. Some of the most common issues with popups include:
- Non-relevant Offers: Popups offering discounts on unrelated products or irrelevant promotions feel tone-deaf and out of touch with customer needs.
- Repetition Fatigue: Seeing the same popup multiple times on one visit—or on every visit—feels spammy and reduces its effectiveness.
- Jarring Audio or Visual Disruptions: Popups with loud sounds, auto-playing videos, or flashy animations can be overwhelming and turn visitors away – not to mention they can also be pretty un-inclusive for prospects with epilepsy and other sensory sensitivities.
- Lack of Transparency: If customers feel pressured into providing their email without understanding how their data will be used, they may lose trust in your brand.
But forget about alienating the audience. Because we’re only interested in delighting your customers and encouraging conversions.
So, what does popup best practice look like when it comes to your ecommerce store?
3 eCommerce Popup Best Practices
Ultimately, getting your popup campaigns right boils down to these three key aspects:
- Timing
- Design
- User experience
Let’s jump into those three areas now and unpack what makes them so important.
1. Timing
Resisting the urge to slap a popup for your latest shiny offer in front of your audience as soon as they land on your site is a great place to start.
Nobody likes being hit with sales patter when they open the door. That’s what your selling or connecting emails should do.
Additionally, Google hates when people enter your site then bounce straight back out again without taking any action. This is known as your “Bounce Rate”, you want this to be as low as possible. Immediate popups will cause this to rise.
You want customers to be able browse your site and find the best products, before hitting them with a sign-up banner. Setting rules to your popups is a great way to strike this balance while simultaneously managing your customer’s journey.
2. Design
Setting an exit intent rule will mean your popup appears as an offer or discount when someone looks ready to leave your site.
Conversely, you might like a banner to appear when someone scrolls through a certain percentage of your page or hover over a product for a pre-determined amount of time without buying.
Basically, you can tell these people are engaged with your brand, now you just need to get them on your mailing list.
This is where the design element of your popup best practice comes to the fore.
3. User Experience
Slightly different to design, user experience or UX is more about how your popups perform rather than their appearance.
eCommerce popup UX is becoming increasingly important when it comes to the success of online campaigns. Which is why many turn to using high-performing tools like Klaviyo to get it right.
Basically, if your popup doesn’t look and behave correct across platforms, your customers ain’t gonna sign-up.
We’ve grown the average revenue per email for all our clients by 37.5%. Get our bespoke email marketing campaigns on your team today.
You want your prospects to click your “Subscribe” call-to-action button. But you also want them to be able to click off your banner with ease. Create a large or easily visible “close” button too.
Much the same as with poor timing, poor UX can also affect that bounce rate we spoke about earlier. Google has recently started to penalise sites whose popups cover or hide their page’s content.
You can improve your email marketing campaigns drastically by ensuring your customers aren’t annoyed already when they enter your welcome flow. Think about using chat boxes or ribbon banners instead of larger splash designs, especially on mobile.
Now that you know all about that best practice triple threat, we’d better tell you how all that hard work will pay off.
What Are the Conversion Rates For eCommerce Popups?
A recent study by Wisepops found that the average conversion rate for popups is 4.01%.
However, figures from Optimonk found that sites following popup best practices saw an average conversion rate of 11.09%.
That means, if you follow the rules, sites with an average of 100 visitors a day could see a return of 77.63 sign-ups every week. Before you know it your email list will be booming!
Now all you need to do is delight your customers with your email content. Check out our guide to 5 elements of effective email marketing to find out just how to do that.
Make Life Easy For Yourself, Take the All in One Solution
The great thing about all of this is you don’t have to toil over your site’s popup strategy, if you don’t want to.
You want to deliver an engaging popup plan that encourages prospects to sign-up to an email journey which is so uniquely ‘you’. We’ll get them in, it’s up to you how you wow them from there.
Our tailored approach can take care of implementing a popup structure for your brand which smashes the three key areas listed above out of the park. Find out more about our bespoke email marketing solutions.
