When a person browses your website you might think that pop-ups will hinder the their experience, but the reality is quite different. Rather than creating a negative customer experience, they actually serve an important purpose in the process that helps both the person browsing and the eCommerce store owner.
The fact is that pop-ups enhance the customer journey while providing a way to capture lead details, as well as guide people to what they’re looking for.
An Essential Tool For Any Marketing Strategy
Lead capture through pop-ups is an effective and useful tool to increase conversion rates, boost customer loyalty, and capture new customers. On average, a pop-up will result in the desired action being taken around 3% of the time, with the top-performing ones offering a higher conversion rate.
Pop-ups can be used for a number of different purposes including:
- Building email lists and subscriptions
- Improving checkout conversion rates
- Upselling & cross-selling products
- Increasing direct website sales
- Promoting customer loyalty
- Capturing customer data
In eCommerce, the smallest details can result in the biggest changes in the success of your retail store, and pop-ups certainly fit into that category. To learn more about building an email marketing list, check out this resource on hot to create email lists with Klaviyo.
How Pop-Ups Drive Conversion
What is it that makes pop-ups so effective lead capture and converting sales?
Unlike banner ads on your footer or sidebar, pop-ups are quite hard to avoid. Customers may not engage with your website's CTAs but they may engage with a variety of pop-ups on your site. A pop-up can be triggered when a new customer has entered the website. These pop-ups can include a discount to encourage customers to subscribe to the email list. From there you can send email marketing campaigns based on the customer data collected. Pop-ups can also be triggered if the person is intending to leave the website. This gives eCommerce business owners an opportunity to change the customer's mind before they close the browser window.
Due to the highly-customizable nature of pop-ups, they offer a versatile way to encourage site visitors to carry out all kinds of useful actions.
The Use Cases For eCommerce Pop-Ups
So, now we’re going to delve down a little more deeply into the subject by looking at the various types of pop-ups that can be integrated.
Welcome Pop-Ups
This type of pop-up is present to the site visitor when they arrive and it can be useful in directing people to certain types of products or sales. Welcome pop-ups are also used to grow email subscription lists. By offering a discount of exclusive sales through email, you can generate more leads through your welcome pop-ups.
Exit-Intent Pop-Ups
Exit-intent pop-ups appear when a customer is leaving the website. For instance, your pop-up might be set to track mouse movement and trigger when the cursor moves toward closing the browser window. The intention of this style of pop-up is to change the mind of the customer to keep them from leaving your website.
Gamification Pop-Ups
Pop-ups also have the ability to be fun for customers to interact with. For example, instead of offering a 10% discount automatically, you have a spin-to-win game that customers can play to win a discount. Making these pop-ups engaging can add real value to your website visitors and can potentially extend the time they spend on your site.
Making Your Pop-Ups Relevant to the Viewer
As we’ve seen so far, there is a variety of different pop-ups to use and however you do use them, they need to be relevant to the viewer. Most often, a single, generic, one-size-fits-all pop-up is not the answer, so how do you avoid providing a pop-up that doesn’t meet their needs?
When a pop-up doesn’t work, it’s usually for two main reasons: it has either shown up at the wrong point of the buying journey, or it’s simply irrelevant. The good news is that it’s rectifiable and relies upon using an approach that’s based on where your site visitors have come from.
Segmentation Allows For Highly-Relevant Messages
Segmentation is a process used by marketers to categorize certain types of customers based on their behavior to personalize marketing messages. Pop-ups can also be tailored in this way to the viewer, based on how they’ve arrived on your website, whether it's from a Google search or social media.
Knowing where a visitor came from and whether they’ve visited you before will tell you a lot about how to structure your pop-ups. For example:
- Social media visitors are likely to be impulse buyers
- First-time visitors typically browse the store to check it out
- Customers arriving from an ad are typically looking for what you offer
- Returning visitors could be comparing prices or products with competitors
When you understand why a person is on your site, a tailored message that’s geared towards that sort of user will have a much better chance of being relevant.
Grow Your eCommerce Store With Pop-Ups
So, if you’re an eCommerce store owner without pop-ups you're missing out on a profitable marketing tactic! Pop-ups can be extremely useful, and while they may annoy some, the benefits of utilizing them are clear: increased engagement, improved customer satisfaction and higher conversion rates - what’s not to love?
