Crafting Killer Email Pop-Ups: A Guide to Capturing and Converting Your Audience
Capturing the attention of your audience is both an art and a science, particularly in building your email marketing lists. Enter the email pop-up, a marketer’s necessary evil. While annoying by reputation, these little automated windows hold a lot of power when it comes to growing your subscriber base.
Popups are a bridge between casual website viewing and loyal shopping. You need them to extend your customer interactions beyond single site visits to return engagement. But they can be tricky to get right.
The effectiveness of an email pop-up hinges on several elements: compelling copy, eye-catching design, and strategic implementation that take the user's journey on your site into consideration. In this guide, we take a look at these components to offer our insights and best practices for crafting pop-ups that capture and convert.
Image source: Melusine Studio
What is an email pop-up and what does it do?
Email popups serve to capture the information of potential customers who visit your site so you can grow your email lists. The most commonly used are capture-all pop-ups that greet users upon arrival. These can be customised to trigger under various conditions. Exit intent pop-ups engage users when they're about to leave but serve the same purpose.
Pop-ups typically include fields for visitors to enter their name, email address, and, in some cases, their mobile number (for SMS) or their birthday for a treat when it comes around. They can also offer incentives like discounts or exclusive content, headed by some attention-grabbing copy.
They serve several practical purposes for enhancing online marketing strategies. Here are the five most common uses:
Grow your lists: Pop-ups help turn visitors into leads. Even without offering discounts, clear communication of benefits to subscribers can effectively increase sign-ups.
Promote special offers: Pop-ups are good for highlighting seasonal promotions or special deals, making offers more visible and providing customers with a direct incentive to engage.
Reduce cart abandonment: Presenting offers like discounts or free shipping in your popups when customers are about to leave their carts can decrease abandonment rates.
Recommend products: Pop-ups can recommend products based on user behaviour and preferences, enhancing the relevance and timing of offers to increase the likelihood of purchase.
Collect customer feedback: Utilising pop-ups to solicit feedback can help you understand customer behaviours and barriers to purchase, especially useful when experiencing high traffic but low conversions.
Why is it so important to get your email pop-up strategy right?
A pop-up that misses the mark can actually deter visitors. The truth is, pop-ups are generally viewed badly. Most pop-ups interrupt the customer journey, appearing at an inconvenient time, leading to users quickly exiting them. They also tend not to offer nearly enough of an incentive to justify being so intrusive.
You need to offer value that makes the interruption worthwhile. Luckily, you can tailor the timing, appearance, and content of your pop-ups to make sure they only enhance the user experience rather than detract from it.
Key Elements for Crafting Compelling popups
You don’t just want your pop-ups to be tolerable. Use the right combination of timing, design, and copy, and they might just be welcomed by the right audience.
1. Clear Value Proposition
You want to clearly articulate what your visitors gain by taking the action you're suggesting. Whether you’re offering exclusive content, a welcome discount, or access to special features from your brand, the benefit should be immediately obvious and attractive enough to justify the interruption.
2. Engaging Copy
Effective pop-ups use concise, straightforward, and action-oriented language that speaks directly to your users’ interests. Aim for a strong headline, that aligns with the goal of your sign-up form. The message should be personalised and relevant to your brand, creating a sense of urgency. Phrases like "Unlock Your Exclusive Offer" can spur engagement.
Email popup example from Yuum
3. Eye-Catching Design
Your pop-ups should be visually appealing and align with your branding. Use colours, fonts, and imagery that stand out without clashing with page design. The pop-up should grab attention for the right reasons—not its ability to annoy or distract.
4. Minimalist Form Fields
The fewer the fields, the more likely your users will be to complete the action. Stick to the essential information. Just an email address lowers the barriers to entry. If more information is necessary, like a mobile number or date of birth, use progressive disclosure techniques or follow-up forms to gather these. Multi-step forms, if you’re using Klaviyo, ask for an email address and name, before triggering a second pop-up with the option to add SMS. So even if a user doesn’t want to give their mobile number, you will already have their email. This works to avoid overwhelming potential customers. In general, consumers are more apprehensive about sharing their numbers than their emails.
5. Clear Call-to-Action
The CTA button should be prominently displayed and clearly state the action you want the user to take. Use contrasting colours and inviting text that makes clicking irresistible. Make it clear what will happen next, reinforcing your value proposition. Learn more about creating visual contrast in your CTA button here.
6. Timing and Placement
The effectiveness of a pop-up can depend on when and where it appears on the screen. Exit-intent pop-ups are triggered when a user is about to leave the site, offering one last incentive to engage without interrupting their journey when they first arrive at your site. You can also consider less-intrusive pop-ups like flyouts or slide-ins, which are both great options for mobile where space is limited.
Example of a flyout form from Everlywell
Timing the pop-up after a user has spent a certain amount of time on the site can also ensure that your pop-ups are only shown to more interested visitors. Klaviyo now offers an AI testing tool that works like a GPS to test multiple versions of your forms and find the display times that lead to the highest conversions. With forms display optimization, Klaviyo automatically selects the winning version and sets it live.
7. Easy Dismissal
Make sure your pop-ups can be easily closed if the visitor is not interested to maintain a positive user experience. An obvious "X" or "No Thanks" option prevents frustration and allows visitors to continue browsing without feeling forced into action. When designing your pop-ups, make sure your windows are accessible for all, meaning they can be closed and clicked easily. Check out the example below. The close icon on the form on the left may be difficult to tap on a mobile device. However, the close icon in the form on the right is larger and easier to see. Accessibility is a win-win, giving users the freedom to engage on their own terms without disrupting the browsing experience while also improving customer relationships.
Image source: Klaviyo
5 Best Practices for Setting up your Email pop-ups
Ensure Mobile Responsiveness
With more users accessing websites from mobile devices, your pop-up must be optimised for smaller screens. This means large, easy-to-tap dismissal buttons, readable fonts, and quick loading times.
An example of a mobile responsive email popup by Melusine Studio for Real Science Athletics
Segment Your Audience
Not all visitors have the same interests or needs. Use segmentation to display different pop-ups based on user behaviour, location, or source of traffic. If you want to make your pop-ups less distracting, start by suppressing existing subscribers as an audience segment that shouldn’t see your pop-ups.
For example, if a user is visiting from an email link and has therefore already subscribed, you could offer them an SMS marketing or birthday popup instead.
Setting Targeting and Display Rules
Define when and where your pop-up will appear on your site. Set conditions based on user behaviour, such as scroll depth, time spent on the site, exit intent, or specific pages viewed. You can use these settings to optimise the timing and placement of your pop-up for maximum engagement.
Test and Optimise
Use A/B testing to trial different versions of your pop-up in regards to timing, content, and design. With Klaviyo’s new optimisation feature, AI determines the optimal settings for you and updates your form automatically to increase the submit rate without the need for ongoing manual adjustments. Note, this requires a minimum of 400,000 profiles.
Implementing Double Opt-In
To maintain a high-quality subscriber list and avoid spamming your users, you can require that users confirm their email address upon subscribing. This can be easily set up within your form’s settings when creating your po-pup.
Crafting a Killer Email Popup
Setting up an effective email pop-up involves more than just technical integration—you need to craft a strategy that enhances engagement without disrupting the user experience. Here’s our simple, three-step process to get you started:
1. Decide your offer
Identify the incentive you’ll provide for users to subscribe. This could be a discount, exclusive content, or early access to new products. The key is to make the offer compelling enough to justify the interruption of the browsing experience and align with what your audience would want.
2. Determine the behavioural trigger
Selecting the right behavioural triggers for your pop-ups is crucial for engaging visitors without disrupting their experience. With Klaviyo's advanced settings, you can fine-tune when and how your forms appear. Key triggers include:
Exit Intent: Capture attention as visitors are about to leave your site. This is ideal for last-minute engagement.
Time Delay: Customise the timing to your audience’s engagement patterns. This helps in capturing visitors' attention at peak interest points without being intrusive.
Scroll Depth: Engage visitors who have already shown interest by scrolling through your content, perfect for making sure you’re only capturing the right audience’s attention.
Page Views: Target visitors who have explored multiple pages, indicating higher engagement or purchase intent (for the same reasons as above).
Each trigger can be combined or used standalone, tailored to align with specific campaign goals. Testing different triggers will help you understand which ones convert best, allowing you to refine your strategy for optimal submit rates.
3. Develop, monitor and optimise
Continue to analyse how your pop-up performs in terms of conversions and other key metrics. Use this data to test all elements, individually of course, like your message, offer, and design elements. Optimisation is a continuous process. If your pop-up isn’t converting, change the trigger, offer, or image and re-test until you find the perfect combination for both the user experience and your conversion rates.
Don’t forget to personalise your pop-ups to enhance their effectiveness. Consider targeting users in specific markets, using local events and festivities to make your offers more relevant. You can also segment your audience based on their engagement level or purchase history. Differentiating between first-time visitors and loyal customers, or even creating a "VIP level" for your top buyers, lets you customise your messaging to meet the unique needs of each group. Personalisation improves the user experience and boosts submit rates.
Final Thoughts
The art of crafting killer email popups lies in the balance between engaging your audience and enhancing their experience. Focusing on clear value propositions, compelling copy, strategic timing, and user-friendly design can transform your pop-up strategy, taking them from mere interruptions to valuable touchpoints on your customer's journey.
If you think you need help supercharging your pop-up strategy so that it aligns with your broader email marketing goals, book a friendly call with us today.