The Welcome Pop-Up Playbook That Will Helps Your Brand Convert 5% Of Traffic.

You launch a well-organized, high-quality online store. You make the most of social media marketing. You set link-building campaigns in motion. Plus, you put a bunch of other marketing efforts.

To what end?

We bet you want to increase your Traffic. That’s what eCommerce marketing is all about.

However, with many of your competitors doing the same thing, it’s not enough to stand out and close a sale. It’s second nature to a prospective client to click the back button.

Unless…

You capture the attention of a visitor straight off the bat.

So how do you achieve that? It’s simple: incorporate a welcome pop up into your site.

Is it the holy grail of eCommerce marketing? No. Does it promise huge Traffic within the first week of implementation? No. But it’s a marketing gist you certainly don’t want to overlook.

Let’s take a more in-depth look at the welcome pop-up below.

What is a Welcome Pop-Up?

When we think of welcome pop-ups, we usually think about annoying messages that make it difficult for us to navigate an eCommerce site.

But if they’re used intelligently to capitalize on the Traffic your online store receives, they can be real game-changers. We’ll get to that in a bit, but first, we unpack what a welcome pop-up is.

A welcome pop-up is a kind of a form that suddenly appears (“pops up”) when a person is browsing through your product offering.

Think of it as a way to engage with your visitors even after they leave your site.

How, you might ask?

It all starts with capturing visitors’ email addresses using the pop-up form. Then you use email as a channel to drive them back to your site actually to make an order.

There’s really a ton of different ways you can format pop-ups, but the idea here is to grab your visitor’s attention when they’re new to the brand. And you’re using that to build a direct relationship with these visitors through email.

Why Do So Many Stores Run Welcome Pop-Ups?

The idea of welcome pop-ups was a brainchild of larger eCommerce brands. So this is what happened…

Not so long ago (2015, to be exact), big brands were spending tons of money on triggered emails and broadcast emails.

As you’d expect, a large portion of their store revenues was actually coming from email.

Every time they’d send a broadcast or add a new automated email sequence, the store would generate more sales.

Our customers say that in some cases, 40% or more of their net revenue can come from email as a channel. It kind of makes sense, right? If you can grow your email list’s size, in theory, you’d be well on your way to generating more revenue.

On top of that, the same brands also noted that very few first-time visitors ended up making a purchase. Only 2-3% of visitors made it to the other end of the sales pipeline, which, of course, meant that their email marketing strategy wasn’t quite as effective. Something was definitely amiss.

So, these brands sought to seal the cracks. They tweaked their marketing strategy a little. The focus now shifted to pulling visitors through email. And what better way to pull customers than using welcome pop-ups?

We won’t be “too meaty” here, but there are two main reasons for this:

Think about it: without a pop-up on top of your site, someone needs to intentionally scroll all the way to the footer of your page and use the embedded form to join your newsletter. Obviously, that’s a tall order.
Welcome pop-ups are inexpensive, on-brand, and punchy. They remove the steps your visitors would have to go through to join the email list. Plus, they drive the point home in the fewest words possible. Talk about convenience.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the qualities of a good welcome pop-up.

What Makes a Great Welcome Pop-Up?

We’ve seen tons of pop-ups down the years. Some good ones. Some bad ones. In general, though, it’s prudent to aim for a healthy signup rate of 5% for you to enjoy a thriving email list. We want you to strive for that down the road.

But if you’re yet to experiment on welcome pop-ups, you’d want to follow the playbook below to set you on your way to achieving a signup rate of 5%- easy peasy.

Stick to Pop-Up Format

Normal pop-ups are the status quo, and you’d be better off with that format.

Don’t muddy the waters. Keep the shape of the pop-up vertical so that it works just fine for both mobile and desktop. Given that you’re still finding your feet in eCommerce, there’s absolutely no reason you’d want one for each.

New Visitors Are Your Ideal Target

Oftentimes, new visitors get to your site through a generic Google search. So we can safely assume that they have no clue about your business or your offering.

These clients are driven by curiosity, and since it’s their first visit to the store, they are likely to have short attention spans. This means you have to get the timing of your welcome pop-up absolutely right.

So, we recommend that you trigger the pop-up to load based on which of these two things happens first:

The visitor has been there for 5 seconds.

Or they’ve scrolled 75% of the content down the site.

Remember, first-time visitors have no clue about your value proposition or business. So, piquing their interest within a few seconds of landing on your site is a great way to get them ‘hooked.’

The Type of Content Matters

Next is really about the type of content you want for your welcome pop-up with the format and the targeting firmly in place.

Are they joining a newsletter? Or are they signing up for an offer like free shipping on their first order or a code for 10% off their first order?

Whatever the incentive, don’t be ambiguous about it. Set clear expectations in the crux of the content. That’s the only thing visitors care about- really. They want to know exactly why they’re signing up and what to expect.

So here’s what we think: a signup offer is often the best way to pull visitors to your email list. It doesn’t have to be big. But it does give tangible reasons for why they should join your list ASAP. To really drill down this concept, let’s go over the “free shipping” example.

First off, the copy of the content has to be brief and concise:

Join our list to get a code for free shipping on your first order

For the button copy, we’d have it say:

Reveal code now. You could also go with, claim offer now. Obviously, these two are stronger than “join.” They focus on the expectation, and they act like a cool reminder of how close the visitor is to get the offer. Better still, they’ll instigate your visitors to take immediate action. And that means only one thing: they’ll be itching to click through to reveal the “goodies.”

Capping it off, we recommend shying away from fancy designs for your pop-up. Keep it nice and simple. It should blend into the website’s existing design and stand out just enough to draw the visitors’ attention. Try it out, and if it works, you can always reinforce the outlook and design sometime later.

If you follow this playbook, we promise you a 5% conversion rate. And your brand will experience a marketing nirvana for some time to come.