Part 1: Popups and Data Collection

Popups are ubiquitous on websites, people just expect them, but most are underutilized. They exchange just a discount for contact information squandering a perfect opportunity to learn more about their visitors.

Popup + Data + Offer

Goal: Product in hand/conversion

Popup Type: Full Page

Popup Design: Text only, high contrast

Popup questions:

1. Have you purchased from us before?
2. What are you most interested in product wise?
3. What matters to you most in that product?
4. When are you looking to purchase?

After 5+ years of testing…

This is the only popup strategy that I can suggest moving forward.

It simplifies things down to just two forms, one for desktop and one for mobile.

Both Full Page, both plain text.

Step 1: Qualifying Question MANDATORY

The purpose of this question is to have people self-select if they have purchased from us before, provides us with relative data related to our current targeting efficiency and allows us to only collect data from those that haven’t purchased from us before or bifurcate the data collection based on the answer via logic mapping.

Reason for Mandatory: 25% of customers that see popups and interact with them have already purchased skewing lots of reporting, A/B testing, and costing margin.

Step 2: Product Interest

Insights into what type of product or category the visitor is interested in. There is no wrong answer, but there are answers that help us determine how to properly merchandise our store.

Step 3: What matters most to you in the product

We’re looking to narrow down the biggest cause of purchase related to what matters to people. In surveying those that are returning shoppers, their data for what they like most about the products aligns with what they said matters to them most. This correlative relationship tells us that people really do care about what they prioritize in a product.

Step 4: Reason they are shopping

Why do people shop for new things? There’s usually only a few reasons that people are looking to purchase new products, this helps us narrow down if there are any outliers that we can use for marketing angles.

Step 5: Purchase timing

This is the most important question of the bunch, there is consistent correlations between people looking to purchase Today and the highest conversion rates, most orders, and most revenue. When someone is signing up they are usually in buy mode or about to buy mode, those that are not in buy mode, typically do not sign up, of those that do sign up convert at a much lower rate.

Step 6: Email Sign up

We run variations of this form with the email sign up being Step 2 as well with an automatic redirect upon drop off to the last page. In this form we are making emails required to unlock the offer. Location of this step should be dependent on your goals for more established brands, putting it in step 2 makes sense.

Step 7: Thank you page with code auto-applied

The keys here are to keep it short, let them know it’s been applied to the cart, let them know they will get it via email, and have a CTA that says Shop Now.

Step 8: If someone says yes they have purchased before you can promote an offer or collect more data from them

If this form is collapsed we push it to sticky with 50% OFF as the label to match the offer.

Some notes on this, if the email is at the end, the form will open back up to the last question until they reach the email step, whereas if the email is the second step and the user exits, they will be notified that a coupon code has been added to the cart.

On average of all the people that see this popup, 35-40% of people answer whether they have purchased before.

The split is about 75/20 people that haven’t purchased before v. those that have. 5% of people don’t remember if they’ve purchased before.

If starting with just questions without an offer roughly 60% will answer 4 questions before getting to the email subscribe step. This will be your second biggest drop off point.

On average 32% of people that make it through the questions will subscribe.

On average 18-24% of people that were eligible will subscribe via either form.

Meaning the placement of the email step DOES NOT MATTER for pure subscription or subscription to conversion rates – I know, kind of crazy.

The forms where you have the email step as the second step have a 95% data completion rate once and email is provided.

Data first approach collects more data from on average 64-70% of all people that qualify.

So it’s dealer’s choice whether you want more data or data only from people that subscribe. I am yet to form an opinion on the matter.

These are the strongest numbers we’ve recorded using two different approaches that seem to yield similar overall subscriber numbers and subscription to conversion numbers.

Why this approach?

In testing we found that even without an offer most people when presented with questions would answer them without any expectation of getting anything and the location of the email component would be about the same in terms of subscriber numbers.

We were getting a lot of dirty data from 20% of people that were signing up that were existing subscribers which was skewing our numbers, reducing our margins, and impacting our bottom line. Dirty data cannot be used to optimize.

If there’s dirty data, then most A/B test results become flawed.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many options for excluding already subscribed individuals as most every solution relies on cookies and cannot track cross device without an individual logging in.

It’s not 100% but it does clean up a lot of dirty data.

On average these forms have a subscription to conversion rate of between 15-28%.