Email Opt-In Pop-Ups: Friends or Foes?

Email opt-in pop-ups can be either friends or foes, depending on how you set them up. If you optimize these pop-ups correctly, you can collect email addresses and add those customers to your list for marketing. If they’re not optimized, these pop-up can increase your bounce rates and hurt conversions.

Optimize Them

There are two things you need to do to benefit from email opt-in pop-ups:

First, offer your customers something of value: If you’re asking for an email address, you need to offer your customers something of value in return.

Many pop-ups ask customers to give their email address in order to subscribe to a newsletter for the latest specials and news. The truth is, most people don’t care about that! And they don’t want to be spammed daily, so the request may be ignored.

But what does have value to your customers are things like coupon codes for an instant discount, free shipping, a free or digital product, and so on.

Second, don’t set your pop-up to appear at page load: This is also common on many websites: as soon as you open the website, an email opt-in pop-up immediately flashes on your screen. Your customers only have seconds to process the site and see what it has to offer and the pop-up interrupts that.

If you have a pop-up that opens instantly at page load, potential customers may choose to bounce off your website.

Consider the Device

To avoid high bounce rates, there are two approaches you can take, depending on the user’s device:

1. If your customer is on desktop: Make sure the pop-up only displays on exit intent. A lot of apps will allow you to do this. The theory is that if your customer is leaving your site, you should show them the pop-up asking for their email address. Worst case, they won’t provide it, but they were leaving your site anyway!
2. If your customer is on mobile: Even though your app may have an option for exit-intent pop-ups, historically, they don’t work well on mobile. Why? Because when you’re thumbing up and down on your mobile, it’s really hard to tell if someone is getting ready to exit so there’s no good trigger for an exit-intent pop-up. In this case, the best practice is to set a time delay.

Setting a time delay for mobile

This is a bit trickier than choosing to switch to an exit-intent pop-up. For this, you need to go to your Google Analytics (GA) data to figure out the appropriate time delay for your mobile pop-ups. Here’s one easy way to get to the number you need:

1. From your GA home page, select “Acquisition” and then “Overview.”
2. You should now see default columns of data.
3. Under the “Behavior” heading, look at the column labeled “Average Session Duration.” This is the number you want.
4. Once you know the average duration of a session, simply set the exit-intent pop-ups on a time delay that’s just below that average session duration.

You’ll want to test this, of course. If you continue to have a lot of bounces or a low conversion rate, try tweaking that time delay a little higher or lower than the original setting to see if that gets you the results you want.

Note: You can use this kind of time delay for desktop as well. You might need to do that if you’re using a pop-up that’s part of your theme. While most apps allow you to set an exit-intent pop-up, themes may not offer that option.

Wrap-Up

So, the answer to the question, “Are email opt-in pop-ups friends or foes” is that they’re foes … unless you optimize your pop-ups. You can optimize them by offering people something of value and setting pop-ups to load at exit intent rather than on page load. If your potential customer is on a mobile device or your app or theme doesn’t allow you to set exit-intent pop-ups, add a time delay that’s easy to derive from basic GA data about your ecom store.

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