By reaching them directly in their inbox, email has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel (averaging $40 for every $1 spent). And while landing in the inbox is great, it doesn’t beat SMS’ phenomenal 98% read rate (with 60% of customers reading an SMS campaign within 5 minutes). 

So it’s fair to say email and SMS are pretty important. That said, behind every great email or SMS marketing strategy lies one essential element: a powerful list of subscribers. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that your list and how you build it can literally make or break your campaigns. And by extension, your business.

The highest-converting lists are built with active, purchase-ready subscribers ready to engage with your campaigns. This is the closest you’re to get to having a licence to print money. Frustratingly for most merchants, their lists are far from this ideal.

That’s why we’ve put together this guide on how to build an email list that can drive millions in sales.

Steps to building high-converting lists

1) Focus on quality over quantity 

It’s tempting to focus on building your list as quickly and as large as you can. But you need to be selective of who’s signing up and qualitatively determine the filters that will be installed if you use tools such as sales navigator for lead generation.

That’s not to say that quantity isn’t important. All else being equal, a list with a million subscribers is going to drive more sales than a list with only a few hundred. 

But in their rush to build a list, too many merchants just slap together a basic popup overnight with an uninspired offer such as “10% off your first purchase” and try to pass it off as a lead magnet. 

Sure, this will get people to sign up, but it’s a safe bet a lot of them won’t qualify as leads. 

Instead, you should think about who you want on your list. Who do you want to be communicating with? Freebie-seekers? Or people who are your actual target customers and have the potential to become loyal, repeat purchasers? 

In other words, you want people who show purchase intent. Not only will it make your list more profitable, but your sender’s reputation will also remain intact thanks to a clean list. 

Which popup do you think will result in a higher-quality list?

Your existing customers are those with the highest purchase intent, as they’ve already converted. That’s why it’s essential you give people the option to subscribe during check out. 

Obviously you don’t want to limit yourself to just existing customers, that’s why the next step is all about where you get people to sign up. 

2) Think about where to find subscribers

The best way to build a quality list is to think about where and how people are signing up. 

We’ve already mentioned that the best subscribers are your existing customers, but the aim of your list is to scale your sales. This means growing your customer base by growing your list. 

There are two ways you can achieve this: organically, or through paid campaigns. 

Organic is nearly always better so it should be your main focus. 

Ways you can grow your list organically include making the most of your online store’s traffic and your social following. This is because the act of visiting your store or following your brand on social media is in itself a purchase intent signal. These are people interested in what you’re selling. Ideally, they’ll have visited more than just your homepage or a random blog article, but we’ll touch on that in the next section. 

Essentially paying for subscribers through paid activities such as social media campaigns is okay, but it’s definitely the lesser of the two options.  

While not perfect (the value proposition should take prominence above the ‘swipe up to join mailing list’ call-to-action), Bail Body does this reasonably well in the example below.

Whatever you do though, do not go purchasing lists. Only sending campaigns to those who have opted in is essential, unless you want to destroy your sending reputation and end up in the spam folder.

3) How to build an email list 101: Offer them something in return

Now that you have an idea of who you want on your list and how and where to find them, it’s time to think about the what. That’s what you offer them.

People are not going to hand over their email address or phone number for nothing in return. 

And what you decide to offer is going to impact both your conversion rate and the type of people signing up. Remember, you want to focus on quality over quantity. People who display purchase intent over freebie-seekers. 

So what should you offer? 

This is a classic case of it depends. It depends on whether they’re existing or potential customers and it depends on what stage of the purchase journey they’re at. But in general, here’s what we’ve found results in the highest quality lists: 

Tools and resources

This is anything you could consider educational. Think buyer guides, recipes, cheatsheets, even a collection of the latest trends in your industry as a source of inspiration. 

These resources are particularly enticing to potential customers early on in their purchase journey (in other words, at the top of the funnel) as they’re likely still trying to understand your products and which is best for them. 

That’s what makes the popup from Tile Mountain below effective: tiling is something you want to get right the first time, but unless you’re a professional tiler, you’re going to need a bit of help.

Ideally, whatever tool or resource you offer, it will encourage your new subscribers to use your products. You can bet Tile Mountain recommends plenty of its own products in its tiling checklist.

Quizzes

Quizzes are questionnaires visitors answer to get a specific result. They don’t work for every store, but for those they do, they tend to result in some of the highest intent, most profitable lists you’ll build. 

Quizzes work best when customers genuinely need recommendations to make the best purchase possible. Such as finding the right combination of supplements, personalized skincare routine, or what haircare product to buy like in the example below from Curlsmith. 

Deals

This is your quintessential ecommerce lead magnet. Think “free shipping” or “buy one, get one free” (BOGO). 

Yes, everyone does them, but there’s a reason for that: they’ll be the highest-converting lead magnet you’ll have. 

The trick to making sure you capture high-intent potential customers instead of freebie-seekers is where you make the offer. 

Don’t have it pop up on your homepage immediately when someone first visits. Include them on your product pages. Have them appear after your visitor has been on the page for a certain amount of time or has scrolled down most of the page. 

4) Matching your messaging to your audience

Copywriting is a crucial marketing skill, and there are few places where getting your messaging right is more important than your popup. 

The key to making your popup copy work (and where most merchants fall short) is making it relevant by matching it with the context. 

Has your visitor just returned to the same product page for the 9th time this week? Or have they just landed on your site for the first time and are reading a blog article? Is a major event like Black Friday just a few days away? 

The popup below does a good job of leaning into Black Friday with copy including “jump the queues” and the value proposition of getting early access. 

Recognizing that not all your visitors are the same and that time of year can play a big part too will help you write killer copy. 

5) Nailing the execution

Final step before you can launch: think about your popup’s execution. 

We’ve just mentioned that you don’t want your popup appearing immediately when someone lands on a page. We generally recommend a 3-5 second delay. 

Another factor to consider is the format: are you going to be collecting both email and phone number? If so, you’ll want to use a 2-step format where you just ask for email first as people are more willing to hand over their email address than their phone number. (Asking for too much info at the same time will hurt your conversion rate.)

When they get to the SMS step, you’ll want to offer something extra above and beyond the email offer as well. Otherwise there’s no reason for them to also provide their phone number. 

Once you’ve got a solid plan for execution, it’s time to launch! 

6) Test, test, and test again

You’re not finished yet, though. In fact, you’ll never be ‘finished’ if you want to build a high-quality list. 

No matter how much care and attention you put into every step above, you won’t have created the perfect popup. 

And even if you did, the performance of different strategies varies over time. What was highly successful last year might not convert that well this year. Especially in a fast-paced industry like ecommerce. 

The only way to keep your offer fresh and enticing is to continually optimize it. This means running a split test, then another split test, and another (you really should not stop testing). 

But don’t just test things randomly. Approach your split tests in a methodical way by testing one element at a time and tracking the conversion rate closely. Test your offer, then your messaging, then your design, then your execution, and repeat. 

Learning how to build an email list is just the beginning

A high-converting list can make or break your future email and SMS campaigns. But it’s also simply the foundation of your campaigns.

Following the strategies we’ve just covered, such as focusing on quality over quantity and being conscious of who’s signing up, will put you on the right path. What will bring in the actual sales are the campaigns you send to your list. 

Now that you know how to build an email list, check out our blog for strategies on sending killer email and SMS campaigns. 

The post How To Build an Email list & an SMS List That Drive Millions In Sales for Ecommerce appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

They’re one of the most common experiences you’ll encounter on the web. 

And for good reason too. Study after study consistently shows that popups improve conversion rates and lead to more sales.   

But despite this, many merchants still haven’t started running a popup on their online store.

So in this article, we’ll take you through everything you need to know about popups including design best practices, how to optimize the user experience and some things you’ll want to avoid.

What exactly is an email popup?

Generally when people refer to a popup they’re referring to a small window or frame that appears on top of a website, often darkening the page behind it. Like in the example below. 

However in this article we’ll use the term popup to also refer to other full-screen popups that completely cover the webpage as well as smaller bars that appear either at the top or bottom of the page. Like in the example below.

Not just emails

The other important point to keep in mind is that popups aren’t just for collecting email addresses. 

Although that may be their most common use case, especially when we’re talking about email popups, they can also serve other purposes.

For example, because they’re so attention-grabbing, they make for a great way to let your website visitors know about any sale or special promotion you’re running. 

Can also collect phone numbers and other details

In addition to email addresses, you can also use popups to capture other information to use in your marketing. 

One example of this is also collecting customer’s phone numbers for later use with your SMS marketing. Another example is asking customers for their birthday so you can send them an email on their birthday. Just like in the example below.

Why it’s important to set up popups

As a merchant, you likely spend a decent amount of time and money driving potential customers to your online store.

But, as you’d be well aware, getting visitors to visit your store is only half the challenge. The second, arguably more challenging half, is getting them to make a purchase. 

Unfortunately, most customers don’t convert on their first visit. Instead, they will make multiple visits before they make a purchase. 

The good news is that popups, when used well, not only increase the likelihood of a customer converting on their first visit but also when a customer fills out your popup form, gives you a way to remarket to them later on.

They’re also a great way to grow your email list. 

Why it’s important to have a dedicated mobile popup

When talking about customers visiting your online store and not converting, it’s important to remember that half your customers are visiting your store from a mobile device.

And these customers are actually less likely to make a purchase and are more likely to never come back to your store.  

So it’s especially important to ensure you’re running popups to these customers and that your popups look great on mobile devices. 

Which is why you’ll want a dedicated mobile popup instead of just duplicating your desktop popup so you can have more control over how it’ll appear.

Popup best practices

So now that you have a clear understanding of what popups are and why they’re important, it’s time to look at what the best practices are when it comes to popups. 

Design

When it comes to the actual design of your popups, there are a few elements that you should always include and some more that you should at least seriously consider.

The first element you should always include is a way for visitors to easily dismiss the popup. 

While it might seem tempting to want to ‘force’ anyone visiting your online store to fill out the popup, doing so will only incredibly annoy potential customers and could potentially lead to penalties from Google which will harm your organic traffic. 

That’s why all of SmartrMail’s popup templates come with a simple cross in the upper right corner so people can easily dismiss it.

The other elements you’ll definitely want to include in your popup’s design are an engaging headline and a clear call to action. 

Exactly what your call to action is will depend on exactly what you want your popup to achieve (e.g., collect email addresses, phone numbers, or simply highlight a sale offer). 

The more creative you can be with your call to action, the better as well. 

Just consider the two popups below.

Both are trying to collect people’s email addresses, but the one on the right is far more compelling than the one on the left.

One thing that could be improved with the popup on the right however is its button text. 

“Subscribe Now” is such a generic and overused phrase that it lets the rest of the popup down. Instead, they could’ve gone for something much more engaging and unique and ”Get My Free Sampler!”

Obviously, the more enticing your offer is, the more people you will convert as well. 

While a 15% discount coupon will get you more signups than a 5% offer, it’s not always about something of monetary value either. A free guide with relevant content can improve your popup conversion rate as well. It’s all about making sure you offer something of value to your customers.

Lastly, another element you’ll seriously want to consider including is some imagery to attract people’s attention. 

While this is not essential, the more attention-grabbing your popup is, the more successful it will be. 

If you’re unsure of what images to include, consider the following ideas:

• Images of your products
• People who represent your target audience or ideal customer 
• Showing your products being used

For more tips, check out our guide on popup design here.

Timing

Many merchants hold off on running popups on their stores because they’re concerned about annoying their customers. 

The truth is, however, that popups don’t have to be annoying if you set them up the right way. And a big part of this is getting your popup timing right. 

You don’t want your popup to display straight away when someone first lands on your store. Instead, it’s better if you wait at least ten seconds before showing your popup. 

An even better way to make your popups less intrusive is to optimize your trigger conditions. 

Triggers

Trigger conditions refer to what causes your popup to show for a particular visitor. And you don’t want to trigger your popup every time a customer visits your store. 

To make your popups less intrusive, it’s better to wait until your visitor has visited at least a couple of pages before showing your popup. 

Another good option is to give your popups an exit-intent trigger. This will mean that your popups will only display when someone goes to leave your store. 

Exit-intent popups are a great way of not interrupting your customer’s experience and gives you a second chance of engaging with someone just as they were about to leave your store. 

Lastly, another option is to only have a popup trigger on a particular page. 

Doing this lets you set up multiple specific popups that are targeted to what content your visitors are browsing. 

For example, say you’re running a Shopify jewelry store and you sell a range of jewelry including wedding rings. You could set up a popup that offers visitors a free guide to choosing the best wedding ring that only triggers on wedding ring product pages. 

How to set up email popups in SmartrMail

Now that you have an idea of what popups are, why they’re important, and what goes into good ones, the only thing left is to start setting them up. 

Thankfully SmartrMail makes it incredibly easy to create your own popups with our pre-made templates and you can customize with our drop and drag designer.

Better yet, our popup is completely free to use and has no limits on how many email addresses, phone numbers, or other details you can collect with it. 

To see how you can create your own popups in SmartrMail, check out our walkthrough video below.

Conclusion

Popups are an incredibly effective and easy way to make the most of the opportunity potential customers visiting your store represents. 

And when set up according to the best practices we’ve gone through in this article, they won’t annoy your customers. If anything, they’ll improve your customer experience by offering relevant content. 

So now that you know what goes into a well-designed popup, it’s time to start creating your own. 

If you’re still looking for some more inspiration however, we’ve also got a collection of great email popup examples here you should check out.

The post Everything You Need to Know About Email Popups appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

And it’s not just collecting email addresses that they’re great at either. Popups are also useful when it comes to advertising offers, coupon codes, and reducing cart abandonment. 

But if you’ve ever run a popup on your store, you’ll know that the challenge isn’t setting them up, but getting customers to engage with them. 

So, to help you with designing popups that convert, we’ve put together this collection of 10 great examples from some of the top jewelry brands to inspire your own.

Examples of effective Jewelry popups 

1) Missoma’s general popup

Missoma’s popup certainly lives up to the site’s reputation as one of the top online jewelry stores. 

While it may not have any particular stand-out feature or design, it’s a good example of a general jewelry popup that does the job of collecting email addresses well. 

The background image adds a nice touch to the overall design and the heading and body copy is original enough not to be boring. 

The 10% offer one’s first order is also enticing and will help improve the overall conversion rate of the popup.

That said, this offer could be more visible and attention-grabbing. 

With the popup’s current design, customers will only learn about the offer if they bother to read the body text. And as people tend to dismiss popups quickly, you’ll want to make sure whatever incentive you use is immediately obvious. 

2) Example of a simple, typical design

Sometimes the most effective popups are not the ones with elaborate designs but basic ones that get the fundamentals right. 

While the opt-in incentive in this example isn’t as enticing, at least it’s more obvious and not hidden. There’s also a short description of what people can expect by signing up as well as a link to their privacy policy. 

This goes to show you can quickly and easily create an effective popup without having to agonize over its design too much. 

3) YCL Jewels

Another example of a simple and well-designed popup, this example from YCL Jewels also asks for customers’ names. 

Collecting this information will let them personalize their email campaigns later on which will help boost their effectiveness. 

While adding more question fields to your popup can harm its effectiveness, you can get away with just asking for someone’s email address and name. If you want to be really safe, you can also make the name field optional.

4) Highlighting the opt-in incentive

Some of the popups of the list so far, while well-designed, haven’t the best job of highlighting their opt-in incentive. 

Not this example from Baublebar however. This one quite literally highlights the offer with a highlighter effect and bolded text. 

This makes it the first thing people’s attention is naturally drawn to which helps massively with improving the conversion rate. 

While the rest of the popup design may not be particularly inspiring, this is a good example of one that gets hierarchy right. 

5) Kate Spade Saturday

Talk about an attention-grabbing popup design. 

This example from Kate Spade Saturday probably has the most stand-out design on the list thanks to its bold color choice. 

The copy “OH, HEY!” also does a good job of attracting attention. All of this makes it impossible to miss this popup.

The opt-in incentive is then also bolded in the body talk to help it stand out and entice people to sign up to their email list.

6) Popup offering relevant content

What this popup lacks in the design department, it more than makes up for in its relevancy. 

Being triggered on engagement right product pages only, the offer of a free guide on choosing the right ring is likely to resonate with a fair percentage of people who see it. 

It also goes to show that you don’t need to just offer a monetary incentive like 10% or $20 off to grow your email list. 

Often a well-placed and relevant guide like this will perform just as well, if not better, and save you plenty of margin.  

7) Exit intent popup

Unlike the other examples on this list, this exit-intent popup doesn’t aim to collect email addresses. 

Instead its goal is simply to reduce browse abandonment by being triggered when someone goes to close the page or visit another site. 

By redirecting people to their bestsellers, customers who would’ve otherwise have left their site are hopefully shown something that will interest them, giving the jewelry store another chance to make a sale. 

8) Gamified spin-to-win popup

Gamified popups have grown massively in popularity over the past few years.

The interactive element and prospect of winning a prize makes them more enticing which is why they can achieve a conversion rate up to twice that of regular popups.

The other thing to notice about this design is that instead of just being a window in the middle of the screen, it takes up the entire left half of the screen. 

While this ensures that shoppers must interact with it (even if just to dismiss it), you should be conscious of the impact it has on your customer experience if you decide to go with something similar. 

 9) Non-intrusive side popup

If your main concern is not interrupting your customers’ shopping experience, then you might want to consider a non-intrusive side popup such as the one Vivien Frank has on their store. 

Going for a smaller design and having it display only in a corner as opposed to right in the middle of the screen helps ensure you don’t annoy people browsing your site. 

The tradeoff, however, is the smaller and less intrusive you make your design, the fewer people may end up subscribing to your email list. 

10) Popup asking for customers’ birthdays

By Charlotte also has a side popup that’s a bit more attention-grabbing with its contrasting color and image at the top. 

This helps it strike a good balance between being noticeable and not needlessly interrupting the shopper’s experience. 

The other thing this popup does that others on this list don’t is ask for customers’ birthdays. 

This is so that they can send their customers birthday email campaigns later on. 

So that this question doesn’t negatively affect their conversion rate, they’ve made it optional and also explained why they’re asking for it. Two things you should do too if you also want to ask for customers’ birthdays. 

The rest of your jewelry store

Hopefully now you have plenty of inspiration for your jewelry popups. But why stop there?

We also have a collection of great jewelry stores on Shopify in case you are looking for inspiration for the rest of your online store’s design.

Once you start collecting email addresses with your new popup, we also have a comprehensive guide to email marketing for jewelry stores so you can make the most of your email list. 

And once you start email marketing, you can find jewelry email design inspiration here.

For more tips for your popup, check out our guide on popup design best practices. 

The post 10 Great Examples of Jewelry Store Popups that Convert appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

And for good reason. Study after study consistently shows that popups improve conversion rates and lead to more sales.   

But let me ask you a question: does your popup only appear on desktops? 

Or worse yet, did you simply just have your desktop popup show on mobiles as well?

If you answered yes to the first question, then you’re one of the all-too-many merchants ignoring every second customer visiting your store. 

While you’re not making this mistake if you answered yes to the second question, you’re potentially harming your store’s performance from both a customer experience and search engine optimization perspective. 

So what’s the solution? Creating two different popups. One specific for desktop visitors and another for mobile visitors.

Why you should create a mobile-specific popup

There are good reasons why you should want to have your popup show on mobile devices beyond the simple fact that mobile traffic represents more than 50% of all internet traffic. 

First of all, mobile users are less likely to make a purchase and instead are more likely to never come back to your store.  

This makes using mobile popups to collect email addresses and improve your conversion rate all the more important. 

The other reason is that mobile popups don’t have to be annoying or ruin your customer’s experience. All you need to do is avoid simply duplicating your desktop popup to show on mobile devices.

Still not convinced of the need for a separate mobile popup? Consider the following points.

Desktop popups harm user experience on mobile

While popups are important, customer experience matters even more so. 

When you design a popup with just desktop in mind, chances are it’s not going to look that great on mobile. 

The smaller screen space on mobile devices means that elements like forms, buttons, and images can get cut off, appear distorted when squished up against each other, or even just disappear altogether. 

If you include text as part of an image, the text is likely to become so small that it’s unreadable. 

And worst still, your close button may become so small that customers either can’t find it or can’t easily tap on it to close your popup. Talk about a terrible browsing experience. 

But let’s say you’ve designed a simple popup, tested it on mobile and it looks just fine. There are still a couple of reasons why you shouldn’t set it live for mobile visitors just yet.  

Desktop popups can harm your site’s organic traffic

Back in 2017 Google released a new update that penalized sites using intrusive mobile popups. 

To quote Google directly, “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly”.

In other words, having a popup trigger for mobile visitors that prevents them from viewing content on the page when they first visit your site will push your site down the rankings in Google.

To help demonstrate their point, Google also provided three examples of bad mobile popup design when triggered on first page load.

While all three popups may appear well designed (no elements are squished, too small to read, and you can easily dismiss it), Google is worried about the impact they’ll have on user experience by preventing people from immediately accessing content on the site they’re visiting. 

Whether you agree or not, having these types of popups load when someone first visits your store will result in your site being pushed down Google rankings and you’ll lose out on organic traffic as a result.

Mobile popup best practices

So it’s important to have a mobile popup on your store to ensure you’re making the most of your website traffic. 

At the same time, get your popup wrong and Google will penalize your site. 

So how do you go about recreating a mobile friendly popup? 

The first step is not to simply duplicate your desktop popup to also show on mobile devices without at least a few changes. The second step is to keep the following points in mind when designing your mobile specific popup.

Choose the right format and trigger condition

The biggest impact user experience and search engine optimization considerations are going to have on your mobile popup is with its format and trigger condition.

Remember, Google doesn’t want you preventing website visitors from accessing content, even momentarily.

This means you shouldn’t have a popup load that takes up anything more than a small proportion of the screen and/or dim the background. 

Thankfully, Google actually gives an example of what a non-intrusive popup that loads straight away looks like. 

Because the popup is small and doesn’t block the user from accessing content on the page, Google considers it fine from a user experience standpoint to have it load straight away.

The other option is to go for a more standard popup design like in the example below from Sephora, but not have it load on when a visitor first lands on your site. 

To maintain a user-friendly experience and prevent your store from being penalized by Google, you just need to make it either triggered on the second page people visit or after they’ve scrolled down a certain percentage of the page they’ve landed on. You can also achieve this by putting a longer trigger time delay like 20 seconds.

Keep it focused and simple

Once you’ve chosen a popup format and trigger that will minimize any disruption to your mobile visitors and will keep Google happy, it’s time to think about the content of your popup. 

Remember that you have less screen space to work with on mobile so you’ll want to make sure your popup only contains the most important elements.

That means making your opt-in incentive front and center, including a clear call-to-action button with a contrasting color, and limiting the number of fields people have to fill out to sign up to your email marketing.

The example below from Magic Spoon is a good example of a mobile popup triggered after someone visits a second page. 

The popup below from BeautyMNL is another good example, this time of one that’s triggered straight away but doesn’t prevent visitors from accessing content.

For more design tips, check out our popup design guide here.

Conclusion

Mobile popups don’t necessarily have to be intrusive or harm your store’s search engine performance. 

And while you shouldn’t just duplicate your desktop popup, by creating a dedicated mobile popup you won’t be ignoring half of your customers. 

All you need to do is keep the above consideration in mind, as with everything else commerce, always think about the customer experience. 

The post Why & How to Create a Dedicated Mobile Popup appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

However, as you’re well aware, getting visitors is only half the challenge. The second, arguably more challenging half, is getting them to make a purchase. 

Unfortunately, most customers don’t convert on their first visit. Instead, they will make multiple visits before they become a paying customer. 

The good news is that there are plenty of strategies you can use to not reduce the average number of visits it takes customers to convert, but also increase the likelihood of customers converting on their first visit. 

And one of the most effective strategies is popups.

With popups, you can highlight special offers and discounts to drive sales or collect email addresses to entice people to purchase later on. 

Here’s a short vid on creating the perfect Pop Up:

The effectiveness of popups

Not all popups are created equal however. 

While the average conversion rate for all popups across the web is 3.09%, the top performing 10% of popups achieve an astonishing average conversion rate of 9.28%. 

That’s nearly an email list signup for every 10 customers that view the popup! 

Which may seem like a lot, but when popups attract visitors’ attention with an eye-catching design that isn’t intrusive, contain relevant content, and are placed and timed well, it’s definitely achievable.

However, to achieve the average conversion rate, let alone anything approaching 10%, it’s not enough to simply set up a popup live on your store and call it a day. There are certain best practices you should be following.

Having these best practices in mind when you’re designing your popup will help you create one that achieves an above-average conversion rate.

Popup design best practices

1) Define your goals

Before you even start designing your popup, it’s important to think about what you want your popup to achieve before you run off and start creating it. 

Do you want to grow your email list? Do you want to drive more sales? Reduce your cart abandonment rate? 

These are all perfectly valid goals that popups can definitely help you achieve. That said, you don’t want to try to achieve them all with the same popup. 

A popup that’s effective at driving sales is going to look different from one that’s collecting subscribers for your email list. 

For instance, below is a good example of your typical popup that’s purpose is to collect emails. 

You can tell this is the case by the call-to-action (CTA) being “Join Us” and that the popup asks for the customer’s email address and gives a brief summary of what to expect from joining the list.

Contrast this with the popup below. 

This exit-intent popup clearly serves a different purpose, which is to increase sales. It does this by providing customers with a coupon code without asking them to sign up for their email list to increase the likelihood they’ll use it right away. 

The attention-grabbing color and design also helps achieve this goal of bringing people back to the store by commanding their attention. 

Having a goal in mind will help inform what design choice you make when you consider all the other popup design best practices.

2) Include a compelling call-to-action

What action you want customers to take with your popup depends on your goal. 

For example, if you want to grow your email list, then you’ll obviously want customers to enter their email address. If you want to increase your conversion rate, then you’ll want them to add products to their cart and check out. 

Whatever action you want your customers to take, however, you can’t simply just tell them to do so and expect they follow suit. 

Take the two popup examples below that are both trying to collect email addresses. 

Which one do you think is more effective?

While the example on the left makes a vague promise of coupons in return for signing up, the popup on the right provides a much more specific and enticing offer which clearly communicates the value of signing up. 

The more enticing your offer and the better you clearly communicate the value a customer will receive from whatever action you want them to take, the better your popup conversion rate will be. 

Don’t forget about your CTA button

With such a bland call-to-action of “sign up for coupons”, it’s not surprising that the popup button is simply “submit”. 

What is a bit more surprising however is despite the popup on the right having a decent headline and copy, the call-to-action button is simply “subscribe now”. 

Coming up with an engaging call-to-action button that reiterates your offer, like in the example below, is one of those final touches that will make your popup more effective. 

3) Use imagery to attract visitors’ attention

Popups are effective because they are attention-grabbing. So it makes sense that the most effective popups will be the ones that do the best job of attracting attention. 

And one of the best ways to attract people’s attention is with imagery. Especially in commerce. 

In terms of what imagery works best, here are a few ideas:

• Images of your products
• People who represent your target audience or ideal customer 
• Showing your products being used

The popup on Lindsay Letters’ Shopify store is a good example of these points in action. 

If you decide not to use imagery, the other route to creating an eye-catching design is to play around with other elements of your design. Such as using bright, contrasting colors and even experimenting with unique shapes like the one below from Gaiam.

4) Match the design of your store and brand

When it comes to the look and feel of your popup, you should aim to have it match the look of your store and, more importantly, your brand. 

This means you should be using the same fonts as your store uses as well as the same color scheme. If you decide to use any imagery, it should also match the imagery you already have on your site. 

La Colombe’s popup is a good example of one that matches their store.

Not only does matching your popup design with your store’s design make your popup less jarring and intrusive, but it also gives you a good starting point if you’re stuck for ideas or design inspiration.

5) Use a contrasting color for your CTA button

In addition to making sure your popup matches your store’s design, the other design trick to make it engaging is to give the call-to-action button a contrasting color. In other words, it should be close to the opposite color of the rest of your popup window.

This makes the most important element of your popup stand out and draws people’s attention. 

The popup above from La Colombe is a good example of this in action with a yellow button on a blue background. Bliss’ popup is another good instance of contrasting colors. 

Note how while they’ve kept the popup design matching the look and feel of their store, they’ve also used the contrasting yellow behind it to give the illusion of depth and make the design even more eye-catching. 

Conclusion

Creating a great looking and effective popup isn’t as challenging as it may seem when you follow these guidelines and best practices. 

By keeping all of these factors in mind when designing your popup, you’ll be well on your way to creating one that achieves a great conversion rate.

If you’re looking for more popup design inspiration, check out our collection of email popup examples. 

Looking for an app to create a popup?

If you’re looking for a popup app for your Shopify, Bigcommerce, Neto, PrestaShop, or WooCommerce store, you should check out SmartrMail. 

SmartrMail is an email marketing app that features an incredibly easy-to-use popup designer that lets you create designs like the examples on this list with a drag and drop editor. 

You can also create mobile-optimized popups.

The best part is that the popup is completely free. You can collect as many email addresses as you want with it and there’s no limit on impressions or pageviews. 

Unlike other popup apps, SmartrMail also lets you send emails so you won’t have to worry about connecting your popup with your email app. There’s also a free plan that lets you send up to 5,000 emails a month, after which paid plans start at $19 a month for the email marketing features. 

The post A Guide to Commerce Popup Design Best Practices in 2021 appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

That said, you can create the best email campaign of all-time and it won’t drive a single sale if there’s no-one on your email list to receive it. 

This is why it’s important to start growing your email list as soon as possible. And one of the best ways to capture emails is with popups.

While some merchants are hesitant to run popups on their store out of fear they’ll annoy customers, study after study consistently shows that popups improve conversion rates and lead to more sales.   

And when you run a beautifully designed, eye-catching popup that’s set up to minimize the disruption for people browsing your store, you won’t have to worry about annoying anyone. 

So, with that in mind and the goal of improving the performance of your online store, here is a collection of 10 of the best email popups we’ve seen to inspire your own. 

1) Gaiam

Right off the bat is a popup that grabs your attention with its unusual and unique shape.

In addition to attracting visitors’ attention, the pattern around the edge aligns perfectly with Gaiam’s brand and gives off a feel-good vibe. 

Even though it might look like a hard design to replicate, it’s actually quite easy to do. All the popup is is a square image that’s in the PNG format so it supports transparency around the edges.

While the content of the popup is rather ordinary in comparison with black text on a white background and a generic ‘sign up’ button, all the essential elements are present: an incentive that makes it worth signing up, a simple and quick form to complete, and an easy way to dismiss the popup.

What would take this popup to the next level is some more creative copywriting, especially with the call-to-action. Even something simple like ‘grab your coupon’ is much more engaging than the dry ‘sign up’. 

2) Monoset

This is your textbook popup example: rectangular with a logo, title, message, email input field, and a button with a call-to-action. And while this example is not as eye-catching as Gaiam’s popup, it shows how a simple design with a clear and unique message can be effective. 

Where this popup performs significantly better than Gaiam’s above is with it’s more engaging copywriting. Welcoming shoppers, inviting them to ‘please enjoy’, and reiterating the offer in the call-to-action button all improve the popup’s effectiveness. 

The other great thing about this popup is that Monoset is making the most of their visitors’ attention by reminding them about their free worldwide shipping as well. 

3) Lindsay Letters

Lindsay Letters’ popup is a warm and playful example. This is conveyed in the use of color, font choice, and copywriting. Even the email field looks casual and friendly with italicized text and just a dotted line at the bottom.

While the message is longer than what most popups contain, attention is still drawn to the offer through the use of bold text and different color. 

Most importantly, the popup matches the vibe of the website and is not a dull, generic popup that customers will just want to dismiss as quickly as possible. Most are actually going to want to read this one and hopefully sign up for their email newsletter. 

4) The Dog Bakery

This popup from The Dog Bakery does things a little differently. Instead of asking for the customer to sign up, they’re asking them to sign their dog up to receive a special offer on their birthday. 

This reversal of roles immediately makes this popup interesting and attention-grabbing. This is not asking for your details, it’s asking for your dog’s and are you really going to dismiss it and deny your dog a treat? 

In order to provide all the wonderful dogs with treats on their birthdays, the popup also has a date selector. 

If you are thinking about providing your customers with a special offer on their birthday, you might want to consider also adding their input fields to your popup. However, keep in mind that your popup conversion rate will suffer if you add too many fields. 

As a rule of thumb, the fewer fields, the better. 

One way to make the signup process easier if you ask for people’s birthdays is to make that particular question optional. Also, only asking for the day and the month eliminates one field which some customers won’t be comfortable with providing the year anyway.

5) Cart abandonment exit-intent popup

One way to reduce the likelihood of your popup annoying customers and disturbing their shopping experience is to have an exit-intent popup. 

These popups will only show when a customer is about to leave your store anyway.

While you can add exit-intent popups to any page on your site, the example above of the showing items the customer has already added to their cart is a particularly ingenious example. 

Cart abandonment is an incredibly common problem facing merchants, however, this particular popup aims to help mitigate the problem while also collecting email addresses. 

The ability to save items in your cart to your inbox will likely appeal to a significant portion of shoppers who are still interested in eventually checking out. And even if they don’t end up converting, the merchant now has their email address. 

6) J.R. Dunn

Most email popups present customers with everything in the one window. J.R. Dunn on the other hand splits their popup into two different parts.

The first invites customers to reveal their ‘exclusive offer’. This is a no-brainer when you don’t have to do anything apart from click yes and the sense of mystery further entices people to reveal their offer. 

After agreeing to the first question, the 10% off your first purchase offer in exchange for signing up for their email list is revealed. 

By this second stage, the customer is already more invested in the popup and securing their offer than they would have had the 10% off special offer been visible from the start. Some customers will likely think ‘I’ve revealed my exclusive offer, I may as well secure it now’. 

7) Tile Mountain

Title Mountain’s popup here is a perfect good example of everything done well: It’s an exit-intent popup so any friction is kept to a minimum, there’s a simple form to complete that includes the customer’s first name for personalization later on, and there’s a big eye-catching call-to-action button. 

What is particularly interesting about this popup from a commerce perspective, however, is how it’s not offering a particular percentage or dollar amount off a customer’s purchase. 

It’s also not just asking people to sign up for their email list with a vague promise of keeping them up-to-date with their latest news. 

They’re offering customers something of value that doesn’t eat into their margin. 

In this case, it’s a tiling checklist which is something customers browsing their site are likely interested in. For some customers, a guide like this might even be more enticing than a coupon if they’re just looking at options and not yet ready to purchase. 

Either way, Tile Mountain is collecting email addresses they can later use to convert browsers into paying customers by providing customers with something of value. 

If you don’t want to give away too much margin with your popup, have a think about similar guides or other downloadable content your customers would be interested in to include instead.  

8) Tigerlily Swimwear

Tigerlily Swimwear’s website is bright and colorful, which makes their black and white popup stand out and grab people’s attention. This contrast will help get shoppers to pause and properly take everything in. 

While the opt-in incentive is not particularly compelling, all the key elements of any good popup are present: striking design, simple and quick form, and a message persuading people to sign up. 

9) Lip Monthly

This is an example of an interstitial which means that it’s a full-screen popup that appears while the page is loading. This forces shoppers to pay attention to it in order to access the page they clicked through to. 

Just like with J.R. Dunn, the popup asks whether people want to receive the offer before presenting them with an email signup form. It still makes it clear you have to enter your email address in order to receive the special offer, but the absence of any form means that signing looks to be as simple as just clicking ‘yes’. 

10) MyDeal.com.au 

The last popup is one from MyDeal.com.au that shows how a simple design can be effective with a basic background image and a creative font. 

Again, all the key elements are present and the popup also asks for the shopper’s first name so that they can personalize the emails they’ll send later. There’s also a clear hierarchy with the offer being the first thing that grabs people’s attention followed by the call-to-action button. 

What would be nice is if this button contained a unique call-to-action instead of just ‘sign up’. 

Conclusion

These ten examples will hopefully provide plenty of design inspiration when coming up with your own popup for your store.

If you’re looking for a popup app to create your own, SmartrMail has a free popup tool that lets you easily create beautiful, eye-catching popups like the examples above with a drag & drop builder.

The best part is that the popup is completely free as well.

Unlike other apps, there’s no limit to how many visitor sessions or pageviews the popup will be shown for or how many email addresses you can collect with it.

If your store is built with Shopify, Bigcommerce, Neto, PrestaShop, or WooCommerce, you can install SmartrMail and start building your popup here.

Otherwise, you might also be interested in checking out our list of the top Shopify popup apps.

For resources on creating mobile popups, check out our guide on mobile popup best practices here.

The post The 10 Best Commerce Email Pop up Examples for Merchants appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

But that doesn’t mean that customers simply browsing your store or comparing products offer no value. 

The simple fact that they’re visiting your site means that they’re at least interested in what you sell. And while most customers don’t purchase on their first visit, if you make the most of their visit, chances are they’ll convert sooner rather than later. 

The best way to do this is with popups. 

Whether you want to collect email addresses, offer discount codes, or simply draw attention to your current sale, popups improve your conversion rate. ConversionXL even refers to popups as:

“One of the most effective ways to jolt their attention & grab their email for a return visit.”

By collecting emails, you’ll also be able to send visitors email marketing campaigns long after they’ve left your store. 

So with that in mind, here are the top popup apps on the Shopify app store, with a particular focus on email popups designed to grow your email list. 

1) Justuno

Justuno has just about every popup feature you can think of with advanced targeting options that allow you to get crazy with customization. 

For example, instead of targeting all your visits with the same offer, you can target visitors abandoning carts with a unique coupon code to reduce cart abandonment. 

With tools like A/B testing, advanced reporting dashboards and real-time analytics, Justuno caters toward larger Shopify stores with the resources to dive deep into customizing their popups. 

That said, plenty of smaller and mid-sized merchants also use Justuno, making it one of the most popular popup apps on the Shopify app store.

Price: Free plan available for up to 5,000 monthly visitor sessions. Paid plans then start at $29 a month for up to 10,000 visitor sessions, $49 a month for 25,000 visitor sessions, and $99 a month for up to 50,000 visitor sessions. Beyond that, custom pricing is available for larger merchants.

Average rating: 4.6/5

Install the app from Shopify here.

2) SmartrMail

SmartrMail may be first and foremost an email marketing app as opposed to purely an email popup app, but our email popup is one of the most intuitive and easy to use available to Shopify merchants. 

You can choose from a variety of popup templates to get started or create your own from scratch with the drag and drop editor. Of course, all the popup windows are mobile-friendly and you can control how often they appear for users to keep them from being too intrusive. 

If you’re looking for a simple-to-use tool where you can easily create a great looking popup and don’t need advanced features like what Justuno offers, then SmartrMail’s popup is likely your best bet. 

And seeing as SmartrMail allows you to send emails to your customers, you don’t have to worry about connecting your popup to your email app. You can set up email automations to send as soon as someone enters their details in your popup or send a newsletter whenever you want through the same app. 

Price: Popup is completely free with no limit on visitor sessions or the number of email addresses you can collect. Sending emails is also free up to 5,000 emails a month after which paid plans start at $19 a month.

Average rating: 4.8/5

Install the app from Shopify here.

3) Poptin 

Poptin has a comprehensive set of popup tools to optimize your website conversion rate.

It has a user-friendly no-code builder with plenty of customizable, mobile-responsive templates to choose from. Poptin’s display rules and targeting options let you accurately pinpoint the right customers to target in your campaigns which allows you to convert more qualified leads easily.

Testing and tracking your campaigns is also possible using A/B testing and analytics. If you’re keen on building your email list, popups can be your best friend too. As Poptin now integrates with SmartrMail, you can sync your website responses so they go directly to your email marketing database. Creating this seamless email marketing funnel saves you time, money, and energy.

Price: Poptin is free to use, which includes exit-intent technology and some basic features. To maximize the potential of your Shopify popups, you can upgrade to a paid plan to get access to more advanced features. Paid subscriptions start at only $19 a month.

Average rating: 4.9/5

Install the app from Shopify here.

4) Exit Intent Popup by OptiMonk

Exit-intent popups are one of the most popular and recommended options as they don’t interrupt your customer’s shopping experience until they’re about to leave your site anyway. 

In addition to exit-intent popups, OptiMonk also offers a variety of different options including the gamified spin-to-win like Wheelio, countdown timers to create a sense of urgency, and even the ability to include products a customer is most likely to purchase right in the popup window.

There are also plenty of advanced features like A/B testing (not available on the free plan), and the ability to display special offers at checkout depending on someone’s cart value.

While OptiMonk may not be as popular as Justuno on the Shopify app store, it’s extensive range of features and capabilities sure gives Justuno a run for its money.

Price: Free plan available that includes up to 3,000 pageviews a month on a maximum of 1 domain with reduced access to certain features. Paid plans start at $29 a month for up to 25,000 pageviews, $79 for 100,000 and $199 a month for up to 500,000 pageviews. However, you will need to be on the top ($199/month) tier to access the unbranded popup option. 

Average rating: 4.6/5

Install the app from Shopify here.

5) Wheelio

You can never go wrong with the original app that made gamified pop-ups so popular.

Wheelio is the leading gamified popup app that focuses on getting a quality lead for the customer in a fun and engaging way.

They pride themselves on having an easy interface with advanced features that can help maximize lead conversions. Their integration partners and features are some of the best apps on the market and with the combination of wheelio, you can make the most out of your existing traffic. They have multiple gamification options with endless possibilities and modifications and their pricing is one of the best on the market. 

Price: Wheelio starts at 14.92$ per month for 30.000 impressions and has a free trial of 7 days. The price goes up as you grow. 

Average rating: 4.8/5

Install the app from Shopify here.

6) Wisepops

Last but not necessarily least on this list is Wisepops. 

Wisepops is a solid choice for any Shopify merchant. There are plenty of pre-made templates if you’re looking to get something up and running quickly, an intuitive drag and drop editor to customize your popup, and plenty of advanced targeting options and analytics for more experienced users.

There are exit-intent options available however Wisepops is not big on gamified popups. For more advanced users, there’s also an integration with Google Analytics if you want to take things to the next level. 

With a phenomenal average review of 4.9/5 on the Shopify app store, plenty of merchants clearly love Wisepops. 

Price: Starts at $49 a month for up to 100,000 pageviews with limited features. The next tier is $99 a month for up to 500,000 pageviews and more features followed by the top tier at $199 a month for up to 1.5 million pageviews and all the features Wisepops offers.

Average rating: 4.9/5

Install the app from Shopify here.

Conclusion

Searching ‘popup’ on the Shopify app store generates over 600 results. So there’s clearly plenty more options available for merchants than just these five. 

That said, this list gives you a good starting point if you’re looking to create a popup for your store with some easy-to-use options for beginners and smaller stores and more advanced solutions for experienced power users. 

If there’s another Shopify popup app that you couldn’t run your store without, feel free to mention it below in the comments!

The post Top 6 Shopify Email Popup Apps to Grow Your List Faster appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

In fact, 92% of consumers are not ready to make a purchase on their first time to visit an online retailer. Instead it is only on later visits that people become customers.

As many first time visitors will never return to your site, you need a way to remarket to these people so you can increase the likelihood they’ll come back and make a purchase.

One of the most effect ways to achieve this is by collecting email addresses.

Email is one of the most effective channels, especially for ecommerce stores. The average return for every dollar spent on email marketing is a massive $44. Harnessing your website traffic to grow your email list is therefore essential to your ecommerce success.

Achieving this is not always that easy, however. People tend to be hesitant when it comes to handing over their email address, especially when it’s on a website they haven’t visited before. So in addition to offering an incentive for people to opt into your email marketing, you need efficient ways to capture email addresses.

But how do you get email addresses of website visitors?

As a digital marketer, you need to come up with increasingly novel ways to increase your conversion rate when it comes to getting email addresses of website visitors.

To help you with your email signups and to grow your list, here are some of the most common, as well as creative ways of capturing email addresses of web visitors.

1) Popups

Popups are probably the most popular means of collecting email addresses on the web at the moment. No doubt you have encountered them popping up in the middle of your screen as you while for the page to load. Their ubiquity across the internet is due to two factors: the ease of setting them up and their effectiveness.

Adding a popup to your site with an email form highly effective way to increase the number of signups you receive. Their ease of setting up and low cost, including SmartrMail’s own free popup, adds to their appeal. This also makes them something you should definitely try out on your site too.

The only downside to popups, however, is that they can be irritating to some people. Particularly when someone struggles to find how to exit out of the umpteenth popup that’s blocking what the content they’re after for the day.

If you’re concerned about this happening to your visitors, there are some variations on the typical popup that you can use to make them less intrusive.

2) Exit Intent Popups

Exit intent popups only appear to users when they are about to leave your page. These are relatively new and rely on tracking people’s mouse movements to detect when someone is about to click off your page.

These popups are ingenious for two reasons. Firstly, they don’t get in the way of visitors and the content they came to your site for. Secondly, having the popup flash onto the screen a split second before someone leaves causes people to immediately stop what they’re doing and pay attention to the popup.

When combined with other email collection methods, these popups essentially give you a second chance to capture email addresses

3) Delayed Popups

Another effective way to avoid having your popups annoy visitors is to only have them appear after your visitor has met a certain criteria. Common examples of this criteria include having spent a certain amount of time on your site, visited two or more pages, or has scrolled so far down your blog posts.

The disadvantage of delaying your popup is that fewer people who will see it. Having less people see your popup will likely mean fewer signups as well. However, it does mean that the people who stay on your site long enough to be present with the popup are probably more qualified leads and therefore more valuable to be on your email list, leading to better open rates when you send an email.

Determining whether delaying your popups is a good fit for your site will likely involve running a test. If you find that they don’t lead to a significant drop in conversions, then the annoyance you save your visitors might be worth it. Otherwise you can always get rid of the delay.

4) Sticky Top Bar

Displaying a small thin bar at the top of your page that stays at the top of your visitors’ screens as they scroll down the page will command their attention without being annoying.

Usually these bars are used to notify visitors of an update or announcement, but there’s no reason you can’t add an email address box to it and a subscribe button. Being in such a visible part of your site, you ensure that everybody is given the opportunity to sign up to your email list if they want.

Including an incentive offer alongside this telling visitors why they should sign up and giving the bar a bright color to stand out will lead to even more conversions. When DIYthemes added a top bar to their site, they gained an additional 1,180 email subscribers in just 30 days.

Hello Bar is a great service that lets you easily add a top bar on your site.

5) Sidebar Forms

Sidebars are a common navigational feature of many websites. While their primarily purpose is to provide visitors with links to other pages, there’s usually plenty of room to include other content in them as well.

Their width and that they continue down the length of your page makes them ideal for a rectangular graphic showcasing your opt-in incentive. Including a subscription box here will give it plenty of visibility without distracting your visitors.

If your site already has a sidebar that has a lot of free space, then trying this option is a no-brainer. For more crowded sidebars, see if there’s anything you can take out of it to make room for your email opt-in form. If you don’t have a sidebar, then creating one will likely require a moderately intensive site restructure. However if you’re struggling to get email signups, then it might be worth the effort.

6) Footer Subscription Form

The footer is probably the most common location for a subscription box on websites. This means anybody who wants to sign up to your email list will often go straight to the bottom of the page expecting to see an opt-in form.

One advantage of these boxes beyond being where people expect to see them is that by appearing in the footer, they automatically appear across all of the pages on your site. So you only have to set it up once instead of manually creating them across all your pages.

While this is far from the most creative means of collecting email addresses of website visitors, it’s just an integral part of web design that including it is pretty much mandatory.

7) Welcome Gate

If a popup isn’t large or attention grabbing enough for you, then maybe welcome gates might be a better option.

Welcome gates are essentially full screen popups that cover the entire page. They will appear a second or two after the page starts to load to let people catch a glimpse of the actual page they’re visiting. This helps prevent people from mistakenly thinking they’ve visited the wrong site or clicked on the wrong link. This makes them appear very similar to landing pages.

As these welcome gates are very similar to being their own webpage, you should be careful with them showing to the same person multiple times. If someone who has already entered their details on welcome gate sees it again, they’ll want to exit from the form. This is where there’s a risk of them bouncing if they decide to just exit the page. To help avoid this from happening, ensure that the welcome gate isn’t shown to people who have already seen it and provide a clear and easy option for exiting the sign up form.

Being relatively new and not as common as popups, they don’t tend to be as annoying. This is especially true if you don’t make your welcome gate too aggressive in your attempt to get someone’s email address. Instead by including your opt-in incentive and politely asking for your visitor’s address will likely yield better results.

Justuno is a popular lead capture app that also integrates with SmartrMail.

8) Run a Competition

If you’re struggling to get signups with your opt-in incentive, then it’s probably worth improving your offer. Running a competition that people enter by signing up to your email list is a great way to improve your conversion rate.

For ecommerce stores, the reward can be as simple as a discount coupon, however the better prize, the more likely people will be to sign up. When it comes to running competitions to grow your number of email subscribers, this can be both a blessing and a curse.

Ultimately you want to grow your list with qualified leads who have a reasonable potential to convert into paying customers. If people are signing up purely for the possibility of winning the prize, then you risk cultivating a disengaged email list that won’t be that beneficial to your business. The goal here is to balance these competing factors so that you get a decent sign up rate without tarnishing your list.

To run the competition on your website, you can use apps such as Gleam that make doing so super simple. Gleam also lets you run competitions where you can choose from a very long list of activities potential subscribers must do in order to enter such as retweet a tweet or check-in at a particular location on Facebook.

Other options also include gamified popups such as Wheelio’s virtual spin wheel that gives people the chance to win a prize.

What To Do With Your Email List

Now that you’re aware of all the main ways to capture the email address of your website visitors, it’s time to start implementing them on your site.

Collecting addresses to add to your email list won’t do much for your business unless you actually send an email to your subscribers though. Email marketing campaigns are a great way to increase your sales.

If you’re looking for an easy way to automate your email marketing, then check out SmartrMail’s features. We make it easy for ecommerce stores to automate their email campaigns as well as quickly composing email newsletters. Our features include abandoned cart emails, smart segmentation, and triggered email campaigns with integrations with all the popular ecommerce platforms.

The post 8 Ways To Capture Email Addresses of Website Visitors appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

The best fashion marketers use popups that have a meaningful offer, a clear call to action, and imagery as stylish as their store. To get you started, we’ve provided 8 examples of highly effective popups from the most successful fashion brands.

1. Kate Spade

What we like:

Kate Spade offers a meaningful discount plus free shipping in exchange for an email address. The popup isn’t too busy and the vertical rectangle allows them to add spacing to their copy.

2. Pull & Bear

What we like:

Pull & Bear segments their newsletter subscribers right at sign up. As a young man, this ensures that I won’t be receiving the latest floral dresses in my inbox.

Read: 5 Reasons why building your email list is a major key to e-commerce sales growth

3. Ben Sherman

What we like:

Ben Sherman‘s popup is as clean and sophisticated as their brand. They choose a clean font and keep their Popups For E-commerce simple with a bold discount offer and a single call to action.

4. Princess Polly

What we like:

If your brand is loud and proud, your popup should follow suit. Princess Polly is the perfect example with a bold font and neon green border. The addition of the 10% OFF tab on the far right is handy if your customer decides they want the discount once they find a product they like.

Get started with SmartrMail’s free email collection popup.

5. Betabrand

What we like:

Not all ecommerce fashion marketing is done on email, and fashion stores should focus their marketing efforts on the channels that generate the highest return. With over 300,000 Facebook followers, Betabrand gets sales through harnessing the power of community and social media. We like how their popup gives customers the choice to join their Facebook community or subscribe to their newsletter.

Read: 4 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Business Page For Ecommerce Sales

6. Goorin Bros.

What we like:

Goorin Bros. has a creative image and witty copy in their email popup. If you don’t want want to subscribe to the newsletter you can click “X” instead of clicking a passive aggressive “I don’t love hats”.

7. Forever 21

What we like:

Forever21‘s popup color scheme perfectly matches their brand. The trendy image and bold font stands out from the soft pink. Their discount offer is highlighted and the positioning doesn’t interrupt the customer’s shopping experience.

8. Cheap Monday

What we like:

Cheap Monday breaks the mould of the traditional rectangle pop up. Their image and design is trendy and on brand, and their discount offer is clear.

Our friends over at BigCommerce have gone deep on pop up design for ecommerce in an interesting post here if you want to read deeper.

Popups For E-commerce are a powerful way to increase your current active subscribers. Ready to start building your email list and growing your ecommerce store now? We offer a forever free SmartrMail popup for Shopify and BigCommerce stores. While you’re at it try out our automated product emails, abandoned cart emails, and quicker email newsletters – free for 15 days.

The post 8 Examples of Effective Popups For E-commerce Stores appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.