How to Grow your eCommerce Revenue with Pop-Ups

Hello and welcome to another edition of the How to Grow Your Ecommerce Business Podcast. I'm here with Taras from Classpo and we're going to talk about how to use pop-ups to maximize your e-commerce revenue. So Taras, would you like to just start off by telling us a bit about yourself and about your company? Yeah, yeah.

Hi everybody. Hi Trevor. Thanks for having me here. My name is Taras.

I work as a CMO at Class4.io, which is a pop-up builder that focuses to convert more revenue from existing traffic. Okay. So tell us about your product and what do you mean by pop-up specifically?

Oh, yeah. Pop-up is the window that triggers by a specific behavior. So people usually, usually percept pop ups as this 10% off, you know, window, but we make a difference because we are trying to make it more personalized. We are sick of segmentation gamification and we are working with the like different events, different signals and personalize this messaging pop up.

up that's that's what the difference so what could i mean who should be using so let's just go through a typical example of a can i know who should be using pop-ups at the moment because i mean okay the time the things that i've used pop-ups for is um you know getting people to sign up for emails right that's a classic and that's a i think a bit of a no-brainer you have a you know a pop-up which says you know give us your email and we'll give you some sort of discount can you tell me no um presumably you do your product does that but what other kind of things do pop-ups work well for Yeah, yeah, sure.

I believe that e-commerce business, they're mostly using for decreasing the cart abandments. So cart recovery is something because, for instance, the most marketers, by the way, they're using email sequences to recover abandoned carts. But there is a statistical fact that only 20% of abandoned carts are authorized sessions. So in other 80%, we don't know email and we can't recover it.

So pop up on exit intent and not only on exit intent. I can tell you that it is a science of not letting about this card without any, at least email. So another is the surveys, NPA surveys, customer satisfaction surveys. It's very important after checkout.

And promote special offers or flash sales. So this is the major cases. so how does it work okay so let so if you've got an abandoned cart how does your your product what what what what kind of pop up would it show and how would that what kind of performance would you expect from that yes yes so classbook can identify exit intent and which is more important can identify exit intent on mobile it is not that easy as with the desktop and as we know that DTC brands, they have like on average 70-80% of their traffic from mobile.

So yes, we can define this exit intent. Also, we connect it with your ESP, sorry, with CMS. As Shopify, for example, we have a direct integration and we know everything what is in the cart. So we can make a specific personalized offer on exit intent.

we can work with this product reads we can work with the cart value so yeah so what kind of performance would you see from that then i mean so you you get a uh you know obviously if you send like an i don't know what the performance on a cart abandonment email abandonment email is but it's pretty low what would you expect if you have a pop-up with an offer uh for example a simple exit intent will convert you about five percent of traffic too and if if you use personalized pop-up it will you can expect about 10 or even 15 percent conversion and how does that conversion to opt-in sorry how does that compare to sending an email how would it compare could you please i don't know what would be i'm guessing that's a lot more than than if you send an email but i'm just wondering how much more that is oh yes yes um i i think that if you if you have a hundred of abandoned carts for example uh 20 of them you can uh retarget with the email and there the conversion to sales is about one percent okay so it's and the conversion to sales is the same in the pop-up flow, but the thing is that we shouldn't compare because it is not a competitive approach.

We should combine them. You work with the segment of unauthorized sessions with the pop-up and you work with the segment of authorized that you already know the email of this session. Then you work on the email channel. Okay.

So tell me about some of the other so you say like surveys and stuff i mean what what what else do you think that pop-ups with you know people what are the opportunities are there for e-commerce sellers to use pop-ups to drive revenue uh okay special offers and season deals flash sales everything like that it is a pretty simple option that e-commerce already do they use like basic pop-ups and you can extend it you can use formal triggers like countdown timer You can show it specifically to segments that really need a discount to move forward That's the tricky thing that we help e-commerce marketers to save merging.

Because there is one case that you give discount to all people. And another thing that you can segment. You can pick only those segments that really need a discount. How do you know the segment needs a discount?

And how does your tool segment people? Is it by IP address or something? And how does it know that these people need a discount? Yeah, we have integration with the ESP system and with the CMS also.

So we know the existing customers. It's one segment that's already known. And, for instance, no need to give them 50% off because they're a customer that's that bad. Another segment is ESP, those who are subscribers, but they've never bought.

They are not customers yet, but only the subscribers. They require different offer. And talking about other people that are like first-time visitors, we can track and define the behavior on the website. If we see that, first of all, we are letting first 20 seconds to make something on the website.

And we can define by the behavior whether the intent, the shopping intent is high or it's low. If it's high, we are not triggering discount pop-ups. We are triggering something like product quiz or some sort of gamification that will increase the dopamine, that will increase the willing to move further. but no need to give a discount here.

If we see a hesitation, it's easy to define that there were some actions and then they stopped like users stacked. Yes, like you see in the real physical store, you can see that someone was actively looking for something, took one thing, another, checking price, and then stopped, and then do nothing. and the same we can observe in online behavior. So then we trigger a discount.

So much more sophisticated than sending an email, basically. Yes, yes. In this layer, in conversion layer, yes. But then we, at the end of the day, we capture email address, send it to ESP, and then ESP converts it.

Okay. So tell me about, you know, you talk about gamification. Can you explain, go into gamification a bit more, how you use that and how it's, does it work under all circumstances or is it just something that only certain sellers should use? Not all circumstances.

As we already mentioned, a use case of card recovery, gamification here is not the best option. Okay. Yeah, so gamification is good, for instance, for welcome message or welcome email pop-up, so-called. When you have a new visitor that's undefined as your subscriber or your customer, and you see that the pattern is kind of about this visitor is going to be the session without purchase.

Then you trigger this welcome bonus, undefined bonus. So it's like kind of triggering the interest. You're not saying here is your 10% off. You're saying here's your price.

Go and find out what is it exactly. And another thing is that we offer different games and we are encouraging marketers to test different games because the spin the wheel everybody is using and it's kind of blindness about the spin the wheel. So we encourage to use different games, luck and chance, not only casual also, quizzes. And another thing is I always empathize on that, that do gamification fair.

Like don't do, if you're a DTC brand, if you value brand perception do this game fair don't let your visitors don't treat them like Temu or AliExpress gamification do to actually make it like something where you have a potential to win something as opposed to just no one ever wins yeah so this is the this is not a practice for DTC brands. Okay. Because DTC, it's about brand, they invest in this brand, and it is not about the wow purchases. But if you're playing the game of like wow goods, if you are selling wow goods, these goods that like about one second decision, yes, to buy, the gamification can also help to do that um you can use for example just take email gate off and make the game luck and chance chance game and the win will be like instant so instant win and then go by okay it also possible so and and how um what kind of performance would you expect from something like a bonus spin the wheel or something uh i will describe it um as an example for example welcome email pop for new visitors the average uh on the market the average conversion is like about three percent and on our users it's about five percent and if you add uh gamification you will got like about 10 percent okay if you add personalization and also like countdown timer or any formal uh thing you will get 15%.

So is there a reason why you want to? Yeah, sorry. I just wanted to notice that all these high converting mechanics, they're good, they're working, but be careful. So be careful not triggering it to existing customers and to existing subscribers.

Yes. Okay. So you would like to segment people properly, get it set up. So, have you got any advice for making pop-ups annoying?

Or certainly can be annoying. I'm sure your pop-ups aren't annoying. How do you make your pop-ups not annoying? Observe about the user for the first 20 seconds.

This time it led you to define the shopping intent and to define what offer should you do. Whether you should offer a quiz game should you offer a discount. So the more relevant your offer, the less annoying your pop-up. So for people in the ideal world, it is not annoying if the offer is relevant and triggered in the right time.

Another thing, very, very simple thing, but you will not believe that most marketers are not using that. Add teaser, a small button that will trigger your pop-up offer by unclick. That's very simple. Okay, so a little, what do you mean by a teaser?

Can you explain that a bit? It is a small UX element, like small button, floating button, that connects to the side of your screen, right or left or bottom or top. and user opened the pop-up by clicking on this small button. So it's a very simple trick, but just to describe, to get a picture, that the most people after closing pop-ups, they don't see this offer if you don't use it.

Just imagine that you triggered it at the moment that this person wasn't about to be interested in your pop-up offer. But in five seconds later, later on another stage, on another page, your offer would be suitable and would be in place. But the person can't back to your offer because the pop-up already closed. So this teaser, this small button, it doesn't hurt the UX, but it lets you come back to your offer Okay, so can you tell me what is the kind of what would be your advice to any seller what pop-ups should they be using if they're not all you know the kind of basic set of pop-ups they should use to drive revenue for their business Oh yeah I would advise to, first of all to start track revenue per session because in other cases, you will not be ensured that your flow is working for revenue.

You can see it's easy to track conversion, of course, but later you should collect the data about revenue to make right decisions. But the general pattern is to use flows, multi-step flows that deliver a knowledge about a brand. People come in there, especially for cold traffic, that come in and see your website first. Just imagine they just clicked advertisement.

They've been on a few seconds on your website. They probably even haven't already get what your story is about. And you are saying, take this 10% off, just subscribe for our newsletter and grab your 10% off. this is the open this is 10% offer what I don't know so you can build a quiz multi-step flows or gamification that is that explains what your brand is about that's the advice that's what we see in our tests if you let your pop-up understand what your brand is about the revenue per session will be higher than if you're trying to convert as much as possible and push, push, push, push, push conversion.

Okay. So what would you say when you're saying that there's a difference between, you know, things for you're trying to get revenue or if you're trying to get engagement, right? What are the different kind of pop-ups that people should use under different circumstances? For example, brand story pop-ups or brand quiz pop-up will add you more revenue.

Then, likewise, for example, limited time offer pop-up. When you see just timer and see a promo code, or you see a timer and you see an email field, yes, a call to action, subscribe to get your 10% off. That's the difference. Okay.

So what do you think are the obviously you know pop can be a bit annoying right um what can go wrong with pop and what what do people what kind of mistakes do you see that people make oh as i mentioned before the the main mistakes about annoying is the triggering in the first seconds of session i would say that first five seconds uh i encourage marketers not trigger first five seconds at least but if you are serious about that you should make a b tests and see whether your case is like 20 percent uh delay or five percent for welcome pop-ups that's the main case another another thing is the personalization so uh don't offer uh don't offer the same discount to all website visitors try to think about who who who are already okay with your prices they love your brand they love they like to interact with you so no need to to interrupt their journey by this get this off we have a discount so do you i mean is it uh you know you talk about personalization is it possible to go too far with personalization Could you please repeat about the personalization?

Is it possible with personalization? Is it possible to... I know I get a lot of emails which are kind of... The personalization is a bit creepy.

Oh yeah. Is it possible to freak people out by knowing too much about them? Yeah, the simple example is in real life. If you meet a stranger and a stranger called you by name, the first...

What do you feel? you feel like anxiety because how do you know me? How do you know my name? So the same thing is with the pop-ups.

If you, for some reason, you can even know the name. Even if you have a subscriber or you have a customer and when you called by name, we can trigger the pop-up. If you know the customer and you have a name in the base, we can trigger such personalized pop-up. But it is not okay.

It is not like, it doesn't feel like okay, yes? It's a bit too personal. Yes, yes. So just figure out whether it's normal to make this personalization.

If you have, just another case, you have advertisement, yes, ads on Google Ads, and different keywords and different campaigns by different keyword groups. And Classable pop-ups can use these keywords. We can read it in UTMs and get parameters. Oh, okay.

Keywords from ad campaign. That increases conversion by 10% at least. This is a good trick. This is okay.

This is okay. like I as a as a visitor I'm fine with that because I already clicked this advertisement and I see the offer using the same wording as a keyword so it's okay for me I don't like suggest that you're spying me or something like that okay so okay I think you know I think I've we've learned a lot about a pop-up certainly I didn't realize that it was such an art can you tell I just I'd like to finish off my podcast with a fluffy question. Is there anything which you've inspired you recently?

Have you seen any good books? Have you watched any good films? Here in Portugal, is it nice and sunny there? Yeah.

I read a book right now. It's called Alchemy. It's a marketer from all GILV agencies writing about how people are illogical in their decisions, in their perception. I like the idea that we are making a reason why we act in some way later.

So we are taking decisions, following by intuition, following by maybe some social triggers. And then we make this exercise of reasoning, explaining why we do so. So that's interesting. That's interesting for me as a marketer because we are marketers.

We love to read about some theories and complicated knowledge. But in practice, it is not that. Yeah, it's interesting because you've got things when people are scared. You know, the question is, are people scared?

the you know the the um heart rate goes up and they start to sweat and people think ah you know my heart rate i'm scared um you know my emotion is that i'm scared and the reason i i'm therefore because i'm my heart rate's going up because i'm scared but it could actually be the other way around in that people you know you notice that your body is having these reactions and you assign an emotion to it. I must be scared because my heart rate is going up. So it's not, these things work in quite counterintuitive ways.

Yeah. So tell me, Taras, sorry, where can we find you online? Yeah, find me on LinkedIn, Taras Talimunchuk, and also you can find our product, claspo.io on website.

If you are Shopify, find us on Shopify App Store, just type in class phone. And if you're on WordPress or WooCommerce, find us on WordPress plugin category, we are also there. Great, okay. Well, Taz, it's been lovely to speak to you and thanks for letting us know about your product.

Thank you, thank you, Trevor. It's a big pleasure and big honor to speak to you. Thanks, bye-bye. Thank you, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.