Email subscription pop-ups rule!

Gathering quality, permission driven email opt-ins for your newsletters should be at the top of every email marketers’ to-do list. Without an engaged audience it can be hard to make the most out of your messaging.

Luckily there is a math and science to growing your email marketing opt-in list and a good part of it is around targeting your opt-in requests.

Gathering quality, permission driven email opt-ins for your newsletters should be at the top of every email marketers’ to-do list. Without an engaged audience it can be hard to make the most out of your messaging.

Luckily there is a math and science to growing your email marketing opt-in list and a good part of it is around targeting your opt-in requests.

The right opt-in and the right request

Yes, great email pop-up forms actually exists and we see them all the time with our clients. If you don’t want to keep it to out-of-the-box, the marketer has a good deal in the creative side when it comes to email subscription pop-ups, done right.

My previous article actually was a bit more into the numbers; the lessons we learned from gathering more than 4 million opt-ins. It showed some of the targeting rules and their popularity. Now let’s go a bit deeper and learn how these pop-up targeting rules work.

More than 7% sign-ups for new and returning visitors

Here is an example of targeting for new versus returning visitors. This fashion retailer chose to use a slide in instead of a pop up for returning visitors and use different texts for each group. As you can imagine, you can personalize your targeting rules so that you target only the prospects, and not clients and the other way around. Is that cool or what?

This online retailer was able to get over 7% signups from new and returning engaged visitors:
A 7.68% subscription rate on engaged new visitors with a pop-up design.
A 7.19% subscription rate with a bottom slider for engaged returning visitors.

How opt-in targeting rules and filters work

Not all people are interested in your brand and/or your offer, so why engage with all visitors, when you can target and convince your most valuable visitors: the ones that actively engage with your content and website. Modern opt-in plugins or testing modules will allow you to target pop-ups. This is how the most often used targeting rules work:

Rule 1: “Target Returning/New Visitors”

This one is one of the most powerful. Based on what website you run, it might make more sense to target new visitors, as you want to include them in a lead nurturing campaign or send them some education content.
This rule has a have a huge influence on the subscription rates, as targeting visitors based on regency can drive loads of email leads, especially if you compliment your strategy with a cleverly designed email subscription form and / or incentive.

Rule 2: “Target People a # of Times”

You don’t have to target each visitor every time, that might even get in the way of a great user experience. Options for targeting people # of times are:

  • target people only once
  • on each visit
  • for every pageview

Depending on the type of website, one option might fit you better than the other, but we learned that most people choose only once or on each visit. This makes sure that the pop-up.

Rule 3: “Target People After They Visited a # of Pages”

This is a first engagement based targeting rule. With “Target People After They Visited a # of Pages” you can specify the minimum no. of pages a visitor has to have gone through before showing the pop-up. You can count all page views or make it even more specific and count only the page views that correspond with other targeting rules.

Rule 4: “Target People That Spend # Seconds on Your Website”

The 4th most used targeting rule is also engagement based. “Target People That Spend # Seconds on Your Website” allows you to target people based on the amount of time they’ve spent on your website. Usually we at Padiact see campaigns with at least 10 seconds delay since the user landed on the website.

Give them the right reason to sign up

By combining only these four rules you can build pretty sophisticated targeting already. For instance you can choose to target all returning visitors, who browse through 3-4 pages, and spend at least 1-2 minutes on your website and show them one kind of pop-up, lets name that a loyal visitor.

New visitors that spend 10 seconds on your website and visit at least one page can be targeted with a different message. To use not only to exclude or time your pop-up right, but also to offer them different incentives or sign-up reasons.

Claudiu Murariu

Claudiu Murariu is the co-founder of PadiCode, the company behind PadiAct, a behavioral targeting tool for increasing email leads. Claudiu can be found on Twitter (as @padicode) and on his blog.