Popups may actually be a good idea, despite many users thinking they’re annoying. But maybe, just maybe, for every 10 users annoyed by a popup, maybe, just maybe, 12 users are successfully pushed to purchase. I’m making up numbers just to illustrate a “maybe” point. We should consider using popups on the website to do a few things.
a – show return visitors a list of things they looked at last time, or a list of items in their cart.
b – show an exit popup that offers customers an email that contains the items in their cart, a newsletter signup, an offer to “checkout now”, etc.
c – instead of using site-wide sales so much, how about using popups to get attention and offer customers a “10% discount for today”. The discount number can be randomized per visitor between a range we specify (5% - 25%, e.g.) or we can just use a different percentage every day or every week.
d – when users come to the site from a known marketing campaign, e.g. from the newsletter, maybe we can welcome them with a popup interaction. Saying thanks, offering a discount for purchasing today, etc.
e – CSR’s can also actually invoke popups on the customer’s browser during a chat. It’s not complicated for us to enable that. We can use that popup when the chat exits or something. Or just because maybe the customer wasn’t satisfied with their phone call, the popup may offer them a special discount or something.
For all of the above uses of the word “popup”, I don’t mean a literal old-school popup. Could be a lightbox, a slideout attention-grabbing dialog, etc. Just something that appears in some form or another on top of our other site content. A dialog that needs to be either interacted with or dismissed by clicking the “X”, “close”, or “maybe later”, or something.
Just some initial ideas. I’m open to considering these notions that I probably would have summarily rejected not too long ago.
There’s a lot more we can do with these direct-interaction marketing notions.