Have you ever noticed a small box asking for your email on a website?
That little box is called a “Web Popup”. It usually offers something free to be sent to your email address. Sometimes it may also offer you a discount coupon or a free shipping coupon. It could also be a newsletter subscription box.
Actually, modern marketing automation tools let users design web popups in new and innovative ways. We will cover those advanced uses of web popups in the next chapter.
First, let’s get introduced to the entire ecosystem of email marketing and see how web popups fit into this ecosystem.
This image makes the association between email marketing and web popups very clear.
Web popups (sometimes called as “opt-in forms”) are the source element for the Email Marketing of your business. It is a much-loved technique to increase traffic and sales in Internet marketing.
All popups work the same way; their purpose is to collect email addresses of their visitors for populating an “email list”. This list is then fed into the email marketing system being used by the company. You may also receive a second confirmation mail asking you to verify your email address. Data privacy laws (primarily in the EU) make a second confirmation mandatory. For a marketer, this ensures absolute certainty in the visitor's intent to subscribe; they want their emails to be delivered to people who want it the most.
Once you are in their email list, they will use it to send you important pieces of content as well as marketing offers. They get to stay in touch with you even after you leave the website. Marketers collect email contacts to keep the conversation going with their customers after their initial visit.
If you use email marketing for your online business, you should focus on using the web popup. It can be much more than just a subscription box.
As shown in the image above, there are two components of an Email Marketing Campaign:
Depending on where your customers are in the marketing funnel, you can send them different types of emails.
A sustained dialogue over emails to engage with leads is one of the primary ways of staying in touch with them. We hope that these leads turn into customers one day. However, it is rather tough to compel your leads to open your emails. This is why you must first find out what your leads are most looking for.
The process of tweaking the subject lines, graphics inside the email body, and the copy (content) of the email is called Email Marketing Optimization. The goal of this process is to make your leads relate to your emails more naturally. The more relatable your email content is for your customers, the more engagement and conversion it draws.
An A/B test is an optimization technique involving different variations of email elements to see which one resonates with the audience the most. Different emails (for the same purpose) are sent to different sets (or segments) of users. The emails that get better response are picked by the A/B testing tool for the remaining contacts list.
A marketing automation software typically automates both these processes. It also gives steady support in the form of customizable templates for designing your web popups.
All marketing automation software offer web popups. In some tools, they are called "Opt-in Forms", while others call them "Lead Generation Forms". You can always pick and customize a template for creating your own opt-in form.
Sometimes, the web popups can be seen on your first visit, while other times they can be placed on the sidebar. Exit Popups that 'pop up' just when the website visitor is leaving the website are also quite popular. A new and unique popup called “time-triggered” popup is gaining ground too - it shows up after you scroll down a certain length or after you have spent a certain amount of time on a webpage.
In the next chapter, we'll explore all these types of web popups and how you can use them.
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