3 Pop-up Mistakes Most Ecom Stores Make

Joseph Liu Oct 20, 2021

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hey, everyone! Joe here, from Build Grow Scale. I’m a Revenue Optimization™ expert, and I help ecommerce stores build, grow, and scale their business.

In this training, I’m going to talk about three mistakes that most ecommerce stores make when it comes to the pop-ups on their site.

Are you ready? Let’s get into it.

So, what are pop-ups? 

Pop-ups are these things that when you go to a site, they just block your entire screen asking you to put in your email address or giving you a discount. And the reason why most people do this on their store is because they want more sales, or more leads, and because the ecommerce gurus out there are telling them to add this app and install it without even optimizing it. And you end up having these high bounce rates on your store and wondering why you’re not making enough sales.

This is a major problem.

And guess what? You’re not alone in this. A lot of our ecommerce stores, the clients that we have, and the students we have in our program, suffered from the same issue when they first came to us.

We told them, “Hey, think about your user experience when it comes to this. They come to your site, they get this blockage right away, and they don’t even know what you’re selling. You’re loading the pop-up right away. People get really bugged off and they don’t want to see these pop-ups. That’s why you have a high bounce rate.” And when we told them that, they were like, “Oh! Oh my gosh, I never thought of that. Let me optimize that!” … and subsequently get better bounce rates on their store.

So, let’s talk about how we can fix this issue.

Three Rules for Pop-Ups: 

Don’t show your pop-up on your cart page or at checkout. That’s when people already have items in their cart, ready to pay you, and showing them a pop-up again is just gonna block their experience and ruin the whole thing.

So, don’t show pop-ups on cart pages or check out pages. You can do that in settings in most of your pop-up apps to block these pop-ups, so they never show (URL string “with cart,” URL string “with checkout”). Make sure that’s definitely not showing up in your cart and check out because that ruins the whole experience.

Incentivize people to opt in. Don’t just ask people to sign up for your newsletter, because that doesn’t sound intriguing at all. You’re not motivating anyone to give you their email address.

Keep in mind that whenever you ask for somebody’s information, especially online, you have to give them a good reason. Are you giving a discount in exchange for the information? And are you asking at the right time?

So, incentivize them to give you the information that you need, and make sure you ask at the right time. If you load your pop-up right away when they come to your site, the first second, they’re not even able to see what it is you’re selling and you’re giving them a discount or asking them to opt in. It doesn’t make sense. They don’t want to do that, right? That’s the first mistake you should never make.

Make sure your pop-up is mobile-optimized. A lot of times, it looks decent on desktop, it’s easy to close it out … But a lot of times, that pop-up is not mobile-optimized, and it gets all these weird shapes, and people can’t really find the exit button, the “x” button, of that pop-up. They can’t close out of it. And what will they do? They reload the page once, see it pop up again, can’t close it … reload again, can’t close it … They bounce. They don’t have the patience anymore. My girlfriend actually had that experience buying nail polish just a couple days ago. She was trying to buy from this website but just couldn’t close out the pop-up. She got so angry.

Alright, so, three things: One, make sure you’re actually incentivizing people to opt in. Don’t just throw out an opt-in for no reason, asking people to sign up for your newsletter without any incentive (discounts or whatever). Number two, make sure your pop-ups never show on cart and checkout pages. Don’t do that! Make sure it’s a great experience when people are about to pay you. And three, make sure your pop-ups are absolutely mobile-optimized. If they’re not mobile-optimized, it can ruin that user experience.

So, I hope you liked the video today. If this is something that you found helpful, click the “Like” button and subscribe to the channel. And if you want to learn more about BGS and what we do, book a free strategy session call with us.

Go to workwithbgs.com.

We’ll find out where you are in your business, where you want to be, and help you get there.

Alright, that’ll be the video training for today. Thank you, and I’ll talk to you next time.

Bye.

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About the author

Joseph Liu

Joseph is laser focused on perfecting product pages and picks up new ideas lightning fast. He dissects, tests, and optimizes. He is also the man behind BGS marketing efforts. When he’s not cooking up good websites, you can find him in a CrossFit gym working out with his friend Travis.

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