Here’s what I learned this week

Happy Thanksgiving for my US readers, happy Black Friday and Cyber Monday to everyone!

Are popups bad?

As a popup software company, this is always on my mind.

What would make a good experience v. what would make a poor experience?

I swear I get popups from a ton of websites immediately after clicking through from one on their emails.

There’s a certain large popup provider that is massively guilty of doing nothing to prevent this.

It happens to me on tenthousand.cc all the time.

In short, a lot of the way we currently approach popups is lazy.

Then there’s how brands currently trigger popups:

• Time on page

• Scroll depth

• Exit intent

Then there’s the more advanced:

• Number of page views

• URLs

• Behavior with other forms

• Source of traffic

There’s a surprising amount of depth and strategy that can go into popups from a triggering perspective.

But there is an unhealthy obsession with getting everyone to signup on your list as well. If you want to think about it differently, you’re trying to give away as much margin as possible to every possible person that comes to your website.

Now you see when you word it that way it doesn’t sound like the smartest thing in the world, it almost seems like we should have balance.

So the part that we don’t know is what percentage of people would have checked out without the discount in the popup and would that percentage have changed based on the offer.

It’s really hard to test for this because we know that statistically popups at different parts of the journey tend to perform differently for different companies.

Delayed popup on a product page, typically has the higher conversion rate of all popups provided.

The irony is for this week, we turned off our normal popups entirely in favor of instead letting the existing offers for Black Friday and Cyber Monday dominate the attention. We kept them for certain customer journeys but were careful to remove them from others.

We didn’t want to give up extra margin, have a poor experience of people not being able to combine discounts, or take a hit to margin on smaller purchases with lower AOVs.

But all this has got me thinking…

So there’s a new theory that we’ve been playing with, a clean experience where a popup with signup and offer only happens when someone has added something to the cart of a certain value.

Here’s how the logic is working in my head:

There’s a few different types of shoppers -

1. Deal only shoppers, good if your margins can support it

2. People looking for a deal to try out a product, the curious ones

3. People that don’t care about a deal

The ideal shopper is one that purchases and makes you profit, 3 makes you the most profit, 2 makes you the most profit if they like the purchase and make subsequent purchases, 1 is just a money suck if you’re margins aren’t great and they get trained to only purchase on sale.

So further logic is that people that sign up for a discount are already heavily motivated or at least more motivated than others to make a purchase overall.

We see from data time and time again that the majority of people that subscribe for a discount via a popup convert within just minutes and hours of their actions.

So if signing up for a discount is usually one of the last things that people do, should we tie this action to an intent action around the cart or cart value as the trigger?

Meaning a person could come to a page, browse around, add something to the cart, then receive an offer in exchange for their information.

This could even be done depending on the amount in the cart, so essentially a tiered discount based on the cart value for “first time buyers”.

I have to put that in quotes because unless someone is logged in, the best we have is cookies to go on to know whether or not someone is a first time buyer.

Then there’s the practical bits, do you want to enforce the rules of discounts and prevent a potential sale, or do you want to eat the margin but make a customer happy?

In truth, I think the answer is you eat it, knowing that the offer they get will likely be the same as an offer that you provide at some other point of the year during a sale anyway.

Let’s test it

So here’s a test that I’m going to run next month.

Remove all the popups from the website, change the trigger to be in cart only with a threshold amount, keep the offer the exact same.

My hypothesis is that my subscriber rate will go down by my subscription to conversion rate should increase, the only question will be how much?

Then we’ll need to baseline the numbers and build a model to understand their impact minus any halo effect from the holiday season.

Other options for testing this, only show this popup to people that have dismissed another popup in their journey previously.

Going to have to think about this one a little bit deeper, but lots of options around how to reduce variables to get a cleaner read on this.

The Takeaway

I’m seeing a lot of people preaching doing things the same way, the truth is that performance across all accounts for the most part isn’t increasing at the rate necessary to continue to build businesses in ecommerce at a scale that is highly successful.

There are some exceptions to this, but 2023 will go down as largely a down year for a lot of brands.

I think that DTC can still exist but only if we operate in a very customer centric way that balances providing discounts (what everyone wants) with triggering for value based exchanges.

Brands need to find something of value that they can use to improve their own behaviors and create experiences that will help guide their efficiency.

With tightening markets, getting closer to the customer had never been more important.

Have a great week!

-Jon