How to use email popups effectively

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show notes.

• [6:05] What types of popups are there?
• [17:21] What makes for a good popup?
• [35:54] Do I need to offer a discount to get people to sign up?
• [38:13] Shoutout: Demystifying Migrations
• [39:16] Shoutout: Bowling Alone

resources. 

• Demystifying Migrations eBook
• Burnout Newsletter
• Klaviyo
• Omnisend
• Privy
• Justuno
• Milk Bar Store
• Ugly Drinks
• Klaviyo SMS
• Postscript
• Attentive
• Fantastic Texts

transcript. 

Kelly  0:00  
If you've listened to any of our conversion rate optimization episodes or webinars, you know we have a lot of opinions about pop ups. This week on the podcast, we're talking about how you can serve pop ups on your store that are both friendly and effective. Let's dig in.

Rhian  0:17  
Welcome to Commerce Tea, a podcast to help you succeed on Shopify.

Kelly  0:21  
I'm Ryan. And I'm Kelly. Grab a mug and join us as we talk about all things commerce.

Rhian  0:32  
mesa is the easiest way to integrate any top ecommerce app or service with your online store designed exclusively for Shopify and Shopify plus, mesas. automated workflows can get back your time spent on repetitive tasks while growing your business at the same time. Join other merchants that have embraced the simplicity of mesas no code approach to building workflows, you can create new ways to improve customer engagement. Encourage repeat purchases without lifting a finger, reduce manual data entry and more through a simple point and click interface. And with bfcm. Planning around the corner, now is the time to ask the question is my online store prepared? optimizing every step in the shopping experience is the only way to create a lifelong customer. Get Mesa and capitalize on one of the biggest commerce events of the year. Search for Mesa in the Shopify App Store and download the app today.

Kelly  1:34  
every aspect of your website is a variable that could be impacting your business's revenue. We all want to grow our business and we make changes with the hopes of seeing our business grow. Maybe you add a new graphic here new social proof on your product page there, maybe change your pricing. But do you know if this new thing is helping or hurting you? Today, testing is a requirement understanding what is and isn't working for your business. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to test. In fact, I set up my first test in less than 10 minutes on a client store using neat A B testing. After the test was live. We saw a confidence level on each of our tests to know which is actually best for the business, how they sort of see additional revenue per view for each variants. Give her friends that need a B testing a twice a day and start testing for your business. Head over to try dot neat ab.com slash commerce dash t to start your 14 day free trial. Again, let's try dot n e@ab.com slash commerce dash T. Ri and good morning.

Unknown Speaker  2:32  
Good morning. How

Rhian  2:33  
are you?

Kelly  2:35  
I am doing just fine today. Just fine.

Rhian  2:39  
Just fine. I am doing medium.

Kelly  2:42  
It's still early. So I was just gonna be really negative. But no, there's time for my day to get even better. Fantastic. I

Rhian  2:50  
love that outlook. Let's do some jumping jacks have some fun. Let's go. That's what I always say when my daughter's like having a bad day. I'm like, let's do jumping jacks because I don't know why I decided to gentle I

Kelly  3:00  
do the whole like dance party. Yeah.

Rhian  3:02  
Well, you know, when Kelly and I were together, we had some when because we're building this super secret app that y'all don't know about. And we have some mental blocks because building is challenging. And so we had a dance party. And I recommend it 10 to 10 recommend. Exactly.

Kelly  3:18  
I think they're really helpful. I think they're good. We should

Rhian  3:20  
maybe even share a playlist

Kelly  3:23  
might be a good I'll give you a hint. If you're familiar with like 2000 screamo. It's mostly that and pop punk. And in pop funk, exactly.

Rhian  3:36  
Okay, so Kelly, your this is your second week back off of your sabbatical. It is Yes. How you feeling?

Kelly  3:46  
I'm overwhelmed. Fair. Fair. Ready?

Rhian  3:49  
Okay. Fair, I think. Like I think most entrepreneurs are overwhelmed. And actually Kelly wrote a really great he email newsletter

Kelly  4:00  
doodad newsletter

Rhian  4:01  
doodad. about, about overwhelm and burnout a couple weeks ago, so y'all should check that out. Because I

Kelly  4:07  
yeah.

Rhian  4:09  
cippic fan of it. And it's something to just keep in mind as we head into holiday. Like I'm like talking about holiday again, because it's August, but as we head into holiday,

Kelly  4:18  
you know, one of my favorite things. What about my newsletter is so the newsletter is called your friends guide to entrepreneurship. And it's I send an email every Friday, the email takes five minutes or less to read like I tried to keep it short. And I decided on a whim to buy the domain your friends guide to entrepreneurship.com Okay, and it is the longest domain ever.

Rhian  4:41  
I love that also, sometimes I spell entrepreneur. I can never say

Kelly  4:45  
exactly.

Rhian  4:48  
It's like definitely I should know how to spell that. Also calendar how

Kelly  4:53  
definitely down I know how to spell it. I just typo it.

Rhian  4:57  
Yeah, that's the problem. typo it every time that sounds like you don't No,

Kelly  5:00  
entrepreneurship is like that is the going from r e p r e. Yeah, that part I always type out like, I just understand like entrepreneurship. Yes. And just leave out of the are.

Rhian  5:12  
It guess what selling is is a wild wild ride but you know what else is a wild ride? Kelly?

Kelly  5:17  
What's a wild ride?

Rhian  5:19  
ecommerce? His relationship with pop ups? Yeah. And there's,

Kelly  5:23  
this is something we've talked about

Rhian  5:26  
at length outlay.

Kelly  5:28  
Yeah. So let's see, I guess let's start with why it's why there are so many opinions about them. How about that?

Rhian  5:35  
Is the so the whole episode is not going to be like, here's all the opinions but reinas is right.

Kelly  5:41  
Oh, there No.

Okay, doesn't work like that. It could? It could let it Oh, no.

Rhian  5:57  
Okay, so there's lots of opinions about pop ups.

Kelly  6:01  
Yeah, but why don't we go

Rhian  6:01  
over what a pop up is first, what's the pop up?

Kelly  6:05  
A pop up is a pop up. A pop up is something that shows up. And when you either are looking into more details here, but do you either load a website, or you are leaving a website, you'll see something pop up that is described pop up, something will appear there we go. It will pop up asking for your ID I was trying to explain a pop up without using the words pop up. Yeah. pop up. It will. It appears and usually prompts you for something either like to give you a discount code asks for your email asks for your phone number might make you or ask you to confirm your age might ask you to say hey, we have cookies. Do you want some? But not the tasty kind?

Rhian  6:50  
So no, not the tasty kind. Not the tasty kind at all. So with these pop ups, as there are many. Let's talk about the welcome pop up first. So you're landing on the store or the website. And it's like a bow pop up. pop up.

Kelly  7:11  
That's how it feels exactly a POW. Wow. Yeah. So it to to back up. We're talking both welcome and entry pop ups and then exit in time. So we're starting with Well, yeah, sorry. We're just so we're Yeah, differentiate between the two. Yes, yes. So there are three part primary kinds of welcome pop ups, you have your age gate, which is if you are visiting, let's say a website that sells alcohol, and it wants you to confirm your age that you were of age to be visiting this website. My favorite version of this is I forget which website it was that if you put in an age that's less than 21 being the drinking age in the States, it would redirect you to disney.com.

Rhian  7:51  
I kinda love that.

Kelly  7:53  
I know, I wish I knew, I wish I could remember what store it was or what website it was because I thought I thought it was really funny. But yeah, it's just an age confirmation that you can legally visit this website and shop on this website. Yeah. The second one I had mentioned before is cookies. So we have we use cookies on our website, please accept or choose which types of cookies you want to accept either all of them are just like the absolutely necessary ones. And then the third kind are the email and SMS capture pop ups, you mostly see these as email pop ups. But as SMS becomes more and more popular, you start see I've definitely started seeing more SMS pop ups either in the same pop up with asking for your email, and then as asking for your phone number, or a separate pop up for her SMS, which we've had conversations about the UX like so many things showing up on the screen that can get kind of annoying. I prefer to have things all on one place, if possible, or just like not intrusive, overall. So I can make use of the screen real estate that I have.

Rhian  8:53  
And you know who also doesn't like it when your pop ups are intrusive. Google who and me

Kelly  9:01  
can do exactly that. There's

Rhian  9:03  
a lot of science around it. And because Google is the boss of search. Yep. Google has written extensively about pop ups and when and where they should be, and how intrusive they should be. And especially because Google index is mobile first. It's important to pay attention to both your desktop and mobile experience obviously, but if Google's indexing mobile first, that means you know what I do not want to see. And Google does not want to see a wall to wall pop up in the first one second that I can't exit out of on my mobile phone. They're very popular right now. That's specific. modal instance, pop up. It's very popular. It's like a trend right now to do Don't do it. Please do not do it. Do not do especially the wall, the wall, the wall. The was actually very that's a high risk, low reward situation. Because the the reward in theory is that email, SMS capture or whatever, and the high risk is being delisted from Google. So there, you know, choose your Choose Your Own Adventure there.

Kelly  10:15  
Yeah. email, SMS pop ups, those are the annoying ones. Those are the ones that Google doesn't like. Yes, ah, gates, yes, cookies, those are necessary ones, just to be crystal crystal clear, crystal clear, not going to get penalized for showing an age gate pop up as like, as soon as the page

Rhian  10:32  
it also too depends on how your pop ups fly in. Let's just say, I don't know, I've used I've just remember being in high school and and making a PowerPoint. And then just using every single feature.

Kelly  10:51  
You could the different fonts, the Yeah, what was the art? Yeah, the Word Art. The Word Art. There I go. The transitions from one slide to the next that are oh yes difference, which

Rhian  11:03  
we're not going for that here we're going especially including with cookies and educating, you're still looking for like a fly in from the side that takes up less than 20% of your screen real estate. You just are. And normally the cookie pop up is more from below, that's where you're normally see it. And that's kind of where people expect it to be. So it's probably what yours should be as well. But in the age gate, I would fly in from left or right side, maybe even top but I would just don't cover your entire screen, even though those ones are considered okay by Google. Now I understand. Y'all are thinking, Well, I have a welcome pop up. I know you do. In a perfect world in my world, you wouldn't. But I am in a minority when it comes to my thoughts on this. So what my recommendation will be is give Google time to crawl your site. So give them you know, five seconds, 10 seconds to crawl your site. And also, if you do not if if the pop up is not intrusive, it's the intrusive part that is like the key. So if it flies in from the side and doesn't take your whole screen real estate, that's not an intrusive pop up. It's when it eats your whole screen. That's intrusive. I'm done talking about the worst. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I there are some What am I I love universal standard. For instance, they they have a walled wall pop up right now. And I'm like, Can you not? I haven't shopped? They're doing a sample sale right now and I haven't shopped it because they frustrates me.

Kelly  12:33  
It's funny you talk about intrusive, because when I was doing when I was writing the hook, I really wanted to write both friendly and non intrusive. So you know, it's, it's I just didn't want to open with the hook. But at least we got to talk about it. So that's, that's okay.

Rhian  12:46  
We didn't get to talk about but Okay, here's another way to think about it. Imagine you're walking. And by the way, for those of you who can't see me right now I have an egg roll and

Kelly  12:57  
literally just waving an egg roll around as she talks about interests of pop up.

Rhian  13:03  
You're walking into Nordstrom, right and let's say you're walking in from inside of them all. We've all done this Nordstrom can be replaced with whatever store is local to you. That is a department store. You're walking in, you know you're going to hit the perfume area because that's what is there. Right? That tailors all this time. That is how department stores are laid out. You walk in and as soon as you get in instead of the perfume people being like, would you like to spray perfume? No, no, no, no, no, someone blocks your entrance and is like, give me your email. And then condescendingly is like, or not like that's your you're bad. You're bad and and then you have to walk past them, but they're trying to block you the entire time. Are you going into Nordstrom then? Or are you leaving? And if the answer is you turn around and leave. That's what people do to your website's. Well, okay, I I will get off my soapbox. My head roll.

Kelly  14:01  
Roll. We'll get into the the sarcasm piece in a moment. But I did want to back up a little bit. While we're still talking about welcoming untrue pop ups and and talk about their three primary types of problems. I tend to see the standard pop up. Welcome to our website, enter your email address for 15% off or free shipping on your first order. And that's it. The second spin to win I hate these. But the reality is they get you a lot of emails. They're usually not your best performing customers. Some some of them can definitely turn into loyal customers. But I find spinzwin pop ups to be totally overused. They're noxious. They're huge. And I do not I'm not here to play games. I'm here to spend money. That's how I feel about the third kind are giveaways. And these are simply just like enter your email address to be entered to win a bag Or a product that I happen to be selling on my store? I see them all like when a $200 gift card. I know boutiques do this a lot for winning, winning gift cards. I've seen them, you know, various ones and other stores. But yeah, so those are the those the primary three, exit intent pop ups. This is the other type. So I 710 pop ups show up when you move your cursor away from the main area of the screen, like maybe back to like a bookmark or another tab or like your address bar where you're going to visit another website. And it's like, Hey, we don't go into your email address and we'll give you 15% off the great thing about accident 10 pop ups is Google doesn't care about Yeah, because they your site has since loaded. And I feel like they're they could be a really great opportunity for like one final touch point for somebody who's like, yeah, the price is gonna high and not really sure I want to actually purchase this right now, at this, maybe I'll wait for a sale, when you can be like, Well, actually, I'll don't give you 15% or 10% or 20% off or whatever you will have to pay for shipping. Whatever it might be a free gift. It's a good last touch point to capture, keep somebody on your site.

Rhian  16:08  
I agree. I know. Those are my favorite kinds of pop up saying, hey, Ron,

Kelly  16:13  
what can I do to help my support team be more efficient?

Rhian  16:15  
I recommend gorgeous, gorgeous combines all your communications channels, including email, SMS, social media, live, chat and phone into one platform and gives you an organized view of all help requests. This saves your support team hours per day, it makes managing customer orders a breeze.

Kelly  16:35  
It sounds great. What else can I do?

Rhian  16:36  
with gorgeous, you can pre write and save responses to your most frequently asked questions. You even have access to the customer's order information so you can personalize the responses with things like an order or tracking number. This will allow your support team to focus on complex questions. brands like lollipop, deathwish coffee and Steve Madden have reduced their response times and increased efficiency. This sounds like a great way to also

Kelly  17:01  
increase sales and brand loyalty. Where can I learn more?

Rhian  17:05  
Check out gorgeous by visiting Commerce tea.com Ford slash gorgeous and try gorgeous for free for two months. Again, that's Commerce tea.com Ford slash GORGI. A S. Okay, Kelly. So you know, I have a lot of opinions about pop ups, everyone I think has a great idea that I have a lot of opinions about pop ups, what In your opinion, makes for a good pop up when you're like, Oh, yeah, you just crushed it, you blew it out of the water.

Kelly  17:35  
First off, it is not triggered immediately. So I want to wait at least 30 to 60 seconds before I see the pop up. Give me time to to learn who you are and what you sell. Before prompting me for my email address. If I've never visited your website before, I'm not going to give you any of my personal information unless I'm actually interested in potentially signing up your emails or getting the discount code or whatever it might be. I'm going to I'm going to wait as long as I possibly can, which is another reason why it's really important to have that newsletter signup elsewhere on your site, like in the footer, because I won't enter it in on the pop up. But I might actually enter it in in the footer at some point later. So that's a side note. So either you wait a certain amount of time, like 30 to 60 seconds, or you wait until the customer has scrolled down to a certain point on the page and then trigger the pop up. So again, you're giving the customer an opportunity to read about your brand, what you're selling who you are, why they should buy from you my three favorite questions. And you're like, oh, also, Hey, why don't give us your email. So not triggered immediately. That's number one. Number one, um, apps, any of the pop up apps do this. So you can if you're using any, like email service providers, like clay, vo, like Omni send privy, they all offer this as an option with their pop ups. If you use justuno for your pop ups, they also do it if you just using privee for your pop ups in your emails hosted elsewhere, still can do it, I highly recommend choosing one of these two options, if not both to waiting to pop up. Yes. And for the email service providers that allow you to a b test this is a good thing to AV test actually. So test the two different variants and see maybe if I scroll down to 25% versus 50% or maybe I wait 15 seconds versus 30 seconds how many email signups Am I getting? How many of those people are actually turning into paying customers? So some things you can test out there?

Rhian  19:35  
I I love this. Okay, so super important also for a good pop up to customize the content to match your brand voice. You know who does this really well, milk bar. I feel like we taught we shout them out all the time. But they a I mean the website's fantastic but be they everything is branded, right like everything fits the voice and the visual Have what the intent is, and the intent is selling me a cake. And one thing I like that they do, and you kind of just touched on it, Kelly, it's even if they don't capture you in their pop up, there's multiple other places for you to enter your email in later after they've built your trust. And that's a very smart of them. Because by the end, I'm like, you know what, yeah, I do want you to email me when it's my birthday. So I get a discount code, because this was a fun experience at the end. And they've kind of just like, set the stage for it until that moment. So you can also use the pop up to set the stage for what comes

Kelly  20:36  
now. I like that. Yeah, I was trying to find another example of a brand that doesn't well, but the first website I went to, only had signup, give 15% off your order. The second one I went to has been the one so I'm not getting very lucky here. No, I tried.

Rhian  20:52  
Okay. Yeah, no, milkbar said, Great. A great example of this.

Kelly  20:57  
Yeah, and this, this advice, customize the content to match your brand voice. This applies to literally everywhere you have a presence, whether it is on your website, it is in your emails, it is on your pop ups, it is on social media, you want to have that same brand voice use everywhere you are if you have prints, if you have a billboard, like that's still a thing. Um, you know, just make sure your brand voice is actually consistent and unique to your brand. And not just the as I mentioned, a certain website that I had visited was just like, save 15% on your first order. Now, I will say the save 15% on your first order, enter your email. It works for some brands, if you're already a big brand, because people already have inherent trust in brands that have that their friends or family members buy it from that, that have that social proof already, and they're much more likely to give their email. If you're a new brand. If you're a smaller brand, and people are still getting to know you. That's why it's so important to be customized in that content to match your brand's voice.

Rhian  22:02  
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's also the T and trustworthiness.

Kelly  22:07  
Hey, eat with just an SEO

Rhian  22:09  
acronym. Yay. Everything always goes back to SEO in my world. Okay, sorry,

Kelly  22:14  
shocker. All right, my next one here is one that just kills me all the time. This grinds your gears. Yes. Avoid using sarcasm, things that say No thanks. I don't like saving money. Or I don't want to save the puppies, or whatever people decide to say, yeah, we're just going for random things. Don't do it. It Okay. What this is called is a dark pattern. A dark pattern is something that is trying to prevent you from taking a particular action by eliciting a feeling from you a feeling of like a negative one, like a like guilt or fear or anxiety. We don't like doing this. You don't want you to do this. Just Say No thanks. That's all you need. Yeah,

Rhian  23:02  
it's what Kelly said. I have nothing to add, but just Yes.

Kelly  23:09  
Agree. Also on the topic of dark patterns, and this is both a it can be considered a dark pattern. But it's also an accessibility issue. If you make it very difficult to close out of that pop up without entering in your email address. You're in all kinds of trouble in terms of accessibility, in terms of me disliking you, I mean, if you don't care how I feel then you're not really in trouble in that case, but you know, I won't I won't put you on blast. Don't worry about that. Just have what's what's most important if you're going to have a no thanks button, make sure it's easily clickable. And then that little X in the top right corner that is attack target. Make sure that is big enough for people to close. I like pop ups where I can click anywhere outside the pop up to close it as well. Instead of like just that little x. Yeah, it's something I make sure I build in when I'm doing custom pop ups because it drives me crazy when I cannot actually close a pop up and I have to click on that tiny little

Rhian  24:12  
Yeah, my fingers not my finger is too big.

Kelly  24:15  
My fingers too big. It's and I have very dainty fingers.

Rhian  24:20  
Yes, that is that is a fact. I mean, we can talk about top targets for literally hours.

Kelly  24:25  
We just talked about tap targets on another episode about tap targets on episode we haven't been inside. Okay. Um, this is one that ran mentioned earlier. Don't cover the entire pay not full page pop ups are not good for SEO. No. They're also extremely distracting for the customer.

Rhian  24:46  
Yeah, they're not good for CRM, either. Should we say some more acronyms? Just UX?

Kelly  24:54  
Gotcha. Yeah, it's just it's a poor user experience all around. I know. You're Trying to get their attention. Good job, you got their attention, because they don't know that you've completely distracted them from what they were doing before. And that should not be your goal. Their goal is to be like, hey, nudge, nudge, give us your email.

Rhian  25:11  
It's not optimal. Okay? So when you are when you do have a fantastic pop up, you need to capture the information you need. But also don't overcomplicate it, because if you ask for too much information, people are like, I'm out.

Kelly  25:23  
No, we just talked about this as well. Both of these we talked about in our UX, mobile, that's when we talk about

Rhian  25:31  
talk about it. I don't, Kelly, I talk every day, I can't remember exactly.

Kelly  25:36  
Maybe it was just like a podcast. But no, this one actually wasn't a podcast. We did two, we did two episodes on baymard institutes mobile UX pitfalls are 18 of them and how to actually fix them. One was about a month ago, the other one was, I think, two weeks ago, so two or three weeks ago, um, definitely give those a listen, they're really solid episodes, there are so many favorites they are they're very, very solid. So what this means is, if you want to add an extra field, I see some people add like a birthday. This is really common for a gift related brands. It's very common for boutiques, it's very common for brands that give a gift on your birthday. If you're not going to do anything with it, don't capture the information like that should just be like a rule. Because the more information you're requiring, the more people who are going to drop off and not actually complete the form at all. And then you're never going to get any of their information. I also see some forms have, especially for apparel brands who sell for both men and women. Like, who are you shopping for? Or what are you shopping for? And that way, you're able to segment your audience when you start sending your emails being like, Okay, well, they're looking for men's clothes, or they're looking for women's clothes, or they're shopping for gifts, or they're shopping for themselves. So we're going to do like a treat yourself kind of email. Those types of things are where you might have opportunities to capture that additional information and use it. But the core idea here is don't capture information that you're not going to use. And don't ask too many questions up front, you can always capture this information later, during the welcome series. Even you can ask polls, ask them, ask them surveys within an email and ask them to choose an option. And it'll add as a property to their customer account. This is on I mean, I do this with clay do I'm sure there are other I'm sure the other email providers also do something similar. I

Rhian  27:31  
will say something to to your point about the Who are you shopping for right like I come from retail, we've talked about this, I have a retail background. And that was the best question to ask a person to segue into a sale. And I think that that's important too, as we continue to move more and more and more online and Ethan Choi in our last episode, you know, is predicting 50% ecommerce penetration. So So think about how are we going to make an e commerce moment, feel and and be an experience such as one in real life? And this is one of those questions in my opinion that can make all the difference in the world.

Kelly  28:14  
Exactly. That's the hope. That is the hope that is the hope. Okay. Okay, I would also say in this kind of follows along where I said segment your audience, show your pop up to the right audience as well. So first off, don't show your pop up to people who are already on your mailing list. Like that's a huge No, no. That should be a given. But when you have custom pop ups, occasionally, the developer forgets to do this. I'm totally not speaking from experience. I have never done the pop up as being shown to everybody never consider creating different pop ups for different audiences. So when you're using an app like justuno, and again, there are other apps that do this as well. I'm just using just two notes. For example, here, you can segment your audience in terms of what country they're from, what page they came in, from, what type of device they're using, what they've been looking at on the website, and you're able to cater a different pop up experience based on the different audience. So for example, this is not actually an email pop up. But this is another useful type of pop up just an informational one. For a brand website that we built a while ago, it's been it's since been rebuilt. So I'm not going to add a link in the in the show notes or anything. They had three different stores for three different audiences, US, Canada, and then Australia, New Zealand. And what we would do is, if you were coming in from an IP address that's based in Canada, and you visit the.com website, we'd trigger a pop up with Justin I want to say hey, we see you're in Canada, would you like to shop on our Canadian site, and then clicking that button would redirect them to the same page that they were on just on the Canadian website. Like mark so that way you're you're getting your customers to the right place that they want to be as well. So they can shop on their local currency and things like that. This was back when it was much more difficult to have multi currency as a setup to like specifically on one Shopify store. It's much easier now to have one single entity on Shopify in selon multicurrency have different variations of your website based on like, by connecting the different domains that the country specific domains as well. Yes, any questions? No. Cool.

Rhian  30:34  
No, I mean, I I have a lot of thoughts about that in general, but I think this should be its own its own episode. Let us talk briefly about SMS. Yes, and during during this conversation, I actually pulled up ugly drinks.com full disclosure, I'm an investor in them and they when you get past a certain point in their page trigger pop up. So it's a it's I think it's like two thirds down their page, it triggers a pop up and asks for your phone number. SMS, in my opinion, is the future of marketing. Hot take.

Kelly  31:16  
I don't think it's a hot take. I just don't think it's a blanket. Okay, that's fair.

Rhian  31:20  
There's a lot of nuance here that I'm I am lacking it's a it's still a wide open area of opportunity that you should be taking advantage of.

Kelly  31:32  
Yeah, yeah. So if you have a customer base that spends more time on their phone, it's a real and you have a customer base that's more likely to respond to texts or respond positively not literally hit reply and reply, but they can consider adding SMS as another marketing Avenue. That does not mean a replaces email. And it should not be treated the same as email. There are two very different marketing strategies. verticals Yeah, efforts. Sure. Sure. Lane lane. I don't know

Rhian  32:07  
mechanisms

Kelly  32:07  
mechanism. Pull up, dude.

Rhian  32:13  
for grad school, you're trying for another word.

Kelly  32:18  
I'm not ready for that yet reentered. I start our Executive MBA program in October so it is August block is no more bagging we're Tomer. Let's reset it. Oh, oh my gosh. But okay, so yeah, I think SMS is definitely something that's worth looking into. Clay vo has SMS. You can also look at PostScript, you can look at attentive. There are others out there. But those are the three that I am definitely most familiar with. Yes.

Rhian  32:48  
Do we want to give any examples of ones we

Kelly  32:51  
like? I mean, you just gave a good example of the pop up. Like for ugly drinks, they've come combined enter your email and it's your phone I have another really another unique use case I've seen for incorporating both email and SMS is back in stock pop ups. So you can have Li can let them enter in their email or their phone number. If their variant their selected option is out of stock and they would just want to get a restock notification when it comes back in stock. There's an app called back in stock that does this clay vo also does this. This podcast is not sponsored by clay vo despite how many times I say it,

Rhian  33:28  
although we will take the sponsor.

Kelly  33:31  
Wink wink nudge nudge. But yeah, so definitely a big fan of that. So if you do want some good examples of texts and how people are using it in the real world, fantastic texts.com I think it's really fun to see how people are using these various brands on here. I see hydrant Judy. bad habit boutique. Outer I'll bloom all kinds of really great examples on here that are definitely worth looking into.

Rhian  34:08  
Definitely check that out. Definitely, definitely

Kelly  34:12  
adding that to the show notes. I mentioned this before a B test your pop ups. So quick refresher, we already talked about this in the previous episode, a B testing, you have a control. This is what the default status that most people are seeing on your website or potentially 50% people are seeing on your website. And then you have the variants that you've created. One or more. You can have multiple various variations of that control, which basically you're tweaking, let's say one line of text, tweaking the font, you're tweaking the timing, you're tweaking the positioning on the site, the type of pop up you're tweaking the image that is included on the pop up. There are a number of things that you can do with this that you can Amy test. Really, really great opportunity to easily learn more about how your customers are interacting with the pop up Since you've created, the idea is you split your audience in half. Usually, it's half, you can do like 6040 7030, however you want to do it. But we're assuming you're doing 5050 split here, where 50% of your customers will see the control and 50% of your customers will see the variance. And you're checking against certain metrics. Maybe the metric is to see how many sales you're getting how many signups you're getting things like that. And when you're using a tool, like clay, vo, I'm so sorry, how to say it again. That's how I use this. But basically, what it does is it's watching for these metrics, and then it will determine a winner based on it once you get enough traffic coming in to actually have enough results or enough data to work with. And it'll automatically switch over to start serving that one for everybody. I think it's a great idea.

Rhian  35:47  
I think so as well.

Kelly  35:49  
If you want to AB test your website, Google Optimize is a free tool to do that.

Rhian  35:53  
And I love a free tool.

Kelly  35:54  
Do I need to offer a discount to get people to sign up for my mailing list? No. One Do you care to elaborate? I'm not saying you're wrong. Give me more than No,

Rhian  36:06  
I don't think approaching your brand as a discount brand is ever a good idea. So if you position yourself in any way that requires a discount, it can negatively impact the overall value of your entire brand. Does that make sense? Like it does make sense if you if you leave with a discount, like Oh, hey, and you know what I always think of like Kate Spade, right? Kate Spade, you don't think of us as a discount brand. But they do sample sales. So frequently, I will never buy Kate Spade full price ever, I wait for the 75% discount. So in my opinion, when you're leading in with a discount people are like, Oh, this is a discount brand, I'm gonna get this that's always going to be less than the dollar amount. Or if I wait long enough, it's going to go on sale. That's my thoughts. What are your thoughts?

Kelly  36:57  
I agree with that. I will say it's still okay to give a discount but don't feel obligated to do so. A lot of big brands do at least your first purchase as long as you're just not making it a habit to always have your customers expect to get a discount, even if they're like, you know, happened to start the checkout process and wait through the year your abandoned cart series because you know, in three emails in a week, you're going to be getting a discount code. Again, not speaking from experience or anything that I do for brands at all. It's a thing, okay, it's a thing. It's okay to offer a discount, do you need to offer a discount? No. I think that's what that's the point we really want to drive home, that there can be some detrimental effects if you start as a discount, and then continue down that path to always try to offer a discount, because, as you said, once you establish that as precedent, that's what people expect to see. And that's what they're going to wait and they're just going to wait to place an order before until they can actually get it on sale.

Rhian  38:04  
Okay, so this week, we're doing shout outs a little bit differently because why not? And we're gonna be shouting out some books. Kelly,

Kelly  38:13  
you go first, mine is a bit of a self plug. The top room my company. I cannot take credit for this because this was the work of the team for the most part. We recently released our first ebook, it's called demystifying migrations. So it's for brands who want to migrate to Shopify or Shopify plus is more geared toward Shopify plus, but the language, the ideas, the methodologies, they all they're all the same. Stay for a few things you don't have access to on core Shopify, like certain API's, but highly recommend checking it out. We worked really hard on it. You can visit Commerce tea.com forward slash ebook, and it will take you to the temporary website because 301 redirects, your redirects are a great thing and also something that you're going to have to set up when you're migrating to Shopify.

Rhian  39:02  
I love a redirect that I'd love a redirect

Kelly  39:06  
303 A ones are great for fours are not

Rhian  39:09  
Oh yeah, four four bad means your stuffs broken.

Kelly  39:12  
It means something's broken. Alright, what's your

Rhian  39:16  
mine is a pretty hefty book called Bowling Alone, the collapse and revival of American community by Robert De Putnam. It was recommended to me by my friend who was in political tack, and it is about broken bonds in our communities and the impact it has on physical and physical, physical and chemical, physical and civic health. It and what's interesting is this books 20 years old, and yet, it hasn't new Ford and a new a new preface rather and a new afterword. But if this book stands up, and I think that when people can stand up over 20 years when it's a social science book. That's, that's really something special. So I will say it's a bit chewy. It is it is a bit of a meaty book, but I love a meaty book, which is why I have a degree in history. I check it out. I think it's interesting and more than anything, it's as we continue in the world today. How do we reach across to people who maybe were different than and find commonalities with them? Cool. They'll stand up.

Kelly  40:36  
So apparently the website for it is Bowling Alone calm so you can read about it. Fantastic. There. There you go. purchase it.

Rhian  40:42  
There we go.

Kelly  40:44  
All right. That wraps up this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to us talk about pop ups, and hopefully it was helpful. Yes, I hope so. We weren't just totally ripping apart pop ups. I think we were I think there were a lot of those. There was a lot of good advice in here.

Rhian  40:59  
I think so. Yeah.

Kelly  41:01  
Yeah. Cool. All right. Well, thank you so much for tuning in. And thanks again to our sponsors for supporting this episode. We have a YouTube channel you can visit@youtube.com slash Commerce Tea. If you like our podcast, leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Please reviews make us really happy. Please. You can subscribe to Commerce Tea on your favorite podcasting service. We post new episodes every Wednesday. So grab your mug and join us then we'll see you next week. Bye.

Rhian  41:31  
clocked in as a time clock for Shopify. With clocked in your team members can easily clock in and out of their shifts from anywhere. You can manage your team's hours as they work remotely with an intuitive interface that can be used from desktop, tablet or mobile. Check it out a clocked in.io or in the Shopify App Store

Transcribed by https://otter.ai