You’re not alone if you’ve felt overwhelmed by pop-ups on a website and immediately clicked away. But pop-ups don’t always signal website doom and gloom: when used correctly, pop-ups can be helpful and even appreciated by website users.

E-commerce website owners listen up: your website is where the majority of your sales occur. This means it’s time to make pop-ups your BFF! But we’re not talking about traditional pop-ups - it’s time for pop-ups 2.0.

With the right strategy in place, you can create pop-ups that people enjoy and use them to incentivise purchases by guiding website users to relevant information and products. Let’s now dive into how this works.

What is a pop-up on a website?

An e-commerce pop-up is an informational bubble that appears above your website content to attract the attention of your visitors. Brands often use pop-ups as part of their advertising strategy, and many experts encourage companies to think of them instead as a tool to boost user engagement with the website.

With the right conversion optimisation technology, you can even customise the look and feel of these pop-ups with personalised messaging tailored to the unique interests of your shoppers. A more personalised message increases the odds of engagement and conversion. Those two metrics directly contribute to more purchases, higher average order values, and scalable growth for your brand.

How do you make a website pop-up?

With the right strategy in place, pop-ups add a ton of value to your conversion rate optimisation strategy. When starting to create pop-ups the first order of business to get straightened out is your marketing mindset: don’t go for the hardcore sale. Instead, put yourself in the shoes of your customer and think about what information would be helpful to them in order to comfortably finalise their purchase.

At Kindly, we have an engaging method to produce engaging pop-ups. Using Nudge, our conversion rate optimisation tool, you can develop pop-ups with personalised product recommendations that are triggered based entirely on the specific browsing behaviour of your users.

Below is a great example of how one of our customers, blivakker.no, informs customers about special product promotions such as Black Friday:

In fact, we’ve found for our customers across the board that when pop-ups have the right message and timing, they improve conversion rates by as much as 12%.

What are some examples of pop-ups that actually work?

Now that we’ve established how important it is to use pop-ups in a way to help customers find what they need, what are some pop-up strategies you can use to generate real growth for your brand?

Here are 5 examples:

1. Upsell & Cross Sell - Høie

One of the most valuable ways to use pop-ups to drive e-commerce revenue is upselling and cross selling. For example, Høie of Scandanavia, a quality provider of bed linens, duvets, and pillows, set up custom product messaging that engages and informs their online shoppers with personalised recommendations based on their shopping behaviours. The messaging helps guide customers to the products they need and ultimately delivers more sales and higher average order values. By using Kindly’s conversion optimisation tool, Nudge, as a pop-up, Høie achieved a 20:1 ROI stemming from an 85% engagement rate and 38% conversion rate from the Nudge pop-up.

2. Support Purchase Finalisation - Hertz Sweden

Higher-priced, complex products often take some explanation for customers to feel comfortable to complete their purpose. This is precisely why Hertz Sweden chose to implement Kindly’s conversion optimisation tool, Nudge, to recover bookings that might have abandoned, such as the example below. Using our targeted messaging pop-up with Nudge and a Conversational AI Chatbot that answered customer questions 24/7, Hertz Sweden achieved 22% more conversions and a 23% increase in revenue across a 30 day trial period. Since then, Hertz has used our tools across their website to further improve conversions and revenue.

3. Onboard Customers - Norwegian Block Exchange

A pop-up can also function directly in the form of customer support. A primary example is Norwegian Block Exchange (NBX), who needed a solution that would help them onboard new clients, so that they could easily make initial deposits into their new accounts. To help improve the onboarding experience, NBX used the powerful combination of Kindly's conversion rate optimization tool, Nudge, and a Conversational AI Chatbot, to manage their growing customer base and send targeted messages that inspired users to make purchases. The solution was a success, contributing towards helping customers make new deposits.

4. Increase Average Order Value - Helly Hansen

As an e-commerce website manager, increasing your average order value is one of your top priorities - and pop-ups help you with precisely that. Take Helly Hansen, a Scandinavian workwear, skiing, sailing, and outdoor apparel brand, as an example. They wanted to optimize their existing website traffic in order to maximise average order values (AOVs). To do that, they used Kindly’s conversion optimisation tool, Nudge, to create targeted pop-up messaging that improved conversion rates across all international markets. Thanks to Kindly, Helly Hansen reported a 25% boost in AOVs and a 10% increase in website engagement.

5. Generate Leads - Renault Norway

When they provide helpful information, pop-ups can also generate leads. For example, Renault Norway teamed up with Kindly and used our conversion rate optimisation tool, Nudge, to push targeted messages about special car promotions for qualified buyers. It also helped them generate awareness for new product releases, such as the Megane E-tech Electric vehicle. Today, Renault receives 10% of all inbound leads using Nudge pop-ups.