Conversion Upgrades and User-Informed Growth Tactics with Wisepops

Wisepops drives growth for brands across nearly every user metric imaginable through a simple yet elegant solution: well-crafted, intelligent popups on your site. The tool’s roster of 1K+ clients, with huge players like US Mobile, Unilever, Blume and Postmates, can vouch for its unique approach. 

To dig deeper on the UX logic of the Wisepops effect, we sat down with Lisa Fockens, their head of customer success, to discuss client education, why popups can yield compounding returns for DTC brands, and how to turn metric analysis into action items to boost conversion. 

Personalized Communication Flows

Popups are a deceptively simple web tool, but Wisepops’ model integrates numerous schools of strategy, from Marketing 101 to experiment-driven user psychology. In Lisa’s words, Wisepops exists to enhance brands’ native, on-site communication with their audience via highly targeted messaging, yielding a personalized experience based on a customer’s unique journey. 

For instance, their no-code, drag-and-drop popup builder lets clients customize for new visitors and returning visitors to receive different messaging flows. Users can also dive into specific buyer interactions within their site. For example, adding a particular product to one’s cart will trigger a tailored popup based on historical and real-time purchasing patterns. 

“Our no-code builder is designed around real-time, intelligent messaging. As a result, we help brands convert more customers through Popups, but we also enable variable targeting with insanely high degrees of accuracy.”

Optimized Customer Onboarding 

In reality, Wisepops’ ultimate goal stretches far beyond providing a baseline popup builder to their users. Rather, they work to educate clients on best practices for utilizing the high-value tools provided by the platform. According to Lisa, brands should go beyond simply leveraging popups as a conversion tool. Rather, they can be integrated in multiple steps of a user’s journey.

For instance, Wisepops clients tend to onboard to the platform with the goal of moving more product or getting more signups, but they often fail to deeply understand the actual strategy behind audience segmentation. Brands commonly breeze past Wisepops’ segmentation and personalization features, resulting in clumsy, ineffective blanket marketing. 

Lisa points out that in order to fully optimize users’ popup strategies, it’s critical that her team properly implements the appropriate education flows and thorough onboarding for new clients.

“Most marketing managers at the brands we work with aren’t that familiar with designing popups. Going further than providing a conversion tool, our core mandate is to help brands reach a much deeper level of expertise.” 

Untapped Conversion Opportunities

While ecommerce merchants and DTC brands are the sweet spots for Wisepops’ platform, Lisa notes that as it relates to business model, company size, and vertical fit, the tool is fairly agnostic and can benefit almost any company with a website that needs conversion upgrades.

Most brands tend to allocate significant capital into acquisition and driving traffic to their sites through marketing blasts, paid ads, and the like. Yet, the average conversion rate for an ecommerce brand is 2.5%. Wisepops enters at this point of the conversation to help brands convert the remaining 97.5% of users that they’ve poured money into acquiring, but haven’t yet retained.

“For most DTC brands on the market right now, 97.5% of on-site customers fail to convert. That fraction represents an enormous opportunity for us.”

Designing Effective Popups

Below, Lisa shares her cheat sheet on how brands can gauge the real-time results of their popup campaigns, as well as how to leverage that knowledge to boost conversion metrics.

A/B Testing

Clients can administer A/B testing directly through Wisepops while running as many variations and tests on a popup as they’d like. For instance, you can experiment by having 50% of your site’s visitors receive a popup while the other 50% don’t, or have 50% of incoming site traffic receive a popup upon landing while the other half receives it on exit or while scrolling — providing practical evidence on whether your popup, banner, or bar is driving conversion. 

Usage Case

Considering the success of your popups also goes hand in hand with being CX savvy. 

If you’re designing a popup that asks for an email signup, it shouldn’t be displayed right on your landing page because no one wants to hand over their info before they’ve had the chance to navigate your website and gauge if your brand content is interesting enough to sign up for more. 

Optimal Timing

Wisepops found that displaying a popup after a shopper has been on the page for 10 to 20 seconds leads to lower conversion rates. Depending on the page content and length, typically at the 20-second mark, the browser is in the middle of examining your product. Thus, being interrupted is more distracting than informative. 

Instead, Lisa recommends displaying your announcement between zero to five seconds after loading a second or third page once shoppers have had time to start browsing in depth. 

“As a team, you need to be constantly thinking about the user experience. One way to do that is to run variable experiments, collect data, and slowly design and implement conversion tweaks based on those metrics.”

User Experience at the Core

Ultimately, Lisa’s best rule of thumb on how to retain and convert consumers can be found in principles of user experience. In her words, today’s customer wants to feel like they’re part of their favorite company’s identity and growth, rather than being treated like an afterthought.

We see this in action with DTC brands driving incredibly high engagement on their social media, because they bring their audience aboard and create the sense that their followers are building the brand with them. This is also something an on-site experience like a popup can offer. 

Lisa recommends that commerce teams try reaching past a basic newsletter plug or cut and dry announcement popup to involve buyers. Instead, ask customers directly where they’d like to see your brand’s next storefront or what products they want to see restocked next. In turn, brands should incorporate this style of proactive user input into their popup and conversion strategy.

At the end of the day, Lisa drives home the point to focus on understanding the core customer journey and buyer persona — why they’ve come to your site, what they need, and what they love — before anything else. Only then can brands craft truly dynamic on-site experiences. 

“If you want to retain loyal users, start by thinking through how they feel. Do they want to be a part of your brand development? Do they want to give your team feedback? If so, devise a plan that allows them to participate.”