Here is a picture every online store owner will recognize: a visitor comes to your website from an ad, looks around, and leaves.
If you’re a Shopify store owner, chances are, you have hundreds of visitors just like that one, daily. More so, even among those who find a product they were looking for and add it to the shopping cart, over 70% will still leave without purchasing.
You can blame short attention span, decision paralysis, the lack of trust, or even the lack of free shipping. Whatever the reasons are, one thing is clear: if you don’t engage and guide customers within the first few seconds of their visit, you might be leaving money on the table.
One proven solution to help you with that challenge is Shopify popup apps.
If you are not familiar with Shopify, read our in-depth review of Shopify to find out more.
How Exactly Can Shopify Popup Apps Help You Get Sales?
Ask any successful Shopify store owner: popups are the workhorses of online sales.
Whether you like them or not, they can help you accomplish some of the most crucial eCommerce goals – from email list building to upselling and cart abandonment prevention.
If you aren’t using Shopify popups in your store yet, here are a few reasons why you should.
Build Your Email List Faster
Having a list of email subscribers is essential for every business, and it’s especially relevant for eCommerce.
Why?
Because it’s times cheaper to convert an existing customer than to acquire a new one. However, if you think people will voluntarily search for your email subscription form to sign up, you’re up for a challenge.
Popups help you take a proactive approach and display a sign-up CTA at the right moment. They are proven to convert more subscribers than embedded signup forms, and you can get even better results if you offer an incentive.
Upsell and Cross-sell More Efficiently
Upselling and cross-selling are two surefire tactics to increase your average order value (AOV).
As a matter of fact, upselling alone can increase your revenue by 10 to 30%, according to the Forrester research. While there are other tools you can use to recommend products to customers, popups are one of the most efficient solutions for this task.
Two things make popups great upsellers and cross-sellers.
First, they provide enough space for you to display a high-quality image of the recommended product along with a description. Second, you can easily fine-tune them to appear at the right moment: for example, when a customer has added a relevant item to the cart or when they are heading to checkout.
Prevent Cart Abandonment with Shopify Popup Apps
This is a big one.
Shopping cart abandonment is virtually inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you can’t try to reduce the abandonment rate in your store or at least make the most of it. Exit-intent popups are one way to do that.
Exit-intent popups are designed to appear when a visitor is about to leave a webpage; in this case – their shopping cart. There are three things you can do with a popup here.
- Offer a limited-time discount hoping this will encourage them to go back to checkout.
- Invite them to join your list in exchange for a discount and try to reach them later via email marketing.
- Ask why they’re abandoning their cart and use that data to optimize your store.
Promote Sales and Coupons
One of the best things about Shopify is that it’s designed with non-techies in mind. So when you want to run a flash sale or a promo on certain brands, you can also do it without coding or creating new store pages.
With the right set of popups, you can create sitewide sale announcements, promote automatic coupon codes, and target those who’ve met certain requirements.
Survey Your Visitors
You may feel skeptical about surveys, but they are the only way to get the data about your customers your web analytics is unable to provide.
Sure, you can always send a post-purchase survey or a product feedback survey via email. But how do you find out the reasons behind those damn cart abandonment rates without asking people while they are still on your website?
Other than cart abandonment, there are many other reasons to use pop-up surveys. For one, you can learn more about your customers and develop a better customer persona. You can also ask what they think about your new collection, how they heard about your website, or if they have any product suggestions.
5 Shopify Popup Apps You Should Try
Now that we’ve established the reasons why popups are indispensable for eCommerce, let’s have a look at 5 apps that allow you to create popups for Shopify.
1. Getsitecotrol – All-in-one Shopify App
Website: https://getsitecontrol.com/
Trial period: 14-day full-featured trial
Pricing: starts at $9 per month
The first tool in our list is called Getsitecontrol. In the Shopify Apps Store, it’s positioned as a popup builder for product upselling, email list building, and discount promotion. However, you can also use it to create free shipping bars, floating “Add to cart” buttons, surveys, contact forms, and more.
Quick Getsitecontrol Overview
Two things make Getsitecontrol stand out in comparison with most Shopify popup apps. First, it’s their professionally crafted template gallery featuring over a hundred high-quality popups for eCommerce. Second, it’s the deep integration with the Shopify platform that allows merchants to target customers with high precision based on their shopping behavior.
To streamline the decision-making process, Getsitecontrol allows you to test popups right on the website before even adding the app to your Shopify store. The templates are conveniently organized based on the most common eCommerce use cases, so you get a clear idea of what you can use the app for.
Once in the dashboard, you can change the entire popup appearance: its copy, image, color theme, font, and style. The app is designed with marketers and business owners in mind – so its interface is clean and intuitive. However, there are some advanced settings available too. For instance, you can use the CSS editor or features like dynamic text replacement. The latter allows you to display messages like “Free shipping to Brooklyn on orders over $50” – where “Brooklyn” can be replaced with the city a store visitor is browsing from.
To help you display popups to the right audience, there is a built-in set of targeting controls. For example, you can trigger your call-to-action based on:
- Customer characteristics: location, device, referral source;
- Behavior: time on page, scroll-depth, inactivity, exit intention;
- Shopping experience: items added to cart, total cart amount, viewed brands and products.
Although one of the most popular scenarios for Getsitecontrol popups is email list building, you can also let customers apply automatic discounts, copy coupon codes, and add products to their carts.
Apart from modal popups, Getsitecontrol allows you to create slide-ins, fullscreen overlays, sidebars, sticky bars, and floating buttons – so if you’re hesitant about the format, you can start with less intrusive options.
Getsitecontrol Pricing
On our list, Getsitecontrol is among the most affordable tools. All pricing plans include a 14-day trial period and have the same feature set; the first tier starts at $9 per month and includes up to 20K popup views. Once your store's monthly audience grows, you’ll need to switch to the $19/mo or $29/mo plan.
Getsitecontrol is great for: email list building, upselling & cross-selling, surveying customers, preventing cart abandonment, promoting sales and coupons.
2. WooHoo – Gamified Shopify Popup App
Website: https://getwoohoo.com/
Trial period: 14-day free trial
Paid plans start at: $7.99 per month
Woohoo lets you test the power of gamified popups in your Shopify store. This app relies on the consumers’ desire to win discounts and gifts rather than have them handed. WooHoo is tailored primarily for lead generation and will make your list building journey much more fun.
Quick WooHoo Overview
There are various game types you can choose from, such as Spin the Wheel and Reveal your Coupon. The games are lossless and designed to nudge store visitors to enter their email addresses or phone numbers to participate. In exchange, customers get a chance to win free shipping or a coupon with either percentage or a monetary value off.
WooHoo’s most prominent USP is that this app delivers maximum value in one shot. As a store owner, you boost the visitor engagement rate on the website, grow the list of subscribers, and increase the chances of a sale with coupons. If you’re looking for a strategy to convert a higher percentage of first-time visitors, this might be exactly what you need.
Once you create an account, the setup process is quite a no-brainer: all you need to do is choose the game type and fine-tune it for your store. In the dashboard, you can set your own choice of coupons, customize the way the popup looks, and decide when it should appear: as soon as visitors arrive, after they spend some time in your store, or when they start heading to the exit.
To add a sense of urgency and encourage customers to complete the purchase faster, you can add a countdown timer to the bottom of your website and show how long the prize is valid for.
Another handy feature of this Shopify popup app is the way it allows you to deliver coupons. You can choose to display the coupon code right on the popup using a so-called “winning screen” or send it to the winners via email. For the latter option, WooHoo provides you with a pre-designed email template you can adjust and send to customers without coding.
If you want to dig deeper into conversion optimization, WooHoo also enables you to conduct A/B tests and run multiple games simultaneously to see what works better for your audience.
WooHoo Pricing
WooHoo offers a free 14-day trial and a free limited plan that includes 100 popup impressions on your website. From there, pricing starts at $7.99 per month and increases based on the number of popup impressions.
WooHoo is great for: email list building, phone number collection, coupon promotion
3. OptiMonk – Feature Rich Popup Builder for Shopify
Website: https://www.optimonk.com/
Trial period: no free trial available; free feature-limited plan
Paid plans start at: $29 per month
Even before becoming one of the most recommended Shopify popup apps, OptiMonk has been well-known in the market for a while. It’s a popup builder used by Avon, The Body Shop online store, and the Digital Marketing blog itself. OptiMonk popups can help you redirect visitors, inform them about an ongoing promo, capture their emails, and upsell with ease.
Quick OptiMonk Overview
Of all tools in this list, OptiMonk has one of the widest selection of features. Not only does it allow you to create standard CTA popups, but it also brings other types of on-site message campaigns including embedded content, floating bars, lucky wheels, fullscreen overlays, and side messages.
At first glance, the OptiMonk dashboard layout resembles a typical online store layout. Once you select the desired Goal, Message type, and Theme filters using the menu on the left side, you can start “shopping” for popups (which appear to be named after cities they associate with!). One really cool thing about this gallery? When you hover over any popup, the app shows you its average conversion rate. This is rather incentivizing, although you should remember that audience and page targeting settings may affect conversion rates more than popup design alone.
Once you’ve selected a template, you can change its color theme, layout, and content. The editing menu on the left-hand side uses a hierarchical structure and looks very clear even if you’re not too tech-savvy. If you prefer, you can drag and rearrange the elements of your popup right in the preview window, for both the desktop and mobile versions. You can also add extra pages and other form elements, such as a survey, countdown timer, click-to-copy coupon code, or product card.
Apart from the main page and ‘Thank You’ page, OptiMonk suggests that you also use ‘teasers’ – sticky CTA tabs designed to spark interest for the campaign without interrupting user experience. Depending on your main targeting settings, you may want to display a teaser before the popup is displayed and/or after it’s closed by a visitor. This is a clever solution for the scenarios when a visitor closes a popup (perhaps even involuntarily) and then decides they actually want to take advantage of the offer.
On the last step of the campaign setup, you’re going to select targeting rules and integrations. OptiMonk highlights recommended settings, which is convenient for beginning users. However, you also can create displaying rules manually, either by selecting pre-configured options (exit-intent, page-depth, time delay, and inactivity) or by using CSS click detection and JavaScript events. If you’re creating a discount or upsell popup, you can apply shopping cart rules. For example, you can target people based on their total cart value, number of products in the cart, SKU properties, and more.
OptiMonk Pricing
Now, instead of a free trial period, OptiMonk offers a free plan which doesn’t limit you to a certain period but comes with a few feature limitations. The free plan includes up to 3000 pageviews, excludes A/B testing, custom variable feature, and priority support. It also adds OptiMonk branding which looks like a small gray ‘Made with love by OptiMonk’ line in the bottom left corner of each popup you create. Paid tier starts with the Essential plan at $29 per month, but to be able to create unbranded popups, you’ll have to upgrade to the Premium plan which is $199 per month.
OptiMonk is great for: email list building, notifying and redirecting visitors, preventing cart abandonment, upselling, conducting surveys, collecting messenger subscribers
4. Poptin – Email And Upsell Popups for Shopify
Website: https://www.poptin.com/
Trial period: no free trial period available; free plan with limited features
Paid plans start at: $25 per month
Poptin is another great no-code app designed to help you optimize store conversions. It allows you to create all types of popups, including email signup forms, product recommendations, and announcements.
In addition to the set of standard popups, Poptin also brings embedded email and contact forms you can place in the middle of a page or the sidebar. Another feature that makes this app stand out is a selection of social and mobile-only popups with built-in click-to-call and messenger features.
Quick Poptin Overview
Just like with most Shopify popup apps, the onboarding process is very straightforward. Once you select your goal and a template, you can work on the appearance and display rules. As promised on the website, you should be able to create your first generic popup within a few minutes.
Now, when it comes to design, Poptin offers an impressive set of tools and lets you customize every detail including animation effects and shadows. Like in Optimonk, you can move, duplicate, and delete most of the popup elements using the WYSIWYG editor right in the preview window. The left-side menu is intended to help you work out the nuances of the popup appearance. For instance, you can select the entrance effect, button animation, and even button color change when visitors hover over it.
Depending on your scenario, you can add extra text fields, coupons, and additional buttons, such as opt-out or URL redirect buttons. Although certain field types, including checkboxes and radio buttons, are only available with the premium subscription plan, even in the free version you’ll find some unique and fun elements, such as a news ticker, video, and countdown timer.
To display a popup to your customers, you can select a trigger manually or let the app choose the test trigger for you by running split tests and learning your visitors’ behavior. The former option includes a standard set of triggers such as exit-intent, scroll depth, time delay, inactivity, page and click count. However, you can create a more complex set of rules and use page, country, device, customer tag, and cookie targeting. That said, the advanced options are only available under paid tiers, so you won’t be able to try them without becoming a paid customer.
Poptin Pricing
Poptin provides a free plan that works for 1000 store visitors per month, excludes the autoresponder feature, and adds branding to the popups you create. As you move on to the $25/month Basic plan, you get rid of the branding, get access to the autoresponder feature and customer support via email.
Poptin is great for: email list building, lead generation, coupon promotion, content gating
5. Privy – Powerful Popup And Newsletter Builder
Website: https://www.privy.com/
Trial period: 15-day free trial period
Paid plans start at: $15 per month
Privy is one of the most-reviewed popup builders in the Shopify App Store. However, calling it a popup builder would be an understatement because it goes far beyond. In addition to the powerful lead generation platform, it brings email and text marketing tools.
Quick Privy Overview
Unlike most Shopify popup apps, Privy suggests getting started with pre-configured campaigns – not just templates. What does it mean exactly? This means you can select one of the most common scenarios and use a pre-designed popup with display and targeting settings already baked in.
Here are the campaigns you can choose from:
- Welcome discount
- Mobile signup discount
- Cart saver
- Cross-sell
- Free shipping bar
- Exit email capture
For merchants, this is an easy way to eliminate guesswork and it also appears to be the fastest way to get started because when you choose to create a popup from scratch, the process seems far less intuitive.
Once you select the desired option, you can edit the text or replace the image, add links and social sharing buttons. The entire process takes just a few seconds since most settings, including targeting and display rules, are already pre-selected.
If you decide to ignore campaign templates and go on your own, Privy boasts a large list of popup types and features for you to choose from. For example, apart from modal popups, you can create spin-to-win wheels, flyouts, announcement bars, overlays, tabs, and embedded email signup forms. Like Getsitecontrol and Optimonk, Privy is deeply integrated with Shopify, and that allows you to promote coupon codes, cross-sell products, and let customers add items to the shopping cart upon button click.
Once you finish creating a popup, Privy prompts you to craft a follow-up email instead of a submission success message, thus nudging you into trying their newsletter builder. The app allows you to design and send professional-looking newsletters, cart abandonment emails, autoresponders, and win-back emails. If you aren’t using a 3rd-party email marketing service for your store yet, this might be a great solution.
Privy Pricing
Privy offers a free-to-install plan: it allows you to have up to 100 mailable contacts and places Privy branding on your popups. From there, the paid tier for conversion and email features starts at $15/month for up to 250 contacts and scales at $15/month per additional 1000 contacts.
Privy is great for: email list building, cross-selling, coupon promotion, gamification, announcements, cart abandonment prevention, email marketing
Wrapping up
These are not the only Shopify popup apps out there. If you want to test more tools, there are solutions like Sales Pop up, Pixelpop, POP!, TADA, and Sale Kit to name a few. At the core, most of these apps are very similar: they let you design a pop-up call to action and display it when visitors are more likely to convert.
So how do you choose one?
First, you should take a close look at the templates in the app’s gallery. Since you’re probably not planning to spend hours designing popups from scratch, it’s important that the templates align with your website style and your vision. To avoid unpleasant surprises, double-check if the app stamps its logo in popups, and if so – see what it looks like.
The second part of this decision depends on your marketing strategy. Are you only planning to use popups for collecting emails? Then you can choose any app, no need to overthink. However, if you also want to be able to promote coupons, upsell products, and survey customers, the number of apps you can use goes down. Read our lists of use cases under each app description and see what resonates with your plans.
Still hesitant? Leave some room for testing. Most apps offer a 2-week trial period which should be more than enough for you to see the first results. You can even test more than one app during the trial period (just make sure to set page targeting right).
Read more:
- How to create a Shopify online store
- Step-by-step guide to start a Shopify Facebook store
- Easy steps to start a dropshipping business using Shopify
- Shopify store examples we simply love
- Shopify features that can help to boost sales
- How to sell art online using Shopify
- Best Shopify themes that boost your conversions
