Today, online shoppers are highly informed on the products they want to buy. Getting them to chose your product over someone else’s has and always will be the key to a successful business. So how do you convince your potential customers to buy your product?
One successful way has been to offer coupons or discounts on the item, which is usually a one-way street. The customer gets what they want, and you may never see or hear from them again. The best approach in this situation is to ask for their email address, while offering them a discount in return. So, how do you know when to ask the question? Right when they enter the site? No, that would more likely turn customers away, and people don’t like popups to show right away, especially if they frequent your site. There is a smarter way to make this happen, and I’ll show you the FREE tools to do it, and with little, to NO coding knowledge required! Seriously, your 16 year old nephew Justin could do this.
Let’s get started
The first step is to head over to www.sumome.com and watch the video on how their plugin works. The code they supply you can be easily added to the <HEAD> of your website. If you’re using Magento/NRO you can add it under System>Configuration>Design and look for the HTML Head section (see below).
Once it’s in, save it and head to your Home Page. You’ll have a little blue box to the top-right side of your website. Click it, and Sign Up for an account. From there, you can click on the Sumo Store, where they offer some other cool additional plugins. The one we want here is the List Builder. If you open the List Builder, you’ll see the green “settings” option. In there you can change things like the color of the popup, what text is displayed, and more. Here is where you’ll put your amazing copy such as “Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll give you 15% off your order!” or “Get 15% off your order by entering your email address below”
Now for the cool part
You’ll also have the ability to change the Timing of the popup. For our use, we’re going to pick “Smart” with a frequency of 2 Minutes. This can be changed of course, but what it’s doing is saying that if the visitor is on your site for more than 2 minutes, then allow this popup to be shown. Now the “Smart” setting is really cool but very simple. When the visitor moves their mouse outside of your webpage (let’s say they want to close their browser window), the popup displays which gives you a greater chance of converting that visitor to a customer.
So where do the emails go?
You have the option to connect with a third party service, like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, to not only collect these email addresses, but also to assign them to a list for your weekly newsletter, or to automatically send out a coupon for that 15% off you promised them. Alternately you can download the email list from the plugin as a CSV file, to import into Counterpoint’s Customer Connect, or any other service you might use.
Hooray for more customers!
At this point, you’ve got a free tool that provides an easy way to convert a visitor who may be on the fence about purchasing a product from your online store, and it took you all of 15-20 minutes to setup, right? And it’s a benefit to you because you get an email address to add to your fun-tastic newsletter, and possibly drive more sales through that as well! It’s a win-win (and I don’t use that term lightly)!
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