Last updated Thu Aug 29 2024
Lead Capture Popups: How to Create [+10 Examples]
Lead capture popups are a proven method for converting visitors into potential customers. In fact, 62% of Shopify stores use website popups to generate leads and sales.
In this post, you'll find all the info you need to start capturing more leads and grow your email list with lead capture popups.
In this post:
Start getting more leads with effective popups today
Engage your visitors with personalized popups that achieve conversion rates of up to 25%
★ If you're interested in learning about more ways to capture leads, check out Lead capture: strategies and case studies
What is a lead capture popup?
A lead capture popup is a popup created to generate leads on a website. It contains signup fields and offers incentives such as discounts in exchange for contact details and data like product preferences. Also called lead generation popups, lead capture popups are a proven tool for consistently building a customer base for online businesses.
Are lead capture popups effective?
Lead capture popups convert around 4% of website visitors on average. The top-performing campaigns can convert even up to 25% of visitors.
If you're wondering if lead capture popups can work for your business, you'll be glad to find that online businesses in many industries are successfully using lead capture popups to grow their customer base and collect useful data.
Here are a few examples:
Quandoo, a restaurant reservation platform, accelerated email list building by 20% with a lead capture popup with bonus loyalty points: Read case study
Also—
YesPark, a parking space rental service, added 3,492 new emails to their customer list thanks to one lead capture popup campaign (see its performance below): Read case study
Next—
OverstockArt, an online art store, captures 1,000 leads/mo with lead generation popups with discounts: Read case study
“Use popups. They work! By not doing any popups on your website, you are leaving money on the table. Because those 98% of visitors that didn’t buy today left without leaving their email or phone.”
Lead capture popups: best practices for conversions
To make your lead capture popup exceed your expectations, consider these best practices:
Offer a first-purchase discount between 10% and 20%. The most popular discount sizes used by Shopify stores are 10%, 15%, and 20%
Run a limited-time sales promotion. Consider B2GO, ("Buy two get one free"), a flash sale (a sale lasting up to 48 hours), or discounts for selected items (see discount code ideas)
Add a countdown timer to the popup. Countdowns create a sense of urgency, so they're perfect for quick events like flash sales and even first-purchase discounts (see how to add countdowns in one click)
Make popups relevant to leads with targeting. You can personalize your offers based on the shopping cart content and value, browsing behavior, the number of visits, geolocation, and more (see how to use targeting)
Use mobile-optimized popups. If many of your customers visit from smartphones, mobile popups will help you capture leads while staying in line with Google's rules (here's how to create a mobile popup)
Test multiple versions of your campaign. With A/B testing, you can try different discount sizes, images, colors, and CTA button texts to discover designs and offers that capture more leads (see how to A/B test popups)
Resources to implement these best practices:
Examples of flash sales [incl. case studies and tips]
Sale promotion examples [breakdown of 20+ discount and sales offers]
Popup design ideas and templates [see how to design high-converting popups]
Lead capture popup examples
Blume — a lead capture popup with a discount
Incu — capturing leads and product preferences
Hub Coffee Roasters — a simple lead capture popup
Faguo — a spin-to-win popup with a giveaway
TOMS — a lead capture popup with a countdown timer
Lulu & Georgia — a free shipping lead capture popup
King Arthur Bakery — a popup to capture leads and increase average order value
Southern Elegance Candles — a popup that captures phone numbers
Leonce Chenal — a lead generation popup from a journal
1. Blume — a lead capture popup with a first-order discount
This is a welcome popup, meaning it's displayed to unregistered visitors, trying to convert them into subscribers or customers.
This lead capture popup is very effective: Blume converts 5% of its traffic. That's higher than the average popup conversion rate of 3.8%.
Design-wise, this campaign is great: it's got a clean layout, a compelling headline, a nice incentive, and a good image featuring Blume's products. Together, these elements result in a lead generation popup that effectively captures attention and encourages immediate action.
Want to capture leads like Blume?
See how to create a welcome popup [step-by-step guide]
2. Incu — capturing leads and product preferences
This one is a bit more than just a lead capture popup.
Besides emails, Incu also captures customers' names and shopping preferences. That data will go a long way toward creating personalized email campaigns.
The list of benefits is also pretty good, offering compelling motivation for customers to sign up.
See examples of the best designs:
3. Hub Coffee Roasters — a simple lead capture popup
Have a minimalistic ecommerce website design and want your popups to be the same?
Then having a similar lead capture popup to this one might be a good idea. It doesn't have an image—rather a simple text promising a discount for subscribing to the brand's newsletter.
Note that the discount is valid for online purchases only, suggesting that Hub Coffee Roasters are aiming to increase online sales.
Not getting sales at your Shopify store? Take a look at these proven ways to get more Shopify sales
4. Faguo — a spin to win popup with a giveaway
Like most other businesses, Faguo experienced slow lead generation at some point. Then Martin, the head of ecommerce, decided to try an experiment by running a gamified lead capture campaign. After a few iterations and some A/B tests, he arrived at the design you see above.
The idea is simple: share your data for a chance to win a pair of expensive Faguo sneakers. The campaign worked amazingly well, capturing 48,160 emails and names of customers:
5. TOMS — a lead capture popup with a countdown timer
Creating a sense of urgency is a time-tested—and effective—marketing tactic, and we see TOMS using it in this lead capture popup example.
To further inspire visitors to buy, the brand offers a 15% discount on the first order along with the latest promos and special offers.
6. Lulu & Georgia — a free shipping lead capture popup
Discounts are great at collecting leads, but sometimes free shipping will do the trick well, too. This lead capture popup uses this incentive to get more emails, and of course, sales.
Note also that the offer is limited to three days. Limited-time offers are another great idea for speeding up lead capture for online businesses.
Generate more leads with limited-time offers:
7. King Arthur Baking — a popup to capture leads and increase average order value
What's interesting about this lead generation popup is the condition to receive the discount. To get 15% off, customers have to place an order above $60.
With this lightbox popup, King Arthur Baking Company achieves two goals: capturing emails and increasing the average order value.
Like the design of this beautiful popup?
See these 50+ website popup examples for more inspiration
8. Southern Elegance Candles — a popup that captures phone numbers
This lead capture example collects phone numbers, which is another popular lead generation tactic among online businesses.
The text "We send exclusive deals via SMS!" also helps to create a feeling of being in a closed group that gets the best offers—a great example of a strong popup message.
How to collect phone numbers with popups:
9. Leonce Chenal — a lead gen popup from a journal
Leonce Chenal is an online French fashion and lifestyle journal, which uses this campaign to capture leads for the newsletter.
Their popup asks for an email in exchange for insider knowledge and exclusive updates, capitalizing on the readers' interest. The beautiful design also complements the journal's website, ensuring the message is not intrusive but rather feels like its natural extension.
Want to check out more ways to grow your newsletter?
Check these 10+ ways to get more email subscribers or these lead generation tools
How to create a lead capture popup
If you want to display a lead capture popup campaign on your website for free, let's use Wisepops (rated 4.9 on Capterra and Shopify) to create one.
Follow these steps:
Create a new campaign
Pick a template
Customize the design
Add the discount code
Choose when to display the popup
Publish your campaign
In this tutorial, we will create a lead capture popup that collects emails and gives a discount for signing up.
Grab an account to get started:
Unlimited free trial, no cc needed. Learn more about Wisepops popup builder or see ideas to use Wisepops for online stores
"We use Wisepops for email / SMS lead capture. It integrates perfectly with our SMS & email systems."
Alexander M., Capterra
1. Create a new campaign
In Wisepops, go to Create campaign to enter the template gallery:
2. Pick a template
Let's pick a template now.
This one below is great—it has a big heading to catch attention, plenty of room for supporting text, and collects data with two fields (names and emails). Scroll down just a bit on the template page to find it:
Get a head start on designing popups. Browse our library of designer-made popup templates. Start converting your traffic.
3. Customize the design
The popup editor is very easy to use—to change or customize the element, you just need to click it. The text formatting menu is at the top while the rest of the settings are on the left, appearing as you click corresponding elements.
Tip:
When you finish customizing, choose Apply this design to all steps and Wisepops will finish customizing the second popup window ("Step 2") in seconds.
Note:
Your popup comes with a tab, a tiny window that stays in the left bottom corner of the website after the visitor closes the popup without getting the discount. Using tabs is popular among ecommerce stores to make discounts more available to visitors who change their minds about the discount.
Also, use this 5-min video to get help creating and customizing your lead capture popup:
Want some inspiration first?
4. Add the discount code
Go to Step 2 (right above the campaign preview in the editor)—this is the window that will open when the lead provides their data and clicks Get my coupon:
There—
Click the CODE element to customize it.
Next, change the code in the menu that opens on the left:
Note that the visitor can click the button below the discount to both copy the code and close the popup—that's very convenient.
Running a store on Shopify? Connect it to be able to create and share unique discounts from your Shopify account.
5. Choose when to display the popup
We want to capture as many leads as possible, so our popup needs to be displayed to all unregistered visitors. At the same time, we don't want to be very spammy.
So let's do a popup that shows:
5 seconds after landing on a page
on all website pages
to all unregistered visitors
once in two days if closed
Even though those might sound like a lot to do, setting everything up actually takes a few clicks. In fact, most of these are the default settings in Wisepops.
The only thing you need to change is the first display setting: the number of seconds after landing when the popup appears.
To do that—
Go to Display Rules > Trigger and change the default three settings to five:
Why five seconds?
Showing a lead popup immediately after someone can even understand what products you sell is not ideal, to say the least.
If you show the campaign after five seconds of viewing your website (plus keep the discount readily available thanks to the tab), you'll give your potential customers more time to browse around and decide what they might buy from you.
6. Publish your campaign
Your popup is ready to capture leads!
You can preview it and visualize how it will appear on your website (hit Preview in the top right corner of your screen).
To show the campaign on your website, simply add the Wisepops code snippet in a few clicks: add Wisepops to your website.
Also, to have the collected emails sent directly to your email app, connect it to Wisepops: Integrations
You can use all the premium features of Wisepops for free for 14 days and keep all the leads after the trial ends.
So, you can capture plenty of leads—especially if you try some of those best practices we mentioned earlier.
Summary
Lead capture popups are a valuable tool to hook potential leads and grow your business. Implementing the best practices and examples discussed here can lead to significant improvements in your lead generation efforts.
And one last thing: you'll see that the best lead capture popup is one that is refined through continuous A/B testing, so don't hesitate to experiment and optimize your campaigns to get the best results.
Oleksii Kovalenko
Oleksii Kovalenko is a digital marketing expert and a writer with a degree in international marketing. He has seven years of experience helping ecommerce store owners promote their businesses by writing detailed, in-depth guides.
Education:
Master's in International Marketing, Academy of Municipal Administration
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