Your Popup Matters More Than Your Welcome Series

Why Your Pop-Up Matters More Than Your Welcome Series

When e-commerce brands want to improve their email marketing, they almost always start by looking at the welcome series. They'll spend hours debating how many emails should be in the flow, whether they should offer a discount, when to tell their founder story, or, God forbid, what subject lines are going to generate the most opens. Completely pointless at this stage, by the way.

But before any of those things matter, there's a much more important question that needs to be addressed: Who is entering the welcome series in the first place?

Because before someone ever receives email number one, they've already interacted with your brand, seen your products, been presented with a pop-up, and made a decision whether or not they want to be on your list. In other words, some of the most important decisions in your email marketing program are being made before a single email is ever even sent. That's why your pop-up matters even more than your welcome series.

In this video, I'm going to break down why the pop-up is one of the most overlooked parts of the customer journey, the mistakes most brands make, and what a pop-up should actually be designed to accomplish.

If we haven't met before, my name is Nick. I'm the founder of Barbs Media. We help e-commerce brands generate more revenue from the customers they've already acquired by building retention systems across email and SMS. Over the last few years, we've helped over 50 e-commerce brands generate tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue through retention marketing.

One thing I've noticed is that when a welcome series isn't performing well, the emails themselves are often only part of the problem. More often than not, the issues start much earlier in the customer journey.

Attracting the Right Subscribers

Why does the pop-up matter more than most people think? The pop-up isn't just there to collect email addresses. It's there to attract the right subscribers and filter out the wrong ones.

This is something I think a lot of brands get backwards. We're so focused on growing the list that we're willing to sacrifice subscriber quality to do it. I'm going to explain why this is such a horrible idea.

Not every subscriber has the same value or purchase intent, and not every subscriber belongs on your list. The problem is that once subscribers enter your ecosystem, they begin influencing your marketing decisions.

If your list is filled with people who only sign up for the biggest discount possible, you'll often find yourself sending more discounts, running longer sales, and relying on increasingly aggressive promotions just to drive engagement. Over time, it's going to impact both list health and brand equity.

A bigger list isn't always a healthier list, and more subscribers doesn't necessarily mean more customers.

Cleaner Data Makes Bottlenecks Easier to Identify

Another benefit of attracting the right subscribers is that it becomes much easier to identify where the actual bottlenecks in your business are.

For example, if you're consistently attracting the right types of subscribers who are buying, but you're not generating enough new customers, then your solution is very simple. You don't have an email problem; you have a traffic problem. You need more qualified visitors coming to the site, and you probably need to pump up your ad spend a little more.

But when you're attracting thousands of subscribers who were never a good fit to begin with and you're running into conversion problems, now you have data that becomes much harder to trust. You have no idea whether it's the product that's bad, campaign cadence is off, or maybe flows are underoptimized. Suddenly, you're making decisions based on a group of people who are likely never to become customers in the first place.

When your subscriber quality is high, the data is just much cleaner and the bottlenecks are that much easier to identify. You can look at the numbers with confidence and determine whether the issue is traffic, conversion, retention, or something else entirely.

This is one of the reasons why I'm not overly impressed by pop-up conversion rates in isolation. I see agencies all the time bragging about increasing the signup rates to 10%, 15%, or even higher. But in many cases, they're doing it with large discounts, giveaways, or just incentives that aren't really aligned with the brand in the first place. Anybody can do this.

Yes, the pop-up may convert more visitors, but it's not certain that you're going to acquire more customers. What is certain, however, is that your data is going to be flawed.

Building a Pop-Up With Audience Quality in Mind

Okay, so we know what should not be in the pop-up. But what should a pop-up actually do? Here, I'm going to walk through one of our clients' pop-ups and show you exactly how we built this with quality of audience in mind.

All righty. We're going to head over to this website here. We're not going to fire the pop-up right away. We're going to wait at least 8 to 12 seconds.

Now we see it. It's immediate. We're going to ask them. We're not going to just shove emails in their face. We're going to first ask them, "Are you interested in a discount?"

We ask them, "Would you like 10% off?" You see, we have three options here. We have "Yes, I'm interested" or "No, thank you" at the bottom. Or we have, in the middle right over here, "Maybe later."

This is kind of a hack because a lot of times people just don't really know what to do here. So they click "Maybe later," and we will automatically route that to the next step.

In this case, we're going to ask them a question. This is zero-party data: What are you interested in, or who are you shopping for? In this case, we ask, are you shopping for men, women, or both? This is a pretty common question for apparel brands. For this, let's just say both.

Now we have data on our quality of audience. We know who they're shopping for, and we know they are interested in purchasing because they do want the discount.

Now we get this third step here, and this is where we're going to ask them for their information. They're going to enter in their email address, claim their 10% off, and then, if you do have SMS or you would like to collect SMS, I recommend putting it as a separate step. Usually, when people see a phone number, immediately they get a bit turned off. They don't want to get harassed with spam messages, which is totally understandable.

It's really important in this step to not make the phone number necessary. We're not going to submit it here, but if you activate your discount, you're still going to be routed to the final step here.

This is the most important part of the pop-up. You want to show the discount code inside of the pop-up form itself. This creates the least amount of friction. We know we already have their email address. We've collected data on them, and now they can continue to make their purchase right away without searching through any emails or anything else that could come up.

Show the Discount Code Without Sending Customers Away

This brings me to my next point, which is a practice that I think is extremely outdated in 2026. I see it all the time, and it drives me crazy.

A customer lands on your website, they find a product they like, they're interested enough to give you their email address, and instead of helping them move closer to a purchase, we tell them to leave the website and check their inbox for the discount code. They're not showing the discount code right away in the pop-up.

The justification is usually that it improves email flow performance, which, obviously, that's true. Email one is going to get a ton of credit for the revenue, and the reporting looks great, but the customer is not going to care about your attribution. They just want the sale in general.

Every additional step between purchase intent and checkout is going to create friction. What really bothers me about this approach is that it optimizes for the marketer rather than the customer. We're making the buyer experience worse so that a reporting dashboard looks better.

If somebody is ready to buy, we should be doing everything we can to help them buy, not forcing them through additional hoops so email number one can claim credit for the conversion.

How Subscriber Quality Improves Your Retention System

If there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this video, it's that the purpose of a pop-up isn't just to collect email addresses. It's to attract future customers and improve subscriber quality.

Because when subscriber quality improves, everything downstream gets easier. Your segmentation improves, your campaigns become more relevant, your data becomes cleaner, and it becomes much easier to identify where the real opportunities and bottlenecks exist inside the business.

Of course, the pop-up is only one piece of the puzzle because even if you're attracting the right subscribers, there may still be opportunities elsewhere in your retention system that are limiting growth. That's exactly why we built the retention gap calculator.

Using the Retention Gap Calculator

It's a free tool that helps e-commerce brands estimate how much revenue they're potentially leaving on the table while also providing recommendations based on their specific inputs. I've linked the calculator in the description below if you'd like to run your own numbers.

But before you do that, I recommend watching this video where I break down exactly how the retention gap calculator works, why we built it, and how to interpret the results. That video will give you the context behind the numbers and help you get much more value from the tool itself.

Thanks for Watching

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