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Set up WooCommerce popup in 5 simple steps + plugins

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Embedding a WooCommerce popup in is one of the best ways to convert customers who are just browsing on your site to engage and make a purchase.

Running a successful WooCommerce store requires more than just great products — it also needs smart marketing strategies. Popups are a customizable and targeted approach to collecting contact information from visitors who might not make a purchase on their first visit. Your popups could contain a promotion, personal message or CTA to keep customers engaged and increase the likelihood that they will buy from you in the future. 

In this article, we’ll walk you through five simple steps to create and optimize WooCommerce popups using Omnisend, making it easy to leverage this powerful marketing tool for your store’s success. We’ll also cover:

  1. Reasons to use WooCommerce popup
  2. How to set up WooCommerce popups with Omnisend 
  3. How to target popups for WooCommerce with Omnisend 
  4. Best tips for WooCommerce popups
Create eye-catching popups, build your email list, and boost your sales effortlessly with Omnisend

Reasons to use WooCommerce popup

Omnisend multi-step popup
Image via Omnisend

Embedding a WooCommerce email popup to your store gives you the power to have a 24/7 marketing machine helping you to drive sales.

Most people won’t view every page on your site. They may miss the call-to-action to join your mailing list. They may miss seeing a new product because they went directly to the item they knew they needed. They may not purchase additional items because they didn’t see there’s a free shipping offer.

That’s where popups come in. You can increase the likelihood of customers purchasing a specific product, participating in special offers, or joining your email list. It’s a friendly reminder you can give to your customers about important information. Popups can help you grow your email list and provide an automated marketing method operating around the clock for you.

Customer success story

Organic Aromas used a multi-level popup strategy to increase newsletter signups by 150% using Omnisend’s email capture feature.

Learn more about Organic Aromas’ strategy.

Popups allow you to:

  1. Build your email list: an email list is permission to talk to people who have shown an interest in your brand or products, and popups are a highly effective way to build yours
  2. Boost sales by getting the timing right: instead of showing a popup within seconds of the visitor arriving on your site, you can time them so they are more likely to be interested in your brand — for example, once they’ve scrolled a percentage of the page, or viewed specific pages
  3. Recover abandoned carts: every ecommerce store owner knows the pain of visitors adding items to their cart and then leaving without a purchase — a WooCommerce cart popup can remind your customers their cart isn’t empty before they leave and offer an incentive for them to complete the purchase 
  4. Segment your audience: your popups can ask specific questions about your visitors’ interests or demographics, helping you to segment them into groups so that you can send them personalized offers in the future
  5. Increase sales: by building your email list, you can message subscribers whenever you want, informing them of new products, deals, and discount codes — all of which can encourage them to place more orders
  6. Boost AOV: include a promotional offer for people to join your list and place an order, then include upsells and cross-sells in your order confirmation email to increase the size of the order
  7. Improve user engagement: you can provide your customers access to additional content, ebooks, and interactive quizzes to increase the time your customers spend on your site
  8. Increase social media: encourage customers to share their products and a review on social media, helping you boost your social engagement and credibility
  9. Collect feedback: your popups can collect feedback on product quality, customer service, and shipping times, helping you continuously improve your business
  10. Promote new products or services: popups can notify your customers of new product lines or services, bringing attention to them to encourage sales
Boost your WooCommerce store’s revenue by up to 85% using our email marketing plugin

How to set up WooCommerce popups with Omnisend

Getting started with Omnisend for WooCommerce is so simple that you’ll be up and running in no time.

If you prefer a visual walk-through, check out our video guide on setting up WooCommerce popups with Omnised:

1. Create a WooCommerce popup

Black Friday popup
Image via Omnisend

To get started quickly, you can find a template using Omnisend’s huge library of pre-made popups. These can all be customized, so don’t get too caught up in finding one that perfectly represents your business. Just select one that’s most appropriate for your needs.

To gain access to Omnisend’s pre-made popups, all you need to do is register for a free plan. These templates are great for a wide range of strategies, including WooCommerce upsell popups, exit intent popups, and email lists.

2. Choose your theme

Omnisend has a powerful form builder, which you can customize to your heart’s content. Choose your colors, fonts, a background image if you want one, and the placement of the content blocks. There are multiple popup themes to choose from, including holidays:

Omnisend holiday popups

If you like the pre-made templates Omnisend offers then you can use them immediately, or customize them if you prefer.

3. Add your content

Remember, the role of your popup is to encourage conversions and get visitors to sign up to your email list. That means it needs to be both compelling and concise.

There are no hard rules on what content should be on a WooCommerce popup, but we recommend:

  • speaking in your brand voice
  • using clear CTAs (such as “Join us” rather than “Learn more”)
  • being very clear with the offer

If there’s any doubt, ask a friend to check your popup — if they find it confusing, there’s a good chance your visitors will too.

4. Create a design 

Omnisend’s Form Builder was built to let you be you. In other words, you’re not constrained by what we think your form should look like — you have the freedom to create!

You can:

  • Choose your background image and where your Woocommerce form appears
  • The placement of the form on your page
  • Select the color of your background, form, buttons, and links
  • Add primary, secondary, and tertiary buttons
  • Change the form layout with up to four columns
  • Edit separately for desktop and mobile screens
Omnisend's form builder

5. Choose your settings

Omnisend’s Form Builder has a lot of powerful options, giving you total control. Forms can add specific tags to subscribers, for example, so you can send personalized emails once they’re signed up. You can also set how often visitors will see a form if they visit your site more than once.

When you’ve got your settings as you want them, hit the Enable button and your WooCommerce email popup is ready to go.

Omnisend’s Form Builder settings

How to target popups for WooCommerce with Omnisend

Building a WooCommerce popup with Omnisend is just the first step. There are various options to help you target specific people with your forms. As a result, you can send highly personalized messages to people based on their location (e.g., if you have particular URLs for different countries), viewing history, or dates they signed up.

Creating these parameters is really simple, too. Within the Form Builder, the right-hand panel has a section called Behavior with various options to choose from:

How to target popups for WooCommerce with Omnisend

You can choose:

  • When the form shows, including start and end dates, how long a visitor needs to be on your site before it appears, or the number of pages they’ve viewed
  • Specific URLs for the form to show if you don’t want it side-wide
  • Whether to show forms on all devices or not, for example, to show different ones on desktop and mobile

Best tips for WooCommerce popups

Don’t make the classic “set and forget” mistake. Your WooCommerce popups need to be treated like any other form of marketing: test, tweak, refine.

You can consider experimenting with: 

  • The layout, imagery, and messaging of forms
  • Placement of forms on your site, e.g., separate forms for different product types
  • CTA wording
Generate up to $6.30 per email with our WooCommerce email marketing plugin

Here are some additional tips to consider to maximize the effectiveness of your WooCommerce popups:

Timing is everything

A popup’s effectiveness depends on not only what it says but also when it appears. 

If a visitor sees it as soon as they land on your site, they’re likely to close it — they’ve not had enough time to know if they’re interested in you yet. On the other hand, if you wait too long there’s a good chance they’ll leave before seeing it.

Omnisend gives you multiple options to explore, including showing after a certain amount of time on the site, once the visitor has scrolled a specified percentage of the page, or viewed a particular number of pages:

popup timing

Experiment with your popup timing, and don’t be afraid to have different parameters on different forms.

Capture visitors as they exit

A WooCommerce exit-intent popup can be highly effective, converting at over eight times more than immediate popups.

The idea behind them is simple: based on the placement of your visitor’s cursor, the popup appears just as they are about to leave. It means that they have another opportunity to subscribe if they’ve closed previous forms, or you may choose to not show other forms, let the visitor browse uninterrupted, and show them a popup at the end.

Exit-intent popups can have specific wording that recognizes the visitor is about to leave and include a final offer, such as this example from Bakell:

exit-intent popup

Make an offer they can’t refuse

There are a lot of other websites trying to get your visitors’ attention, so you need to give them a good reason to sign up for your email list. If you only have a simple popup that says “sign up here,” you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential subscribers.

You can offer your visitors almost anything you think they’d like, and some popular options are:

  • Gamification
  • Free shipping
  • A discount code or special offer
  • VIP announcements or early access to new launches

You could also offer different incentives on different forms to find out which ones your audience is most interested in.

Don’t overwhelm visitors

It’s easy to think that “more is more” with popups — the more your site has, the more opportunities visitors have to sign up. In reality, they’ll probably feel overwhelmed and annoyed, prompting them to leave.

Instead, use popups with deliberate intent.

A visitor who has scrolled to the end of a page is likely to be more interested in you than someone who has only just arrived, so a scroll-based popup might perform better.

Similarly, popups that appear on targeted URLs and reflect the products from those URLs will feel more relevant to the visitor and be aligned with their interests. A discount code in exchange for signing up is a great option here.

As always, experiment with different options but make the user experience a priority.

WooCommerce popup: final thoughts

Popups are a highly effective way to grow your email list, which in turn can help to increase your store’s revenue. Using Omnisend as your WooCommerce popup plugin will allow you to quickly create effective, elegant popups.

The powerful customization options and targeting settings mean you can experiment with not only the design of your popups but also when and where they appear.

To use Omnisend to create your WooCommerce popups, register for free today.

Generate up to $6.30 per email with our WooCommerce email marketing plugin
Richard White
Article by

Richard is a Content Marketing Manager at Omnisend. An avid writer, he's said to have been born holding a pencil. Fascinated by all things handmade, if he's not reading or writing he can often be found practicing leathercraft.