Email pop-up forms are still very much alive, and they’re an essential type of sign-up form for building email marketing lists.
While Klaviyo sets the general benchmark submit rate for sign-up forms at 3%, Maria Trotta, senior digital strategist at Klaviyo, says that’s a low bar.
Trotta has worked with brands with sign-up form submit rates of 8–20%, which means it’s still possible in 2027 to build a sizable owned audience with pop-up forms.
Here, we run through 11 best practices to help you capture customer data with email pop-up forms, with a few real-life examples to get you started.
1. Centralize your customer data, marketing, and on-site experiences
Before you launch a single email pop-up, you need a sound customer data infrastructure underneath it. If your pop-up form lives separate from centralized customer data, it’s next to impossible to use the data you collect on your forms to personalize emails and text messages in the future.
Pop-up forms are a gateway to customer relationships. Customer relationships are marked by interactions that produce data, and pop-up forms are often what kicks off the relationship with an email address or phone number.
When you collect zero-party data like this, it’s just the first step. Every interaction that follows, whether it’s a direct statement of preferences or an indirect observation of behavior, needs to flow into one customer profile. This is what makes real-time personalization possible in marketing and customer service.
2. Personalize the email pop-up experience
With email pop-ups, the people you exclude are almost more important than the people you include. If one of your goals is to make your pop-ups less intrusive, start by suppressing existing
But if your email pop-up submit rates are holding up against benchmarks, you may want to start experimenting with personalized pop-ups for existing subscribers. Try crafting pop-ups for:
- Site visitors from a specific acquisition source: Let’s say you’re partnering with an influencer on a top-of-funnel digital marketing campaign, and you’ve built out a special landing page at a vanity URL where the influencer is sending their audience. You can launch a specific email sign-up pop-up for that page only, then enter those
- Site visitors who display specific behavior: Try timing your email pop-ups based on behaviors like scroll depth, time on page, or exit intent. Someone who’s dragging their cursor toward their browser search bar may be convinced to stay by a special offer in exchange for their email address.
- Existing email subscribers: Existing email subscribers don’t want to see a form asking them to sign up for a list they’re already on. Instead, target them with an email pop-up encouraging them to sign up for text messages, WhatsApp messages, or push notifications through your mobile app. Mobile marketing channels can create closer, more immediate relationships with customers, and building those lists should be a priority if you have a healthy email list.
3. Write a strong headline
A strong email pop-up headline achieves the perfect balance of clear and unexpected. While many pop-ups aren’t very engaging, one way to make yours stand out is testing your way to a winning headline. A strong pop-up headline:
- Fits your use case and context. Tailor your headline to fit the goal of your email pop-up.
- Encourages the visitor to pay attention. Always aim to be clear over clever, but consider experimenting with wit, voice, and compelling offers people can’t ignore.
- Represents the voice of your brand. Craft a headline that gives the visitor a taste of who you are.
It may not surprise you that this example from healthy soda brand OLIPOP is an exit-intent pop-up, meaning it appears when someone is trying to leave the brand’s website. Known for their bright colors and cheeky copy, OLIPOP encourages people to stay on site with a pun. The headline fits the brand voice and the context for the pop-up.
OLIPOP
4. Write simple, straightforward copy
Your email pop-up has one job: to persuade the visitor to subscribe to your emails. And your best bet for capturing that email address is to be clear about the exchange.
While you may be able to test clever vs. clear for your headline, your email pop-up copy should always be more straightforward. It’s a promise you’re making to your
This example from Italian design brand doubles down on copy and leaves out a headline entirely. The brand opts to communicate an offer and dedicate more space to their privacy policy, which offers GDPR-compliant transparency for how the brand will use the
Alessi
5. Offer an irresistible incentive on your email pop-up
You can experiment with headlines and copy to the nth degree, but nothing gets someone to share their email address more than an incentive.
But do you offer a discount? A free gift or shipping with purchase? Entry into a contest or giveaway? Exclusive content? If you don’t want to break the bank, you can get creative with testing different pop-up incentives.
If you operate in an industry like skincare, where your product costs very little to make and you can sell it for a high price, a free gift with purchase might be a smart alternative to a discount. In this email pop-up, olive oil brand Brightland, for example, offers a free pouring spout in exchange for contact information.
Brightland
6. Design an eye-catching email pop-up
Good design is subjective. What looks great for one brand won’t look so great for another. And keeping up with design trends is difficult if you don’t have access to a full-time designer.
This is why customizable templates are important. If you want to deploy your email pop-ups across many pages at scale, you probably won’t have a lot of time to fiddle around with design, but a well-designed email pop-up can make a big difference in terms of conversion.
Some of the most important design elements of an email pop-up include:
- A modern font
- A lovely color palette
- A great product shot
- A stand-out call-to-action (CTA) button
- A clean design with minimal fields (more on this later)
- Bonus: a photo that represents your audience
This example from coffee brand Grind combines all of these elements into one. The brand colors pop against a product shot with people in it, and the font carries some flair that isn’t standard or outdated.
Grind
7. Keep email pop-up fields to a minimum, but test additional fields
Test whether your audience is willing to fill out more form fields on your email pop-up. If they are, the information you collect there will help you send more personalized messages in the future.
Maria Trotta, senior digital strategist at Klaviyo, recommends gauging success based on both submit rate and what that extra field can do for personalization. For example, you can test:
- A: one screen asking for email address only
- B: two screens, where the first screen asks for an email address, and the second asks a question like, “Who are you shopping for?”
When you use multi-step forms to ask custom questions like this, you can also sync the segments that result from them to social media as lookalike audiences to find brand new customers.
In this example from apparel brand minnow, the first step of the form asks the subscriber who they’re shopping for. The form features a lifestyle image along with their brand colors, their logo, and a large headline with the 15%-off promotion.
minnow
8. Include a clear CTA on your email pop-up
Your CTA button is what people click to convert on your email pop-up. Consider your CTA your last opportunity to express what the reader gets for subscribing.
Basic design rules like a large button, good color contrast, and minimal language are what make an effective CTA. But in this email pop-up example, tableware brand Zarina takes it a step further, using a “Get Code” CTA to emphasize that subscribing gets the shopper a discount.
Compared to the more standard “Subscribe” CTA, this slight tweak in language indicates that a brand is giving something rather than getting something.
Zarina
9. Consider less intrusive sign-up form types
By definition, an email pop-up pops up on your website, which can disrupt the shopping experience. If you want to test less intrusive types of forms, consider a fly-out or slide-in form instead.
Fly-outs slide in and out on your website, and they’re a great option where space is limited. We recommend testing slide-in forms based on where someone’s thumb sits beside their mobile screen to see if they perform better than they would on desktop.
This example from Aura Bora appears as a fly-out only after you’ve scrolled down a certain percentage of the homepage. It’s eye-catching, the offer is clear, and the brand gets to capture a lot of information, but the user doesn’t have to interact with it if they’re not ready.
Aura Bora
10. Make your email pop-up window easy to close for accessibility
When you’re designing your email pop-up experience, keep people with disabilities top of mind. This means ensuring your pop-up window adheres to accessibility standards and is easy to close for everyone, but most of all for people with motor and visual impairments.
Accessibility is a win-win for everyone because it means you’re giving people the choice to engage with your email pop-up on their own terms. In addition to building trust and establishing a positive relationship with your audience, this allows visitors to browse your site without interruption.
This example from vegan skincare brand OSEA shows a clear “X” button in the top-right corner, contrasted against a different color within a photo. The X is white against gray, obvious enough that someone can easily find it, but not so obvious that it takes center stage.
OSEA
11. Improve email pop-up submission rates with AI
After you’ve built your email pop-up, track its performance and improve it through A/B testing. Some metrics to measure include:
- Total number of sign-ups
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates on pages where your pop-ups appear
To conduct an A/B test, conventional wisdom says to choose one variable to test at a time, whether it’s your headline, CTA button, or offer. If your email pop-up isn’t converting as expected, change the offer or trigger and re-test until you find the right combination that resonates with your audience.
But now, with AI forms display optimization, you can test variations in the background and automatically set the top-performing version live.
Before skincare brand Tata Harper started using Klaviyo AI to test and optimize their email and SMS sign-up forms, they could only manually test two versions at a time. But with forms display optimization, they were able to test 20 variations on AI-generated placement and timing across their desktop and mobile sign-up pop-ups.
In the 30 days after the winning versions went live, submissions for both forms jumped over 65% from the 30 days prior to testing.
Tata Harper
Build your best email pop-up form yet with Klaviyo
Your email pop-up forms are only as good as what you can do with the data you collect from them. Klaviyo, the autonomous CRM for B2C, houses all the customer data you need to personalize thousands or even millions of messages at scale.
And with Composer, the always-on AI marketing agent built into Klaviyo, you can create new email and text messages in minutes.
Start with a goal, a brief, or something Composer uncovered in your customer and performance data. Composer can help build the audiences, flows, and campaigns across channels like email, text message, and mobile push, using your brand and business context throughout the process.
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