It’s About When, Not Where

Many of us have been in the industry for a while, and we had our chances to learn about human psychology, and compelling microcopy and effective scarcity and social proof. So it’s not uncommon to land on a page that does a fantastic job at pushing just the right buttons to drive sales and sign-ups. But just as landing pages are often very good at conversion, the products that these landing pages promote often perform very poorly at retention.

At the heart of it usually lie performance or accessibility issues, difficult onboarding, a flawed pricing model, or just the lack of a clear value proposition. We roll up our sleeves and tackle these issues with user interviews, design iterations and A/B tests — often successfully, sometimes not so much. We talk about the right features and the right placement of these features. However, one consideration that’s often missed in this process is the right timing to prompt a particular action.

Asking for an email on an eCommerce site is a good example. We could easily generate leads with a slightly annoying newsletter pop-up for first-time visitors. We would surely gather some sign-ups, and we might even decide to show the pop-up for people coming from search engines as well. But what kind of email addresses would we get there? How many of them will probably be barely used, abandoned and filled with irrelevant notifications and marketing campaigns?

As business owners we don’t want just email addresses — we want good email addresses, the ones that customers check frequently, and that they open regularly; with a mailing list that has high opening rates and low bounce rates.

To achieve that, perhaps we need to give customers a chance to build trust and interest first — e.g. by looking at a few product pages, or tutorials, or a few videos on the site. We need to ask for an email only when we know that we are likely to get a good one in response. So rather than asking where is the right place to show a newsletter pop-up, wouldn’t it be more useful to ask when is the right time to ask for an email?

When will your visitors know just enough to build trust and interest, and when will they more likely be to respond positively to whatever action you encourage them to take? Perhaps next to the price on a product page, so customers could “qualify” for free shipping or a little discount? Perhaps when the email matters most — just when they are about to pay, or when they’ve just paid?

Timing matters. Be it password, location permissions, push notifications, the data needed to get started with the service, or moving users into the funnel. Perhaps the right question isn’t where but when.