Add a pop-up signup form to your website

A pop-up converts when the offer matches what the visitor came to the page for, so Kite chooses the offer from your business and from the pages where the pop-up will appear. It looks at what you sell, who buys it, and the questions your customers ask, then proposes an offer that makes sense to someone reading that page.

For example, a coffee roaster's shop pages might offer 10 percent off a first bag. A bookkeeping firm's blog posts might offer a one-page year-end tax checklist instead, since people reading about deductions want something they can use. A software startup that hasn't launched yet might simply offer a spot on the waitlist. If you already have something to give away, like a guide or a template, Kite can build the pop-up around it.

Kite then writes the pop-up's headline, the line beneath it, the button label, and the message a visitor sees after signing up. It writes them in your brand voice and keeps them short, because a pop-up gets a few seconds of attention at most. Kite can also put the promised download or discount code right into that thank-you message, so the visitor gets what they signed up for straight away.

A pop-up feels helpful rather than annoying when it appears at a natural pause and is easy to dismiss, so Kite decides when it shows up and who sees it. On desktop, an exit-intent pop-up watches for the cursor heading toward the top of the browser, which usually means the visitor is about to close the tab or go back. Phones don't have a cursor, so on mobile Kite times the pop-up a different way, such as after the visitor has scrolled well down the page.

Kite also decides where the pop-up should and shouldn't appear. A pop-up on your blog posts or product pages can catch readers who are interested but not ready to buy. A pop-up on your contact or checkout page would get in the way of people who are already doing what you want. Kite uses your site analytics to find the pages that draw the most visitors but produce few signups or inquiries, since those are where a pop-up has the most to gain.

Small details make the biggest difference to how a pop-up feels. Kite builds it so the close button is obvious and the pop-up stays closed once a visitor dismisses it, and so it doesn't reappear for someone who has already signed up. On phones, a large pop-up that covers the whole page frustrates readers, and Google has said for years that it can count against pages in mobile search. Kite keeps the mobile version small enough that the page underneath stays readable.

Kite builds the pop-up from your site's own design system, so it looks like the rest of your website rather than a widget pasted on top. When Kite built your site, it set up your colors, typography, logo, and image style, and it applies those same rules to the pop-up. If the offer needs an image, like a cover for your guide or a photo of the product on sale, Kite can make one.

Because the pop-up is built into your site's code, there's no embed script to install and no separate pop-up tool to pay for. You ask for the pop-up in Slack, Kite builds it, and the change waits on your site as an unpublished change. You can open a preview on desktop and mobile, ask for adjustments, and publish when you're happy with it. If you change your mind later, you can undo that one change without losing anything you've published since.

Every pop-up signup goes through your site's form handling, so it reaches you the same way your other website forms do. You get an email for each new signup at the address you've chosen for form submissions, and each signup also appears on your website's leads screen in Kite.

If your email list lives in Mailchimp, Kite can send each pop-up signup straight into the audience you choose, with tags that say where it came from. Kite gives the pop-up its own name as a form, so its signups can carry a tag like "Exit pop-up: year-end checklist" while the newsletter box in your footer keeps its own tag. That way you can see which form brought in each subscriber, and Mailchimp can start the welcome email or delivery email you set to begin when that tag is added.

Kite follows your Mailchimp audience's own subscription rules. If the audience uses double opt-in, Mailchimp sends its confirmation email before the person is subscribed. Someone who unsubscribed in the past stays unsubscribed even if they fill in the pop-up again. Your notification email still arrives even if Mailchimp is briefly unavailable, so a signup is never lost.

Kite counts each pop-up signup as a conversion in your site analytics, so you can see how many visitors the pop-up turned into subscribers. Kite records the signup on its own servers when the form is submitted, so the count stays accurate even for visitors whose browsers block analytics scripts.

You can ask Kite in Slack how the pop-up is doing, and it compares signups with the traffic on the pages where the pop-up appears. It can compare this period with the last, show which pages produce the most signups, and explain what changed. For a pop-up, the useful question is simple: of the people who saw it, how many gave you an email address?

When Kite thinks a different offer or timing could do better, it can run an experiment. It sets the goal, splits your traffic between the current pop-up and a new version, and asks for your approval before the test starts. It watches the results and asks again before making the winning version permanent. That might mean testing a discount against a guide, or an exit-intent trigger against one that waits for visitors to scroll down the page.