How Ebates Converts 20-40% of Its First-time Visitors into Email Sign-ups

By Contributing Editor Janet Roberts, janetr@marketingsherpa.com

Pop-ups are one of the Web's most hated ad formats, but they
actually help shopping gateway Ebates convert between 20 percent and
40 percent of first-time visitors into signing up for regular email
newsletters and targeted mailings.

"Conversion rates are everything in our business," Co-founder and
CEO Alessandro Isolani says. "We operate on a small margin. We offer
a free service. We pass along our sales commissions to the user at a
discount, so we need to convert effectively and get users at a low
cost."

Using pop-ups and pop-unders on its own site, Ebates has gathered a
permission-based house list with more than 6 million names since the
company launched in 1999.

However, relying so heavily on pop-ups to collect emails is risky
these days because blocking software can kill 10 percent to 20
percent of those pops. (Note: you can't rely on your Web metrics to
show how many pops were viewed, because much blocking software stops
the viewer from seeing your ad after it's served. This makes
tracking accurate conversion data very hard.)

So, if you have to make your remaining viewed pops work harder for
you if you want to duplicate Ebates' results. Their key best
practices:

o Keep pops relevant and easy to use,
o define your customer benefit clearly,
o and, cookie users so that registered members don't see opt-in
requests anymore.

How Ebates Uses a Succession of Pops to Raise Results
The first time you visit Ebates.com, you land on a simple page that
asks you to give your email address and choose a password.
"The landing page is a simple one-two-three of what we do. If the
user signs up at the landing page, then there's no more need for
pop-ups or pop-unders."

If you bypass it and go right to the homepage, you'll see a floating
pop-up that asks again for your email address and password but
explains the company's benefit in more detail.

You can close that pop-up to browse the site, but when you click a
link, such as one leading to a merchant partner's site, another
pop-up launches, asking you again to register before going farther.
If you leave the site without registering, an Ebates pop-under gives
you one last chance to register.

"The exit pop is a freebie, your one last chance at them. It doesn't
pose a whole lot of risk, and you might gain a lead," Isolani says.
"Any damage it might do is very diffuse."

It sounds like a lot of windows launch during a single session, but
once you register, you won't see more pop-ups unless they match your
shopping interests.

Visitors also can sign up on any Web page, but the pops deliver the
best results, Isolani says.

Simple Pop Design is (Usually) Better

Ebates changes its pop-up and pop-under repertoire constantly,
tweaking the copy inside the window as well as the window size and
placement, sometimes even suppressing them to see how it affects
registrations.

Testing shows that simple formats pull better than more complex
ones, although sometimes visitors will respond more to just a
graphic change.

The simple-is-better logic also applies to the registration process,
which users can complete right in the pop-up rather than being
shipped to an interior registration page

"Back when we launched the site in early 1999, I don't think people
had fleshed out the proper way to get people to register," Isolani
said. " My view was from a consumer-centric one. Ask for as little
as possible and don't ask for anything that isn't absolutely
necessary."

That's until an Ebates visitor turns into a shopper.

"Once a user signs up and shops and buys, then we get more
information, including a home address and demographic data, but we
didn't want to hit users with all of that right away," Isolani says.
"It sends the wrong message. If a user comes and signs up on the
landing page, we're done. If they close the window, we serve an exit
pop with more urgent phrasing, asking them not to leave without
signing up."

Getting Past the Pop-Up Stoppers

So why don't more people use pop-ups to collect opt-ins or site
registrations? Because people hate them.

A PlanetFeedback survey in 2003 found pop-ups scored higher on
annoyance and lower on trust than all other ad formats, even
including telemarketing, spam and banner ads.

More people are using software to stop pop-ups, too, now that ISPs
and other online services bundle blocking software in with their
programs.

More than 1 million of EarthLink's 5.1 million customers are using
its proprietary PopUpBlocker software, and "millions," according to
a Google representative, have downloaded that search engine's
toolbar, which includes a pop-up blocker.

Pop-ups can also cause problems if you market through paid search.
Tom Barnes, founder and CEO of MediaThink, an Atlanta, Ga. marketing
consulting firm, which uses Google's Adwords, says his company is
getting rid of the pop-up it uses to collect opt-ins to its company
newsletter, and using pop-ups for any reason violates Google's
Adwords terms of service.

Our recommendation - set up a special landing page or microsite for
your AdWords clicks that's pop-free, but keep pops on your main site
if they are working.

Blocking software also doesn't distinguish between pop-ups and
pop-under windows, which don't generate quite as much hatred, or
between third-party advertising pop-ups and in-house pops, such as
Ebates' subscription solicitations or windows explaining terms of
service or privacy policies.

Instead, they block a site's attempt to spawn a new window, what
Fastclick Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Hirsch calls a
"non-user-initiated" window. (Fastclick is a Web-based ad network
offering only pop-unders.)

"That's based on our impression that it's a less-intrusive ad format
which delivers a better response for the advertisers," Hirsch says.
Although earlier research studies lumped pop-us and pop-unders
together, "it makes common sense to say that they different," Hirsch
says. "A pop-up interferes with what you see, where a pop-under does
not appear until you're done with what you're doing and you close
your browser."

If you're going to use pop-ups or pop-unders, you have to watch how
often you launch them and at which points during a user session.
Pop-up blockers also present challenges that their email
counterparts don't. You can't change wording or formats to evade a
blocker, although most give users the option to whitelist sites
whose pop-ups they do want.

"We've had zero customer complaints about our pop-ups," Ebates'
Isolani says. "They know we're not spamming them, we're not serving
ads and not trying to distract them.

"What we do get are emails from customers saying, 'What happened to
all those great coupons? I'm not getting them anymore.' When we
investigate, we usually find out they're using pop-up blockers, so
we give them directions on how to let our pop-ups get through."

Useful links related to this article:
Sample creative for an Ebates pop-up:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ebates/1.html
Ebates
http://www.ebates.com/
Information on pop-unders:
http://www.fastclick.com/