If you’re running a crafting business or thinking about turning your crafting hobby or side-hustle into a business, you might be wondering how to time your mailing list popup on your website.

To answer the question, I’m going to look at this from the point of view of a buyer.

We’ve all been here: You’re looking for something and you land on a website you’ve never visited before. You haven’t even had a chance to look at the site and a popup has exploded across your screen telling you about a deal if you sign up to their newsletter.

How do you feel?

Annoyed? Stressed? Like you just wanted to know if the store sold the product?

All of the above? Something else?

Popups and offers for new customers are a fantastic way to get new mailing list subscribers. BUT you’ve gotta get it right or they’ll put off casual browsers.

Think hard about the user experience when you design your site.

Webstore customers can be divided broadly into two groups: Browsers and SEO traffic.

Browsers come to your site just to see what you have at the moment. They know your brand name but might not know your latest products.

Unless you’re a well-known brand such as Target or Tesco, you’re not going to get people searching specifically for your site or brand name to see what you have available. So for a new business, most of your traffic will be SEO traffic.

SEO traffic has Googled (or Duck, Duck, Go’d) for a specific product to see if they can buy it. They come from anywhere in the world and once they’ve found out what you sell, they probably want to know about delivery and price.

There is literally NO POINT in me, in rural Ireland, wasting time getting a discount code for a store in America which doesn’t ship here. That might seem like an extreme example but it’s happened so many times that I’m now very aware of this whenever I shop.

When you’re setting up your offer and your popup to collect email addresses, don’t make it pop up instantly. I would advise 30 seconds. If a customer leaves before your pop up appears, how likely were they to shop with you anyway? If they were on your page for so little time, they weren’t going to buy, and 10% off (or whatever your offer is) wasn’t going to change their mind. Bouncers gonna bounce.

You want to attract the people who like what they see. They are your target audience. Your tribe, if you prefer. Get them to complete their purchase and sign up to your list with your great offer, then send them a stunning welcome series to get them engaged and buying from you again and again.

The other reason for this is, if your popup appears too soon, people will feel like you’re pushing them to make a decision: Sign up for an email OR pay 10% more. That puts them in a stressful place, which is a closed mindset. The buying mindset is an open, unstressed place. Everything needs to happen at just the right time for optimal results.

That’s why I recommend timing your popups at 30 seconds, not instantly.