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Contextual marketing with Zoho Marketing Automation’s smart pop-ups

November 22, 2020
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Contextual marketing with Zoho Marketing Automation’s smart pop-ups

Contextual marketing is the key to presenting personalized, relevant content to all website visitors and customers. Sure, you can use contextual marketing in any marketing medium. We will focus on website smart popups.
 
It wasn’t until I started my marketing career that I noticed how marketing is everywhere. As a child of the 80’s, I grew up when offline marketing was king. TV, radio, billboards on the highway, the last few pages in newspapers and of course, junk mail. Back then, they were the main avenues of advertising. Their tactics, their propaganda, their lies, their misleading, false testimonials. The way they put ideas into your head. I never realized how marketing was an art form, and it actually works, until I started building automated digital marketing platforms and started my own company. If you landed on this page its almost certainly because you want to know about using Zoho Marketing Automation’s smart pop-up. Lets jump in…
 
What is a website smart pop up? When you land on a web page, you immediately start digesting the content and your eyes start to wonder. Then, BOOM, out of no where the entire page goes dim with only a little box that is displayed.
 
You have no choice but to look at the only visible part on the web page, the infamous pop up! I admit, these can be very bothersome and may force some to leave your site if they are inundated with pop-up form after pop-up form on all your pages.
 
In my example pictured above, you’ll notice in the background that the web page the user is on is “Why I switched from WordPress to Zoho SItes“. Now look at the smart pop-up. The user is on a web page about switching to Zoho Sites, and they are presented a pop up about reaching out to QuakeCinch if they need assistance migrating their site. Now, what could be more contextual than that. Ok, lots, but do you get the point now? You are presenting people with marketing materials that is relevant to them.
 

Some ways you can use the smart popup forms are:

  • Use them to get newsletter subscribers. I know you’ve all probably seen those before
  • If your website has more than 10 pages, choose 2 or maybe 3 web pages and create popups specifically for those. As an example, QuakeCinch works with nonprofit organizations. There is one special day out of the year called “Giving Tuesday”. What if a nonprofit organization created a popup for their homepage with a message about #givingtuesday and put a link to their donate now page. Could that work? Absolutely! What if after the one day event, they still want to ask for donations. Couldn’t they update the smart pop-up form to read “there is still time to donate”. When a visitor visits the home page the day after, they will get a pop up.
  • What if you have a newsletter form on your site. If your organization has 5 different newsletters, couldn’t you customize the popup to be contextual? Yes… If you take products 1 and products 2 web pages and you note that newsletter 1 is mostly used on products page 1 and newsletter 2 is mainly used on product page 2, couldn’t you create two popup forms? One popup on product 1 page with newsletter 1 subscribe with a prefilled form. Same with product page 2. You create a popup form on product page 2 that by default has newsletter 2 checked as subscribed by default, but not newsletter 1. That would be more of a conditional popup that you will need to involve the Zoho Forms product with. I just want to get your mind going a little on how and why they could be used.
  • What if you could target returning website visitors? You can. You can set a popup criteria where the popup is only shown if they are a returning web page visitor. It does this by setting a cookie on the users device.
  • What if you have a business that works with local businesses and companies all over the world? If you’re willing to travel to business sites within a 30 mile radius of your business location but can only do remote video meetings for those outside of the 30 mile radius, you can do that with Zoho Marketing Automation’s smart pop-ups. You create two popups. One that the criteria is web visitor from city = xxxxx . I use ‘Fredericksburg’ and ‘Spotsylvania’ as my surrounding town. Add more local cities if needed until all the local cities are present in your criteria. Next create a popup for everyone who is not in those surrounding cities you input in the previous criteria config. Zoho Marketing Automation smart popup form criteria
  • What if you have a marketing campaign that your small business or nonprofit is heavily invested in. Imagine being able to show users that are member of that campaign a specific pop-up. With the UTM value you specify in the clickable web URL link you create (Maybe using Google Campaign URL Builder), you can.Zoho Marketing Automation smart popup form UTM
  • What if you wanted to show different smart popups to different people based on what was the source they used to land on your site? Perhaps you keep it professional if they come in from LinkedIn, but you add a little more flair if they come in from Facebook.
  • Perhaps you have 5 companies you partner with. You share links with them. You could create a popup that is displayed when the source is being referred from one of your partner websites.
  • What if you only want to show a popup to a customer who has clicked on specific buttons or a combination of buttons, or if they have come to the current page from a specific web page on your site. Maybe you only want to show the popup if someone clicked a specific button (CTA?) landing on a specific page from a specific page and stayed on that page for 2 minutes (That time spent implies they are reading/digesting your content) Zoho Marketing Automation smart popup form goals sources referrals
  • What if you only want smart popups to run at certain times of the day or for a set amount of time. You can!
  • For realtors, you could have an IDX website and create hot sheets or smart search pages that show a specific city or state of houses in that area. Now, imagine if you setup some criteria of — If a home buyer comes to my web page that shows Fredericksburg VA homes, and they come there 3 times, show them this popup. It could be a popup saying the realtor will be in Fredericksburg VA next week and ask if they want to set up a showing.

With ‘Activity-based criteria’ you have a huge pool of scenarios you can create popups using your known data, assumed data on your web pages, how users get to your website, who are they are. It’s really limitless…

What options are available to you when designing smart popups?

We will not go into great detail here, but we will cover the most important options. The first option to discuss, what does a popup looks like and how to get started. The answer, create from a template. As the picture below will illustrate, the Zoho Marketing Automation smart pop-up templates are an awesome starting point!

Zoho Marketing Automation smart popup form templates

That’s an eye full and plenty to get you started creating popups. Go ahead, select one. Play around with the colors, text, buttons, backgrounds and even change the pictures. I won’t go over the actual design of the popups because it’s kinda a WYSIWYG editor. I do want to cover how are these pops triggered. We talked about what audience should get which popups, but we haven’t reviewed the popup setup triggers. Below is a screenshot. Note the “Entry, Scroll and Exit below the “Trigger on”.

Zoho Marketing Automation smart popup form triggers

Here are the settings to say when and how the popup should occur. You can select 1 or all 3 triggers. Let’s take them one at a time. If you select Entry, you probably guessed it, its options to change for when a user lands on your page. Position and animation, are self-explanatory. The scroll button is a neat option. You basically select the scroll depth for when the popup will be triggered. If you select 50% your popup will fire when the visitor has scrolled halfway down your page. If you set it to 100%, the visitor can scroll and browse the entire page, but once they scroll to the bottom, your popup will fire. Check out my home page as I have a trigger for 90% scroll depth. The once rejection setting is basically to eliminate a user constantly receiving your popup every time they go to a different page and come back. The last config option trigger is the Exit. This is used for when you want the popup to fire when the user scrolls up and is about to close or exit the page. Boom, not so fast Mr. site visitor 🙂

How to create smart pop-ups | Zoho MarketingHub

Learn how to create smart pop-ups and configure where, when, how, and to whom they should appear in your pages.

As you can see, the Zoho Marketing Automation smart popup feature can provide you with opportunities to prompt web visitors with personalized information at the right time. While this can be used for anonymous site visitors, its potential is really realized when you start leveraging data in your CRM. Think of the discounts you can offer to return visitors who have a low lead score and are not engaging with your email campaigns. What better time than right then to offer a deal or resources.
 
One thing that is important is when you create the popups, you may have to create two popups. One for desktop and one for mobile. You will not have to if your popup shows nicely on the mobile and desktop. My suggestion is if you want to use one popup on both devices, use a vertical template, not a horizontal template. The horizontal templates to too wide to display on a mobile device by default. Try to make the vertical of the body of the popup less than 600 pixels. Below is how I created criteria to show on mobile or tablet, but not desktop. You would do the opposite when creating a display on desktop but not mobile or tablet criteria.
Zoho Marketing Automation smart popup form mobile filter criteriaZoho Marketing Hub smart popup form mobile filter criteria

If you made it to this point, I hope you enjoyed this post or take away a better understanding of smart popups or maybe your mind is racing through scenarios on how you will create your popups.

Thanks for reading…

Smart pop-ups

https://help.zoho.com/portal/kb/articles/smart-pop-ups