[CASE STUDY: JKINIS SWIMWEAR] How This Small Business Collected 103 Emails In 30 Days Without Spending $ on Ads!

Custom, hand-made swimsuit shop Jkinis grew its email list by 103 emails in just 30 days, all without running any ads or generating additional traffic to their site.

For big sites, this may seem like an easy task, but any small business owner will tell you – starting an email list from scratch is no small feat. Growing an email list by more than 100 emails per month on top of that can practically feel like a miracle.

Read on to learn how Jkinis’ owner and sole employee, Julie, used Hello Bar to grow her email list, plus the clever lead magnets she used to get more email sign-ups and more sales.

The Full Break Down Of Julie’s Winning Hello Bar Results

Over the month of November 2018, Julie added 103 brand new emails to Jkinis’ email list without running any ads or driving any additional traffic to the site. This immense growth in the size of her email list came as a surprise – without the traffic from ads, Julie wasn’t expecting to see such growth at all.

The 103 newly collected emails even led to sales almost right away – within one week, Julie had already sold nearly $300 worth of merchandise all thanks to the emails she collected using Hello Bar.

Check out her winning pop-ups here:

Before Hello Bar: How Julie Started From Scratch To Build A Big & Healthy Email List

Before using Hello Bar, Julie’s email list was practically non-existent. The only time she added new email addresses to her list was when someone made a purchase on her site – and this was mainly to share shipping information.

At the time, Julie was making a fair number of sales by driving traffic to her site using ads, but she was looking at her site’s traffic and becoming increasingly frustrated that of all the visitors coming to her site, there weren’t more of them taking action and actually buying her swimsuits.

It was hard to watch all of her SEO and advertising efforts pay off in a higher rate of traffic to her site, but not to see an increase in sales from that traffic.

Julie’s main problems with her site were:

People were browsing through her products, but very rarely were they making a purchase
With a good portion of her site views coming from ads, most of her traffic was not yet warmed up to her product, so they were leaving – causing a high bounce rate
When people did select a swimsuit and add it to their cart, they weren’t going through with the purchase, and instead were abandoning their carts and leaving the site

With these problems in mind, Julie sought out a solution to get more out of the traffic coming to her website.

She knew that if she had a way to get in touch with the people coming to check out the custom swimsuits on her site, she could nurture them, familiarize them with her brand, and ultimately get them to buy a swimsuit. Essentially, she could lead them down her full sales funnel.

But the issue wasn’t leading people through her sales funnel. The struggle was how to actually collect their information so she could get in touch with them in the first place. Was it better to drive them over to her social media pages? Grab their email address? Julie wasn’t sure where to start.

After some research, Julie came across Hello Bar and decided to give pop-ups a try.

She noticed that she had the ability to point people towards her social media pages or to simply collect their email using Hello Bar, but she wanted to focus on just one starting out. So she wrote into the team and asked which would be the better place to start – a common question.

The main argument for email, she learned, was that it allowed her to stay in touch with the visitors to her site. On social media platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, there is always the danger of an algorithm shifting or a mass migration to the newest, hottest platform (RIP Vine and MySpace).

So, to play it safe and ensure she could reach her customer base, Julie opted for collecting emails using Hello Bar.

Here is the Exact Path Julie Took to Collect 103 Emails In One Month and (530 Email Addresses For The Year!)

The very first pop-up that Julie designed for her site, Jkinis, was a full page takeover that was timed to appear upon exit – otherwise known as an exit intent.

With a good portion of her site’s traffic coming from ads, Julie knew that sometimes, people just weren’t warmed up enough to buy from her just yet. They were coming into her site completely cold to her product, and that was causing a lot of them to bounce from the site – and, unfortunately, never come back.

So, the implementation of an exit intent was perfect. She could catch people right as they were leaving her site or, even worse, abandoning their cart that was already loaded with potential swimsuit purchases.

Here’s what Julie’s first pop-up looked like:

Variation A)

There are a few notable things about this pop-up:

1. The background was comprised of a GIF that displayed Jkinis swimsuits in various angles and shots, while being worn by real people, which let potential customers imagine exactly what the swimsuits would look like from all vantages

2. The color of the CTA button was bright pink and really drew the eye of any visitors

3. The text offered a 15% off discount code, which was perfect for an exit intent – if people were leaving the Jkinis site due to price, this might be enough to reel them back in

Additionally, it’s important to note that Julie made use of Hello Bar’s A/B testing feature and created two separate versions of that same pop-up, but with different text, so that she could test all three against each other and find the text that worked best to convert her site visitors into members of her email list.

Here are the variations she set up (note: these also used the same exact GIF in the background):

Variation B)

Variation C)

Julie let these variations test for a few weeks and saw the following results from her A/B testing:

With conversion rates between 1-2%, these pop-ups were a great start for Jkinis site (a good conversion rate is typically between 2-3%). And, as you can see, in just a matter of weeks Julie collected 81 new emails to add to her list – pretty incredible!

When we look at the winning variation (variation A), there are a few factors that seem to have pushed it to the top.

For starters, this pop-up offered 15% off – so there was a nice and juicy discount for anyone who saw it. The pop-up with text regarding the fit of the swimsuit (variation B) converted the very lowest, likely due to its lack of a discount.

Variation A and variation C were very similar, though. Both offered a 15% discount and both had the exact same text on the button. However, variation A differed in that it had more text in the headline – instead of variation C, which just offered the discount alone. In this, we see that the text that’s used in the pop-up can make a big difference (1.5% versus 1.8%) and the more personalization, the better the conversion results.

Julie’s A/B Testing Process

After one round of A/B testing, Julie knew she had a decent pop-up. But she wanted to keep pushing her conversion rate higher – so she decided to test another pop-up against the winning pop-up from the last round of testing.

After all, she now had a better idea of what resonated well with her site’s audience. For example, the first round of testing showed her that Jkinis customers were hungry for discounts, so some sort of monetary offer would likely be the best direction to continue forward in.

So, with this in mind, Julie created another page takeover – again, timed to appear upon exit.

Here’s what Julie’s next pop-up looked like:

Looking at this pop-up, you’ll notice the following:

1. Julie offered free shipping to anyone who signed up for her email list as her lead magnet, instead of the 15% discount from before

2. Julie did not use a GIF as the background imagery and instead used a still photo

3. Julie changed the color of her CTA button from pink to blue

Here’s how it converted:

With a conversion rate of 1% and 44 emails collected, this was not a bad showing. But it still wasn’t quite as high-converting as Julie’s first pop-up, so it was back to the drawing board, and back to the A/B testing.

Julie cycled through a few rounds of A/B testing on her site. She tested out different text promoting the same offer, different colors of buttons for her CTA, even different images and template styles.

With each test, she got closer and closer to knowing what really resonated for her specific audience and Jkinis’ customer base. For example, a blue CTA button on the pop-ups typically converted very well for Jkinis audience – a yellow button did not.

These findings, through A/B testing, were items Julie was able to carry forward into other areas of Jkinis marketing efforts. If she found a power word in a Hello Bar pop-up, that same word typically converted just as well on email. If there was a certain color that really caught her audience’s eye, Julie was able to keep using that across all her digital marketing practices.

But, let’s not stop here. Julie was able to get her pop-ups’ conversion rate up even higher.

Highest Converting Pop-Ups

For her next round of testing, Julie came up with an entirely different lead magnet – instead of offering a percentage discount or free shipping, Julie offered her visitors the change to win a $100 gift card for Jkinis.

This is what her two variations looked like:

Variation A)

Variation B)

Both variations display the same text, same offer, and same colors. The template is the exact same, and so is every little detail apart from the image. In terms of A/B testing, this couldn’t be purer.

Here’s the impact that changing just the image alone had on each pop-up variation’s conversion rate:

As you can see, variation B won, with a conversion rate of 3.7%. The image alone resulted in a difference of .5% when it came to the conversion rate!

There are a few likely reasons why variation B’s image performed better:

The first image only shows one swimsuit style, while the second image shows three different Jkinis swimsuit styles. This gives site visitors a better opportunity to view Jkinis’ various offerings, identify with other women with similar body types, and experience more options that can be created for them
In the first image, the woman is smiling with closed lips, but in the second image, all three women are smiling with their teeth exposed and one of them appears to be laughing – it is very clear that all are having a great time. Their energy is contagious, and likely contributed to this variation converting better than the first image
With three women wearing Jkinis swimsuits instead of just one, there is a greater aspect of social proof in the second pop-up. This demonstrates this pop-up to be popular among a bigger group

Ultimately, with a conversion rate of 3.7%, Julie’s page takeover exit intents exceeded the satisfactory range of 2-3%. She went above and beyond!

But she didn’t stop there.

Julie didn’t just use page takeovers to optimize her website. She actually combined these exit intents with another pop-up type – the top bar, for which Hello Bar is best known.

Top Bar

Once Julie implemented the page takeover pop-up, she had a taste for how quickly Hello Bar could grow her email list and, in turn, her sales. Through just the page takeover alone, she had collected hundreds of emails.

Like any business owner, she wanted to maximize the value she was getting from Hello Bar and make sure to use the entire toolset. So, Julie set up a second pop-up type – a top bar.

Here’s what her first Hello Bar top bar looked like (peep the light blue strip at the top of the page):

Variation A)

And, like any good marketer, Julie made sure to A/B test her top bar. So, she created this second variation:

Variation B)

She even went so far as to set up device-specific targeting, so that her pop-ups would display perfectly, whether they were viewed from a mobile device, a tablet, or a desktop computer.

Here’s what Julie’s mobile versions of her bars looked like – notice how she switched the bar to the bottom of the page, instead of the top, to allow for better user experience on the mobile site:

Mobile Variation A)

Mobile Variation B)

Here are the results:

As you can see, the traffic to Jkinis site differed between desktop and mobile. Mobile visitors were less likely to opt-in on the bar – with both variations of the mobile bar converting at .2%, while the desktop variations scored slightly higher conversion rates, with a top rate of .4%.

While this conversion rate wasn’t ideal, Julie still collected 149 emails using these bars. It was well worth it to add this into her page takeover pop-ups!

Julie went on to create new variations of the bars, again using Hello Bar’s A/B testing feature.

Here are her next takes on the top bar, this time using a special discount to entice visitors into joining her email list:

Variation A)

Variation B)

Variation C)

As you can see, the offer on each top bar was the same – a discount of 15%. But the text and the wording that Julie used to promote this discount was slightly different for each bar.

Here are the results from the A/B test:

With this test, Julie was able to improve her top bar’s conversion rate from .4% up to .7% – further proof of the power of A/B testing.

All-Time Results Using Hello Bar Testing for One Year

With the combined efforts of an exit intent page takeover and a top bar, Julie collected 530 emails using Hello Bar pop-ups in just one year.

And the best part?

The conversion rates for each of her pop-ups are increasing higher and higher with every A/B test Julie conducts. That means more emails collected, more leads generated, and more sales in the months to come as Julie continues to use Hello Bar on Jkinis.

By the end of her first year on Hello Bar, Julie found the winning formula for her site, allowing her to collect 103 emails in just one month. At that rate, Julie stands to more than double her efforts from last year and add a whopping 1,236 emails to her list this year.

Ready to add 1,000+ emails to your email list this year?

Here Are 2 Easy Steps to Build Pop-Ups That Will Get You More Emails Than Ever This Year

Find the most appealing offer for your audience. Whether you have existing blog posts on your site that you can convert into downloadable eBooks, or whether you want to go all out and build a unique and interactive quiz, an exciting lead magnet is a must-have for success. If you’re in eCommerce, think about trying out a competition, discount, or lottery like Julie used. People love opportunities to save!
Present your offer in the most exciting words and terms possible. That means focusing on your pop-up’s copy. Once you’ve found the perfect lead magnet for your pop-ups, you’ll want to focus on presenting that lead magnet in the most eye-catching way possible. That means finding the best words to communicate the value that your lead magnet can give people who make use of it. Of course, not everyone is a world-class writer. That’s why here at Hello Bar, we have an entire team of professional copywriters available to write custom pop-up text just for you – based on any idea you have in mind! Want to give this a try? Just message our support team at support@hellobar.com to get started right away.
Play with the design of your pop-up. Don’t be afraid to change up colors, fonts, images, and more! The only way you can know what really works to convert people into joining your email list – instead of what just looks pretty – is to set up A/B tests between different designs of your pop-ups. Use Julie’s tests as an example! You can see exactly how impactful some of her changes were. But the best part is, you’ll be able to apply your findings to all aspects of your own site!

That’s it. Three quick, simple methods to get your pop-ups on the same level as Julie’s in order to get the best results possible out of using Hello Bar on your site.

Still not sure where to start? Just let us know! Our team of marketing specialists is always available to hop on a strategy call, walk through your pop-up set-up, and teach you the best practices to ensure your pop-up converts. Just get in touch at support@hellobar.com.