Popups have a reputation. We've all landed on a site, barely had a second to look around, and been hit with a full-screen form asking for an email address before we even know what the brand sells. That's not a popup problem - that's a strategy problem.

A well-timed, well-designed popup is one of the most effective list growth tools an ecommerce brand has. Avoiding them because you don't want to seem pushy doesn't make your site feel more premium - it just means fewer people are entering your email ecosystem every single day.

But here's the question I want to ask if you already have one: when did you last actually look at it? Not glance at it - actually open it, put your email in, read through every step, and ask whether it's doing what you'd want it to do for a first-time visitor? For most brands, the honest answer is whenever I first set it up - which might have been a year ago, two years ago, or longer.

The details in a popup matter a lot more than most brands realize. And there's one part of it that almost everyone overlooks entirely.

In this episode, I walk through the three parts of a popup worth auditing: the trigger, the suppression settings, and the success step - including one counterintuitive recommendation about your discount code that might genuinely surprise you.

✨ In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why popups get a bad reputation - and why avoiding them is costing you subscribers

• The difference between a time delay and scroll trigger, and how to decide which makes sense for your site

• The 80% rule for setting popup timing based on your actual session data

• Why where your traffic is coming from should influence when your popup fires

• Two suppression settings worth checking right now - and why showing a popup to existing subscribers is a bad look

• What the success step is and why it's the most underlooked part of any popup setup

• Why putting your discount code on the success step is actually working against you

• What that first open and first click really means for your deliverability - and how your popup can set that up right

A popup that's been running untouched for two years isn't a set-it-and-forget-it win. It's just a decision nobody's revisited.

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