Welcome Popup: 7 Examples & How to Create [Guide + Video]

Welcome!

To learn about welcome popups, see inspirational welcome popup designs, and get a tutorial on how to create them, just scroll down.

See what I did there? 

Just like this intro, a welcome popup is a message that greets new visitors to your website. It also has one super important goal: convert those new visitors into subscribers and customers.

In this post, you’ll find everything you need to make a welcome popup that converts visitors: examples, templates, tips, and a step-by-step creation guide.

Go to sections:

• What is a welcome popup?

• Examples of welcome popups

• How to add a welcome popup to any website 🎨

• Welcome popup tips

What is a welcome popup?

A welcome popup is a message that appears when visitors enter a website. Its goal is to attract the attention of new visitors and convert them into subscribers or customers.

Adding a welcome popup to a website is an effective way to convert visitors who are not ready to buy right away. That’s why online businesses use welcome popups to build email lists to nurture them with marketing campaigns later. Other popular uses include driving traffic to product pages and making marketing announcements.

Here’s a typical welcome popup from an ecommerce website.

Examples of welcome popups

If you’d like some inspiration, let’s take a look at some amazing designs of welcome popups from popular websites. These examples are both great-looking and effective, converting up to several thousands of visitors every month.

1. Full-screen welcome popup

• Website: Nickey Kehoe

• Goal: Build an email list

• Incentive: Early access to new products, exclusive deals, latest news, and invitations to in-person events

If you’re looking for an inspirational welcome popup, this might be the one. This one beautifully reinforces the brand identity and the overall classy website vibe. And just look at it—it’s simply gorgeous.

Nickey Kehoe shows its welcome popup a few seconds after opening a website. Note that you can close the popup in two ways (by clicking Enter Our Site or the close button). This design decision simplifies the task of closing the popup, which is a good way to keep the visitor experience positive.

2. Welcome popup with a discount

• Website: Blume

• Goals: a) Build an email list, b) Generate more orders from first-time visitors

• Incentive: a 20% discount for the first order + member perks (free shipping and returns)

A nice welcome popup that gives away a discount for the first order. Many ecommerce stores rely on homepage welcome popups like this one to build an email list and get orders.

This welcome popup from Blume converts 5% of website visitors, which is way above the average popup conversion rate of around 4.01%. Reasons: a generous offer, cool-looking branded popup design, and a good brand reputation.

Case study

Learn how Blume converts up 5% of their store visitors with welcome popups: Blume success story

Create this kind of campaign: Discount popups

3. Welcome popup with a free product sample

• Website: Sundays for Dogs

• Goal: Increase sales by helping visitors decide on purchasing 

• Incentive: Free product sample

Sundays For Dogs, a dog food subscription business, motivates newcomers to try a free sample of personalized food. It’s a great marketing tactic: free samples are proven to increase sales for food subscription businesses.

When customers click Get Yours, they go to the page with the sample product. There, they choose the recipe preference and order—the only charge is $5 for shipping. Thanks to the preference info, the business also collects useful data to personalize future offers.

Sundays for Dogs created this welcome popup with Wisepops.

See how businesses like yours are converting traffic with Wisepops.

4. Welcome popup with a coupon code

• Website: Candle Delirium

• Goals: Generate leads and sales from first-time visitors

• Incentive: a discount coupon code for the first purchase

Personalized coupons can get leads, increase order value, and drive sales. This welcome popup encourages first-time visitors to convert with a unique coupon code—also a good way to greet new visitors. Plus, unique codes also help track performance of the campaign.

Design-wise, it’s a pretty simple yet good-looking welcome popup. There’s a nice image of a product from Candle Delirium, branded design, and a short & sweet message. A good example of a welcome popup for ecommerce stores.

5. Welcome popup with a software demo

• Website: Zendesk

• Goals: Increase demo views and generate leads

• Incentive: Seeing how Zendesk can help to improve the quality of customer service with examples

This welcome popup stood out to me for various reasons. 

First, Zendesk is a software business, so the purpose of the campaign is to showcase the product in a demo session. Second, the popup makes the most out of the image, showing a screenshot of the product’s dashboard along with some popular apps it integrates with.

When visitors click on the CTA button, the site takes them to the demo signup page. There, they enter their name and email to begin watching the demo.

Overall, Zendesk gives us an awesome example of how website popups help software businesses generate leads and build awareness of their products.

6. “Brand intro” welcome popup

• Website: PRESS Healthfoods

• Goal: Build a list of loyal customers

• Incentive: Weekly content with healthy lifestyle tips, VIP offers, and giveaways

Two things caught my attention here: a beautiful product image and the casual tone of writing accompanied by an emoji.

PRESS Healthfoods did an amazing job with product images, so including one in a welcome popup is a good idea. Besides, popups with images convert almost 5% of visitors while those without images convert only 2.85%.

As for the copy, “Let’s make it official 🙌” feels like a friendly conversation starter, which evokes a sense of liking. Such a friendly, casual communication style is something that 57% of online shoppers prefer, so this welcome popup nails the good first impression.

7. Welcome popup with a limited-time offer

• Website: Pedego Bikes

• Goal: Increase sales of specific products

• Incentive: Limited-time offer to upgrade a product for free

Besides generating email signups, welcome popups are also great for raising awareness of promotional limited-time offers. This is exactly what this welcome popup is trying to accomplish: drive traffic to a product page with an enticing limited-time deal.

Copywriting is another great thing about this popup. Even a few sentences here are packed with attention-grabbing power words: “free,” “limited time,” “save,” and “ends.” Using these words in headlines is a proven tactic in which experienced writers engage visitors:

How to add a welcome popup to any website

You can create and add a welcome popup to your website easily and quickly. For this purpose, we’ll be using our own popup builder.

If you prefer a video with a tutorial, use this one below. But if you’d like a step-by-step guide, it’s right below the video.

So—

Follow these steps to create and add a welcome popup to your website without coding.

To begin, get a free account in Wisepops:

Unlimited free trial, no cc required. Learn more about Wisepops popup maker

★★★★★

"We've increased our signups by 10x, very easy to integrate with our website and email platform, too"

Wisepops review from Capterra

Steps to make a welcome popup:

• Step 1: Make a new campaign

• Step 2: Pick a campaign format and use case

• Step 3: Select a popup template

• Step 4: Design your welcome popup

• Step 5: Customize the thank-you window

• Step 6: Define how to show your popup

• Step 7: Publish your website popup

Step 1: Make a new campaign

Let’s create a classic welcome popup for online stores—the one that promises access to special offers and a discount as a thank-you for subscribing. But you can customize your version in the process in any way you want.

In the Wisepops dashboard, click Create Campaign:

Step 2: Pick a campaign format and use case

Since we’re creating a welcome popup to build your email list, choose Popup and Emails & Phone: 

Step 3: Select a popup template

Now we choose what our welcome popup will look like. Our template library gives you some good choices of premade popup formats.

Click a template to confirm your choice and move on to the next step.

We’ll go with this welcome popup template—it’s got a familiar format that focuses the attention of visitors on the message.

Step 4: Design your welcome popup

We need to make this welcome popup truly yours—

This means customizing colors, images, and text to make it look like a natural part of your website. Doing this is very easy thanks to the drag and drop editor—just click an element and change.

First, let’s write our text.

Click the textual element to open editing settings. Just above the popup, you’ll see them (highlighted in the image).

Next—

Let’s add a new image.

To do that, click on the visual in the template. This will launch the image menu on the left side of your screen. There, click Replace and choose another image.

I changed the colors and the image by clicking on them and—

Here’s how our template looks now. Looks like a real welcome popup from a candle store, agree?

And you can totally design the same (and much better!) popup.

For those interested in replicating this design, I used:

• Arial for font

• #803345 for color

• This free photo for the visual

Step 5: Customize the thank-you window

A thank-you window appears when a visitor fills in the fields and clicks Sign Me Up. Most popup templates are equipped with this window because they’re used to confirm the subscription, thank the visitor, and share discount codes (here are 20 discount code ideas, just in case).

To start—

Click the Thank you tab.

There, you’ll see the thank-you window.

Customize the design exactly as you did for the main welcome popup. You can easily return to the main one to get color codes—just click Main Pop-Up. Also, add the promised discount code (I went with TENOFF).

Here’s what my version looks like.

Now, the design of our welcome popup is done.

The last thing before publishing is to set the popup to be displayed on your site to new visitors. That’s what we’re about to do.

Step 6: Define how to show your popup

Go to Display rules in the main menu.

Wisepops will show your welcome popup to visitors after they spend eight seconds on your website. If you’d like to display it earlier, say, five seconds, simply add your preferred number in the Show only after field.

And the last setting—

We want only our new visitors to see this welcome popup. To ensure that, choose New visitors in the Audience tab.

That’s it.

You just created a good-looking, branded welcome popup for your site to generate leads and grow your audience. Well done!

Step 7: Publish your welcome popup!

We’re done designing our popup, so hit Done editing. You’ll be redirected to the campaign overview window, where you click Publish and confirm.

That’s it, the welcome popup is live on your website! Congrats!

Once the popup starts receiving views and generating emails, you’ll be able to check the performance in the Wisepops dashboard.

Welcome popup tips

Use these tips to make your welcome popup a lead generation machine.

1. Offer benefits

Fresh, useful content, discounts, coupons, exclusive offers, free shipping, early access to new products—businesses add to welcome popups all of these. If you’re running an online business, consider using an incentive, too.

2. Write clear copy

All great welcome popups clearly communicate an engaging message.

To write good copy:

• Keep it short & sweet. People need to get your message as soon as possible, so try to write only two sentences (headline + the supporting message)

• Be engaging and creative. Use friendly, casual language in your welcome popup—but don’t hesitate to be witty or playful if your brand’s voice allows it

• Ask people to act. Describe what you need your visitors to do and be clear about that action

Here's how to write a welcome message for customers.

3. Make your popup appear with a delay

People don’t like popups that appear the moment they arrive at websites. 

That’s why consider setting a delay of at least five seconds for your welcome popup (just like we did in the tutorial).

Experienced marketers also do a simple trick. They find out the average time people spend on their website with Google Analytics and set the display time at about 20% of that value. For example, if the average time is 60 seconds, the popup might appear at 12 seconds (20% of 60 = 12).

4. Add a countdown timer

A sense of urgency is a powerful motivator to buy: Wisepops research shows that adding a countdown timer increases the conversion rate by 41%.

To add this element in Wisepops: in the main menu, go to Blocks and choose Countdown. The timer will automatically be added to your welcome popup.

Steps: how to make a countdown timer popup

5. Test different versions of welcome popups

Some customers want to find the best price. 

Others tend to buy on impulse. 

To find out the preferences of your visitors (and what makes them buy), create different versions of the welcome popup campaign. 

In Wisepops, this means creating an A/B test: essentially, you duplicate your welcome popup by clicking AB testing in the dashboard. Here’s a view of a campaign that was split into two versions this way.

The split makes it easy to change the second campaign version in a way you want (discount size, countdown/no countdown, etc.) and monitor the results.

Welcome popups FAQ

Although welcome popups are popular, many website owners have concerns over their effectiveness and the impact on visitor experience. That’s why in this last section, we’ll answer the most common questions people have.

How effective are welcome popups?

Welcome popups can convert up to 5% of visitors.

Will a welcome popup hurt my customers’ experience?

Welcome popups can be annoying if they are too generic and appear too quickly. If you design a branded campaign with a clear value for visitors, then you should be able to convert many visitors.

How does a welcome popup affect my store’s SEO?

If you use top popup software to create a welcome popup, then your campaigns will be 100% compliant with all SEO requirements.

For more tips and insights about popups, take a look at other guides at Wisepops blog.