The onsite marketing strategy that brings Asphalte 4,000+ leads every month

Prefer French? Read this case study in French.

We spoke with Benjamin Mateo, the Head of Growth and Tech at Asphalte, about how he built a growth strategy that brings in 4,000+ leads every month.

An online store with 500,000+ monthly visitors. Over 100,000 customers gained in five years. An annual turnover of around €25 million.

That’s Asphalte—a fashion brand whose customers help co-create products.

We’ll share the highlights of our interview with Ben, who gave detailed insights for businesses trying to generate more leads.

We will talk about:

• Asphalte: The beginning

• Asphalte’s business strategy

• Challenge: Lead generation with product surveys

• How Asphalte uses popups to generate leads and get feedback

• Results of lead generation campaigns with Wisepops

• Extra lead generation boost: On-site notifications

• Tutorial: Replicate Asphalte’s best campaign

1. Asphalte: The Beginning

William, Rodolphe, and Antonin founded Asphalte in 2016. All three worked in the menswear scene and knew the typical fashion business approach: buy products, sell them, and try to get the best margins.

The guys studied the market and found that customers wanted more freedom in the choice of styles, materials, and prices. This was something that the traditional model couldn’t provide.

So, they chose a different approach with these steps:

• Ask customers about their product preferences

• Make product prototypes based on customer feedback

• Launch a pre-order campaign to see if the product would sell

• Sell products to customers who pre-ordered them via the website

Did this work? You bet!

Fashion publications like The Gentleman’s Journal call the brand “the future of fashion.” MailChimp says its business model is “pioneering.”

Asphalte’s team has grown from four to 55 people (here are some of them).

Yet there’s still a lot of growing to do to achieve the company’s ambitious goals, says Ben.

Here’s how the brand’s business strategy helps to get there.

2. Asphalte’s Business Strategy

Before any item is made, Asphalte asks customers about their style preferences via product surveys made with Typeform. The surveys ask about what clothing customers want, why they want it, and when they want to wear it.

Here’s the latest product survey, asking about feedback for the 2022 spring and summer season styles.

Asphalte drives traffic to these surveys with engaging social media content. The brand’s social media pages (Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube) are active, publishing new content several times every week.

When the surveys end, the product team starts designing the new collection based on the feedback. Then, the designs are sent to manufacturers to create high-quality prototypes.

Next, the prototypes are released on the website through pre-order campaigns (see below) that are only available for a limited time.

Major benefits of this strategy include:

• No overproduction—No need to manufacture tons of clothing right away and hope that the customers will buy the entire collection.

• Lower business costs—Asphalte makes only the pre-ordered number of items, so there’s no need to pay for excess inventory.

• Matching customers’ needs—The brand’s team knows what materials and fabrics they need to buy in advance.

To keep this strategy working, Ben’s team needs to ensure that there are plenty of potential customers’ emails when product surveys end.

This brings us to the challenge… And popups!

3. The Challenge: Lead Generation with Product Surveys

Asphalte’s business strategy relies on collecting customer feedback and building an email list through product surveys.

After conducting marketing experiments, Ben’s team discovered one important insight.

So, if customers knew about Asphalte’s mission, they were more likely to convert. 

And research supports this: 83% of customers are loyal to brands whose values are aligned with theirs.1 

Fortunately, Asphalte found such a versatile lead generation tool: popups. Ben decided to try Wisepops to engage visitors with different messages related to the brand’s mission.

Why did he choose Wisepops, you ask?

Here are Ben’s reasons:

• Customization through CSS—Ben could customize the design, colors, and styles of popups to make them look natural on Asphalte’s website.

• Integration with other useful apps—Wisepops has flawless integration with Shopify and Klaviyo (both used by Asphalte). 

• Many different marketing popup types—Wisepops has email popups, exit-intent popups, spin-the-wheel popups, and many other options that are useful for different marketing messages.

Now, let’s see how Ben and his team used Wisepops to achieve their goals.

4. How Asphalte Uses Popups to Capture Visitors’ Emails

Since Asphalte started using Wisepops, Ben’s team has experimented with different kinds of popup campaigns.

But they needed to create a campaign to drive more visitors to the product survey to introduce them to the way Asphalte worked. So, they created a time-triggered popup (displayed after 30 seconds) to be shown to first-time visitors.

This popup invites customers to participate in setting future fashion trends—how’s that for a brand intro?

Besides being an amazing intro, this campaign also serves as a brilliant example of a unique and engaging popup.

Here’s what helps this campaign generate leads:

• Attention-grabbing headline—”Well, this is awkward” is great to capture attention.

• Engaging copy—Keeps visitors focused and reading further.

• Custom design—Makes this popup look like an original part of the website.

• Brand-inspired photography—Differentiates this popup from thousands of boring or pushy marketing counterparts.

Here’s how Ben explained his motivation to create such a popup.

Indeed, amazing work with this unique and attention-grabbing popup!

But there’s more:

For the same product survey campaign, Ben and his team used a different popup version for mobile visitors. This version meets Google’s requirements of user-friendliness, so it’s a completely SEO-optimized popup.

For Ben, testing these popup campaigns was essential to conversion optimization. So, he used Wisepops’ A/B testing features to test designs, customer targeting rules, and copy.

Here’s an example of popup campaigns used for A/B testing.

The time-triggered popup below had different designs but the same intent: invite the visitor to participate in the product survey.

Here’s the first campaign version. Note that it’s a full-screen popup that focuses the visitor’s attention on the message (this is another point of testing, as the previous campaign occupied only a part of the screen).

The second version of this campaign had a different background and feel.

The tests with different versions paid off nicely.

Thanks to A/B testing, Ben increased the CTR of popups from 15% to 25%.

5. Extra Boost to Lead Generation: On-Site Notifications

There was one more innovative way Ben’s team shared marketing messages: onsite notifications. They offered a familiar way to discover more about the brand (kinda like personalized social media notifications).

Noticing the notifications is super easy. If you head over to Asphalte’s website, you’ll see a small loudspeaker icon near the main menu. The red-colored bubble indicates unread messages and easily stands out.

Clicking the icon opens a small news feed. Thanks to the social media apps we all use, the notification feed feels like a familiar and easy way to get info.

This time, the feed shows messages about the latest pre-order campaigns. That’s not something customers want to miss, for sure! 😉

Besides messages about pre-orders, the notifications showed:

• Sales events

• Discount coupons

• Invitations to join the email list

• New blog posts and brand events

• Social media post notifications

• “Soon out of stock” and “back in stock” messages

Needless to say, Ben used many of these onsite notifications. From the very beginning, he wanted to focus on encouraging visitors to browse Asphalte’s website with targeted messages.

Here’s what he said about this experience.

The end result of the on-site notification strategy is improved performance across many aspects of lead generation, visitor engagement, and sales.

The most important results:

• More conversions—Visitors who interacted with the notifications converted 3.5 times more than those who didn’t (13.2% vs 3.8%).

• Greater engagement—Visitors who clicked on-site notifications viewed 2.5 times more pages on the website (6.6 vs 2.6).

• Higher customer value—11.5% of visitors who clicked notifications contributed to 42% of Asphalte’s revenue.

Using Wisepops is a great example of how knowing your customer can translate into profit. Ben knew that the visitors were looking for personalized brand experiences, so using targeted notifications was an effective way to engage them.

6. Results of Lead Generation with Wisepops

Two years into its Wisepops project, Asphalte has seen significant growth in lead generation, while also improving brand learning and visitor engagement. 

Here’s the overview of monthly campaign performance with the number of clicks and CTR.

Let’s take one month’s performance for evaluation.

In January:

• 60,000 visitors viewed the popups

• 15,000 clicked on them

• 4,000+ converted into leads

• CTR of 25% was achieved

That’s amazing, and here’s why:

A CTR of 25% is way higher than the average CTRs of popups (between 4% and 10%). Again, effective testing and popup content are major reasons for this success.

The data shows that the CTR stays around 20% consistently. This translates into around 4,000 high-quality new leads every month!

Their popups engage 15,000 website visitors per month, so Asphalte has plenty of opportunities to introduce its mission to lots of potential customers.

Bonus: Replicate Asphalte’s Lead Generation Success

Now for the best part! 

Let’s show you how you can create similar popup campaigns.

You can try using our popup app used by Ben:

No commitment, unlimited free trial.

Step 1: Choose popup style, background, and text

Ben used the full-screen popup with a custom background. This popup type focuses the attention of visitors on the message. If made with a branded visual and engaging text, it could fit into any website design very naturally.

You can add the background image in the Style tab of the Popup menu section. There, you can also write a message for visitors.

Ben went even further with the customization and added Asphalte’s unique font using CSS. You can do the same to use your brand’s unique font (but search the Wisepops’ library first—many common fonts are already included).

You can add custom CSS options in the CSS tab under the Popup menu section. Just add the code and save—it’s that easy.

Step 2: Add the CTA

As we mentioned, Asphalte used Typeform to make product surveys. Ben linked the CTAs in popups with Typeform to open the survey in a new browser tab.

You can, however, also set the survey to open on the same page. Navigate over to the Blocks menu section to see this CTA setting.

Step 3: Set a time delay

To ensure that visitors have some time to browse around, Ben decided to set the delay at 30 seconds before the popup appears. But you can choose any time delay.

To set the delay:

• Navigate to Display in the main menu

• Make sure you’re on the Trigger submenu

• Click After delay to activate a delayed popup appearance (in the Timing area)

• Set the delay period in seconds

Here’s what this menu section looks like.

Step 4: Choose display frequency

Ben set the campaign to appear to every new visitor to get more signups. In Wisepops settings, this means displaying the campaign for “every new session.”

To set the same frequency:

• Go to the Frequency tab in the Display main menu section

• Click Every session in the Show again setting

• Select Stop showing and After a visitor signed up or clicked to ensure that the popup doesn’t appear to those who took action

Once you’re done, the settings should look like this.

Step: 5: Target right audience

If your website is multilingual like Asphalte’s, you can set popups in one language to appear only on an appropriate website version.

This is easily done in the Pages tab that comes after Frequency.

Ben excluded all pages in English for French-language popups (but you can choose many other languages for your campaigns). 

He did the same for checkout pages to ensure that the shoppers aren’t interrupted while finishing purchases.

To exclude pages for your campaigns:

• Choose Select URLs

• Set the URL feature to Does not contain

• Type your website’s URL in the address bar

You can take a look at Asphalte’s settings below. Note that the third URL option excludes visitors who arrived at the website from the brand’s email newsletters. Those visitors have likely interacted with the campaign, so they might not need another reminder.

Your campaign is ready to go!

That wasn’t hard at all, agreed? As Asphalte’s example shows, a unique design and engaging copy that introduces the brand can make a huge difference for lead generation.

If you’re still wondering if you should create a similar campaign, let me show you Asphalte’s analytics with clicks and the CTR combined once again.

Wouldn’t you just love to see almost 10,000 clicks and a 20% CTR on your website, too?