How to Create a Free SMS Popup for Your Website Step-by-Step

Are you looking for a shortcut to collect leads for your SMS marketing campaigns? We got you.

Many small businesses worldwide use SMS marketing because it gets higher open rates, and 95% of text messages are read within 3 minutes.

Moreover, studies show that 48% of consumers preferred SMS to receive brand updates, while 22% preferred email.

SMS can convert a good deal of prospects, especially if you have time-sensitive offers to make. Whether you want to inform your customers about limited-time offers or send transactional information, an SMS popup can help you:

• Capture new leads
• Increase engagement
• Boost sales

So, in this post, we will show you how to create a free SMS popup for your website with Popupsmart. This way, you can start gathering SMS leads for your list, keep more customers informed, and your revenue growing.

But before that, let’s make things clear about SMS popups and why you would want to collect customers’ phone numbers in the first place.

What is an SMS Popup?

An SMS popup is a type of subscription popup on a website that aims to capture phone numbers from site visitors to use in SMS marketing campaigns.

Most SMS popups also aim to collect leads’ email addresses, but they request the information in exchange for a discount or a lead magnet.

Consumers tend to pay more attention to text messages, while other marketing mediums like email are much easier to ignore. This makes SMS marketing even more valuable for marketers.

Popup SMS campaigns on your website can quickly draw attention and snap those leads’ phone numbers to start texting your potential customers.

So, how do you create one? Keep on reading the steps to find out.

How to Create an SMS Subscription Popup

We’ll use only two tools to create an SMS popup campaign;

• Popupsmart
• SMS and email marketing software you use (such as SendinBlue, ActiveCampaign, or SendPulse)

Popupsmart is the simplest yet the most powerful conversion and lead generation tool out there. And as the name suggests, it is a popup builder that helps you create smart popups in minutes without any hassle.

Not just that, you can use Popupsmart to;

• Grow your email list
• Increase sales
• Boost engagement and conversions

Note that some email service providers have free plans as well.

Let’s see how you can create an SMS subscription popup in a few quick steps.

Step #1: Choose a template for the SMS Campaign

Once you’ve created a free account on Popupsmart, go to your dashboard to create a new popup. Select a canvas template or a ready-made popup template to start tweaking it as you like.

Popupsmart has a wide range of pre-built templates to choose from. All of them are designed to work smoothly over all devices (desktop, tablet, and mobile.)

You can pick a template where you can place an image of your lead magnet, which is an offer to entice leads. Or select a more basic one.

Step #2: Design Your SMS Popup

Now that we have picked a template let’s customize your SMS popup campaign to fit your website. We won’t discuss how to design your popup in-depth since there are too many options to cover just under a subtitle. However, here are the basics:

Basically, you can change anything on your popup like:

• Background color
• Image
• Headline and description
• Typefaces and font sizes
• Form fields
• Buttons, button colors, types
• Countdown timer
• Popup opening effect and more

To start designing your campaign, click on the Customize tab from the left bar.

Determine whether or not you want to display a privacy policy. It will show on the bottom of your popup.

All done! And it only took 3 minutes or less to create the demo SMS popup you see below.

Now here’s the most important part: Adding a phone number field on your popup.

If a template doesn’t have a “phone number” field, add one by clicking Customize > Add a new form field > phone input.

Off to the next step: decide to whom and when you will display the popup on your website.

Step #3: Set up Display and Targeting Options

To make sure your popup converts at its best, you need to configure its display and audience targeting settings right. That may sound complicated, but it’s incredibly streamlined with Popupsmart.

You’ll find many display rules and triggers on the Target tab from the left corner.

Some of the powerful targeting rules we offer are:

• Operating system detection
• New or returning visitors
• Traffic source
• Browser language
• Cookie Targeting
• Geo-Targeting

We also offer kickass triggers like:

• On exit intent (works on mobile too)
• After X seconds
• URL browsing
• After scrolling X percent
• In-activity mode
• HTML targeting
• On-click button popup

What’s even better is the Smart Mode feature. It gathers information about your visitors’ behavior and sets up the best possible targeting based on Artificial Intelligence.

So, you can either set up the display rules yourself or let the AI do that for you.

Are you planning on showing your popup on mobile too? Don’t forget to preview how your popup will look on mobile by clicking the mobile icon from the right-hand screen. If it is red, it means the mobile targeting is inactive.

To make mobile users see your popup, go to Target > Visitor Device > select Mobile > Save.

Step #4: Connect Email Marketing Software with Popupsmart

Congrats, your popup must be looking sleek! Now, we need to connect it to your email marketing service provider with SMS automation features.

Popupsmart can integrate with a variety of email marketing software. These include:

• SendinBlue
• SendGrid
• SendLoop
• Sendy
• MailChimp
• Email Octopus
• Klaviyo
• ActiveCampaign, and more

If you don’t see your service provider, then you can always connect it through Zapier.

How do you connect Popupsmart with your email marketing service? It’s easy; let’s go over SendinBlue, for example.

1. Go to the Publish tab from the left bar and click on Integrations. Then, select SendinBlue.

2. Set the Status on and give a name to your campaign.

3. Go to your SendinBlue account page and click on the Extras tab. Then, select API Keys and copy the API key. Go back to Popupsmart and paste it into the API Key field.

4. Select the list you want to integrate your SMS popup with. Choose which field you will be adding to the list (i.e., phone input field).

5. Save and close. If you publish and activate your popup, you can instantly capture phone numbers with your SMS popup.

Note: The integration process is more or less the same as with other email service providers.

You now have a conversion-ready SMS popup collecting phone numbers and automatically sending them to your SMS marketing list. You better buckle up because your conversions will sky-rocket. 🚀

One more cool thing about Popupsmart: You can actually see your leads on your Leads table. To see the leads captured with your SMS popup campaign, click on Leads from the top right.

This will open the Leads table, which covers detailed information about your leads such as page, device, country, browser, language, and more.

Ready to boost your SMS marketing strategy? Sign up for Popupsmart today.

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