Ecommerce Pop-Ups: The Hidden Cost of Email Capture

Imagine walking into a store you’ve never visited before. You’re on vacation, have twenty minutes to kill, and decide to look around.

You haven’t touched anything. You’re not even sure you like what they sell. And suddenly a salesperson jumps in front of you.

“Welcome! What’s your email address? I’ll give you 10% off.”

That’s insane. Nobody would ask a salesperson to behave that way.

But online, we call it a best practice.

And because ecommerce pop-ups generate revenue, we’ve turned one of the more annoying parts of online shopping into something companies are afraid to stop doing.

When is the revenue worth the experience?

Alex McEachern recently shared a LinkedIn post about his experience shopping on Wayfair. He had dismissed an email pop-up, only to have it appear again a few pages later. Apparently, the site wasn’t taking no for an answer.

He asked when the profit is worth the poor experience, and I think that’s a question more ecommerce teams should be asking.

I get why companies do it. Email addresses are valuable. They allow us to continue communicating with visitors after they leave, bring them back to the site, and potentially turn someone who wasn’t ready to purchase into a customer.

Giving up a little margin to acquire that relationship can make sense. I’ve spent years working with these kinds of experiences, and much to my displeasure, the sites I work on continue to use these types of offers.

But I wonder how often we’re evaluating the actual business value versus simply looking at the revenue associated with the emails we’ve captured.

They’re not necessarily the same thing.

Are we measuring incremental revenue or just attributed revenue?

Let’s say someone visits your site, sees a pop-up offering 10% off, enters their email, and makes a purchase.

We’ve captured an email address, generated a sale, and potentially attributed that revenue to our email capture program. Depending on how we’re measuring success, that looks like a pretty good result.

But what if that person was going to purchase anyway?

We’ve now given up 10% of the sale to encourage something that might have happened without the incentive. Or maybe they would have returned a week later and purchased at full price.

In either case, we might have accelerated the purchase without creating any additional revenue. And we’ve potentially given away margin in the process.

That’s the part I think gets overlooked when teams use attributed revenue to justify these programs.

I’m not suggesting discounts never generate incremental revenue. Of course they can. But if we’re going to accept a worse experience for the potential upside, shouldn’t we be measuring how much additional business we’re actually creating?

We should be looking beyond email submissions and the revenue associated with those subscribers. What happened to overall revenue per visitor? How much margin did we give up? And did we acquire subscribers who continue to generate value after that initial purchase?

Otherwise, we may be celebrating a program that’s taking credit for sales we were already going to get.

Are we acquiring customers or just giving away discounts?

I was reading Wunderkind’s recent Black Friday / Cyber Monday 2026 research, and a few of the findings caught my attention.

According to their consumer survey, 36% of respondents say they subscribe to emails or texts in exchange for discounts. Another 40% intentionally leave products in their carts hoping to receive a follow-up offer.

It gets even more interesting. About 31% say they repeatedly visit products or websites trying to trigger remarketing offers, and 20% report using multiple email addresses or identities to access first-time-buyer incentives.

We’ve gotten to a point where some shoppers aren’t just responding to promotions. They’re actively trying to trigger them.

I have to wonder how much of that behavior we’ve encouraged ourselves.

Think about someone shopping for a holiday gift. They find what they’re looking for, get offered 10% off for providing an email address, and make the purchase.

From the retailer’s perspective, that’s a new subscriber and a sale. But we’ve potentially sacrificed margin on a purchase that was going to happen anyway, and we have no idea whether that person has any intention of shopping with us again.

They might become a great customer. Or they might have bought a gift for someone they barely know and have absolutely no reason to return.

Yet we’ve assigned value to that email address based on what we hope it will generate in the future.

I’d be curious to see how these discount-driven subscribers perform six months later. Are they still opening emails? Are they returning to the site? More importantly, are they making additional purchases?

Wunderkind’s research doesn’t answer those questions, but it does make me question whether we’re putting too much emphasis on capturing email addresses and not enough on the quality of the relationships we’re creating.

We’re measuring everyone who says yes. What about everyone who says no?

This is the other part of the problem, and I think it goes well beyond email capture.

We’re pretty good at measuring the people who interact with our experiences. We know how many visitors saw the pop-up, how many entered their email, how many used the discount, and how much revenue followed.

But what are we learning from the people who dismissed it?

Someone lands on a product page from Google Shopping. They’re trying to figure out whether they’ve even found the right product, and within seconds, a pop-up covers the page asking for their email.

They close it and continue shopping.

Maybe they don’t care about the discount. Maybe they don’t know enough about the brand yet. Or maybe they just want to see the product they clicked on.

We don’t know why they dismissed the offer, but we do know they weren’t interested in it at that moment.

That’s useful information.

Yet instead of learning from that response, we often continue trying to get the same visitor to engage with the same message.

Alex’s experience with Wayfair is a pretty good example. He’d already dismissed the pop-up, but the site kept showing it anyway.

Imagine that happening in a physical store. You tell the salesperson you’re just looking, they walk away, and a minute later they’re standing in front of you asking for your email again.

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s essentially what we’re doing online.

Part of the problem is how these programs are measured. If a team’s success is tied to growing the email list and the revenue attributed to it, they’re naturally going to focus on increasing those numbers.

It’s much harder to demonstrate the value of not interrupting someone.

And if the pop-up is generating measurable revenue, removing it can look like a bad business decision, even if the overall experience might be better without it.

Why are we treating every visitor the same?

I’m not against offering discounts or giving people opportunities to subscribe. There are plenty of situations where those messages can be useful.

Someone who’s been comparing prices across several retailers may genuinely appreciate an offer. Someone who’s returned to the same product multiple times might be interested in a price-drop notification. And someone who’s spent time exploring a brand might actually want to hear about new products.

But none of those situations is the same as someone who’s been on the website for five seconds.

So why do we keep treating them as though they are?

This is where personalization should be doing more of the work.

We have access to information about how visitors arrive, what they’re looking at, whether they’re exploring or narrowing their options, and how their behavior changes throughout the visit.

None of those signals tells us exactly what someone is thinking, but they can help us make better decisions about what to show and when.

Maybe someone who’s early in their journey would benefit more from help finding the right product than from a discount. Someone purchasing a last-minute gift might care more about delivery timing, while a visitor comparing prices could be more interested in an offer.

And sometimes the right decision is to leave them alone.

I’m not suggesting we can accurately predict what every visitor wants. But surely we can do better than asking everyone for their email address five seconds after they land on the site.

What I’d actually test with ecommerce pop-ups

If I were evaluating an email capture program, I wouldn’t start by trying to improve its submission rate. I’d first want to understand whether it’s creating incremental value for the business.

That means looking at the entire visitor population, not just the people who interact with the pop-up.

I’d want to compare an experience with the traditional welcome offer against one without it, measuring revenue per visitor, conversion, AOV, and ideally the impact on margin.

I’d also want to understand the difference between capturing an email and offering a discount. Are people subscribing because they want to hear from the brand, or are we simply buying an email address with a promotion?

Those are two different things, and they deserve to be evaluated separately.

Then there’s the question of timing and audience. Rather than showing the same offer to everyone, what happens when we make it available based on where someone is in their journey or the behaviors they’re showing?

I’d be particularly interested in what happens when we respect the visitor’s decision to dismiss an offer instead of continuing to show it.

And I’d want to follow those subscribers beyond their first purchase. An email address that generates one discounted order and never produces another sale has a very different value from one that develops into a long-term customer relationship.

None of this means the email capture rate isn’t important. It’s a useful metric, but it shouldn’t be the measure of whether the experience is successful.

The bigger question is whether we’re creating more profitable business without unnecessarily making the shopping experience worse.

Sometimes the best message is no message

I think one reason ecommerce pop-ups have become so persistent is that companies can easily point to the revenue they generate.

There’s a number attached to the email addresses collected, the campaigns sent, and the purchases that followed. And once a company sees revenue associated with something, it’s understandably difficult to walk away from it.

Especially during the holidays, when everyone is under pressure to deliver results.

But just because something produces measurable revenue doesn’t mean it’s producing as much value as we think.

We need to get better at understanding the impact on everyone who doesn’t engage, the margin we’re potentially giving away, and whether we’re actually creating additional business.

I’m not suggesting we get rid of pop-ups (well, I kind of am).

At the very least, we should stop assuming that because an experience generates revenue, it deserves to be shown to everyone.

Just because we can show a visitor a message doesn’t mean they’re ready for that message.