I was auditing a brand's website last week and saw something I've seen on too many DTC sites, something that kills on-site conversion rate and can cut email signups in half.

I landed on the homepage and an email popup fired immediately.

That wasn't the issue.

Not three seconds later, another popup.

What the…

I almost closed the tab myself , and I was actively looking at the site. A real visitor with zero patience would have been gone after the second one.

Turns out they had two popups running from two different platforms and never turned the old one off. Completely understandable mistake.

But here's the bigger problem, this kind of thing happens because most brands build their popups separately, launch them, and never actually test the full on-site experience together.

Email form built by one person. SMS form added later by someone else. Exit intent thrown in at some point.

Nobody ever sat down and visited their own site like a real customer to see what actually happens.

The visitor who bounces because they got hit with two or three popups in under a minute didn't just fail to subscribe.

They left your site entirely.

That's ad spend you already paid turning into a bounce because of a timing setting nobody thought to check.

There's no dashboard that tells you "your popups are the problem."

The traffic just quietly underperforms and nobody connects the dots.

There's no single right answer here, every brand's traffic and customer behavior is different.

But there are three levers worth considering and most brands need a combination of all three.

⏱️ Timing delays. The simplest starting point. Set your email popup to fire immediately and your SMS popup to fire at least two minutes later. Exit intent should only fire after someone has had enough time to actually see your site. Stagger everything so a visitor could theoretically encounter all three forms without feeling ambushed.

📄 Page-based rules. Instead of firing on time alone, trigger forms based on behavior. An SMS popup that only fires after someone has viewed three or more pages is reaching a visitor who is genuinely interested rather than someone who just landed and hasn't decided if they care yet. Higher intent visitor, better conversion rate, stronger list quality.

🎯 List-based targeting. This is the one most brands skip entirely. If someone is already on your email list they should never see your email popup again. If someone is already an SMS subscriber they should never see your SMS popup. Build suppression rules that check list membership before any form fires. Your email subscribers who haven't yet opted into SMS are your highest intent SMS prospects — that's exactly who that popup should be targeting.

Go to your own site right now and act like a first time visitor.

Land on the homepage, browse for two minutes, then try to leave. Count how many forms fire and how fast.

If you feel even slightly annoyed by the experience, your visitors do too, and they have far less patience than you do.

Then go into your Klaviyo forms and check the display timing and targeting rules on every active form.

If they were built at different times by different people and nobody has looked at them together since, there's a good chance they're conflicting in ways that are costing you signups every single day.

But if you want to go deeper and actually start testing what's working across key metrics like New Subscriber Conversion rate (What % of new subscribers turn into customers), revenue, and email sign-up %, we linked our 7-step Popup A/B Testing Sheet, the sheet we use to track sign-up form tests with our own clients.

It's free. Make a copy and it's yours.

GET THE POPUP A/B TESTING SHEET

Enjoy it and let me know if you have any questions.

— Anthony

P.S. Reply with “POPUP“ and I'll take a look at your current form setup and tell you exactly what I'd change first.