It’s no secret that repeat customers are the best customers. As a result, the majority of the Sailthru platform centers on engaging and retaining customers across each unique customer journey. But our Overlays product aims to help marketers increase customer acquisition in addition to further engaging and converting site visitors.

If someone is about to leave your website, a good overlay can encourage them to stay. And if they’re on your website for a while, passively expressing interest, an overlay can prompt them to sign up for email, improving the likelihood that they’ll return. Either way, Overlays help you maintain full control of the customer journey through recommendations and content settings.

How Publishers and Retailers Can Use Overlays

Sailthru’s Overlays allow our customers to create personalized sign-up form overlays using existing data, boosting sign-ups and ultimately stoking engagement.

For media brands specifically, they increase website pageviews with content announcements, such as breaking news, and personalized recommendations. We also offer an Overlay that will show readers a premium paid subscription offer instead of ads.

On the retail side, we offer a different set to help increase revenue and conversions with pop-up sale announcements, email acquisition triggers, and personalized product recommendations.

Overlays and Personalization

Overlays live at the top of a webpage, displayed as either a modal window or a top bar. They’re created with two goals in mind. Announcement is a simple message without any interactive elements, while user signup includes a form for people to enter their email addresses.

Revisiting a 2004 study about the least popular ad formats, the Nielsen Norman Group found that consumers still hate pop-up ads. However, these studies about polarizing ad formats always have something of an asterisk: it’s the irrelevant ads that people really hate, pop-up or otherwise.

That’s a non-issue for Sailthru’s Overlays. Why? They’re linked to the rest of our product suite, which makes them highly personalized. With a simple interface, the feature also lends itself to simple customization regarding content, formatting and frequency capping, among others. Its accompanying reporting tool is incredibly easy to use, too.

As we look to redefine personalization, our User Profiles are the centerpiece, housing all the data on your customers in one place. Overlays help marketers make the most of that data, enabling you to deploy website personalization for both repeat customers and new ones.

If you’re a Sailthru customer and want to learn more about website Overlays, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager. If you haven’t worked with us before, click here for a demo.