Your Black Friday Popup Discount Is Probably Too Big

Steve Hutt
Welcome back to e commerce fast lane. I am your host, Steve Hutt. Now, today’s conversation is all about kind of the offers that you put in front of your traffic right now.
And, like, I think why the instinct.Like most of us have as operators is probably a little bit backwards. I’ve been doing a little bit of research kind of for today’s recording, and it’s interesting like between that research I did today and the DMs and things that I get from merchants.

Like from social, it’s like the pattern that keeps showing up over and over again. Like most merchants are actually reaching for bigger discounts to win the sign up. Like we’re talking like these pop up and exit intent kind of things that come on your website, right?
And my guest.Today has research that shows that literally a 10% offer.Can actually beat a 15% offer. And literally, and I read some research on this by a much bigger margin than you would expect.

And so we get into that today. I really believe it’s going to kind of flip.The script a bit about how you think about and how you execute your offers on your website. And my guest is Taras Telemanchuk, and he is the CMO of a company called Claspo.

That’s CL.ASPO. So classpo.io. Now, classpo has served.Literally, he’s probably telling me the real numbers here, but billions of pop-up impressions across hundreds of thousands of sites.

And so when they talk about what’s actually converting, they literally have the data to back it all up. And this is like, they really are at scale.This is not just a bunch of theory. And I’m hoping that by the end of today’s recording, you’ll know a lot about why most of these email pop ups are kind of like underperforming as well as maybe they should.

And you’ll know more about.How to target, have better targeting overall, and you can move signups.To a much larger capacity. So let’s jump into today’s conversation. Hello, Taras.

Welcome to the show.

Taras Talimonchuk
Hi, Steve.

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Taras Talimonchuk: Hi, Steve.

Steve Hutt: It’s my pleasure. Let’s talk about Claspo. I believe it originally came out of an ecommerce agency and an ESP, rather than a VC round. Can you talk about how being close to real merchant operations helped you build this solution? I’m looking for the origin story.

Taras Talimonchuk: Yes, the story started, as you said, between an ecommerce agency that’s a local leader in Ukraine and the ESP system eSputnik, which is also a local ecommerce leader in Ukraine. The idea was very simple. Clients, especially large ecommerce businesses, asked the agency to create an exceptional experience rather than a regular pop-up. It was usually about tactics, gamification, interaction, more comprehensive targeting, and personalization. An ESP doesn’t need that kind of complexity in this part of its functionality. They create pop-ups and forms that work well enough for most clients. When clients wanted something exceptional, agencies started building their own solutions. At one point, they decided, “We can do this together. Let’s build another product that covers the needs of merchants who want an exceptional experience and better conversion, who want to capture high intent, develop it, and pass those warm leads to the ESP system.” That’s how Claspo started. It began as a series of experiments, and eventually it became a product idea.

Steve Hutt: That’s amazing. I’ve been doing this podcast for over eight years, and it seems that many of the best solutions, these apps and marketing platforms that connect to Shopify, have a similar founder story. They were built in-house to solve their own problems because no one else was solving them in a way that worked for their business. The solution was successful, and then someone on the team said, “Wait a second. Is there a SaaS product here that could generate recurring revenue? Could others benefit from this solution?” That’s exactly what happened with Claspo. It was working successfully in-house, and then you realized there was an opportunity for others to use it. Here we are today talking about it because so many people are using it.

Taras Talimonchuk: Yes, that’s how the offering evolved. Claspo started as a tool to save development costs. There was no problem inventing gamification or a new game for a brand. The problem was the development cost. Every client had to pay about 5,000 euros for a branded game on their website. That was the beginning. Now we’re solving a different problem: conversion and return on investment. That’s where every marketer’s headache starts, with customer acquisition cost and lifetime value.

Steve Hutt: It’s interesting. From what I’ve read, your core thesis around Claspo is that a lot of Shopify traffic is anonymous and gone in seconds. Knowing that, can you walk me through what merchants are losing when they treat their pop-ups as an afterthought instead of a business driver? I think part of Claspo’s differentiation is how it identifies unique visitors and interacts with them.

Taras Talimonchuk: Yes, we see a problem around shopping intent, and we’re working on identifying it precisely. To explain how this works in simple terms, every merchant has traffic from paid channels, organic channels, and LLM systems. That traffic lands on product detail pages, blog pages, and the homepage. All these segments have different shopping intent, and they need to be treated differently. The problem you see in most Shopify stores is that the welcome pop-up usually offers 10% off. That’s standard practice. This is the gap we see in the market, and we help resolve it by identifying who really needs that 10% off. We’re not saying a 10%-off pop-up is bad. It’s a good tactic, but not for all traffic or every audience. For some people, it’s better to show a quiz. For others, it’s 10% off or another kind of game. There are so many hypotheses and ideas, and we know how hard it is to implement and A/B test everything. That’s why we’re developing our agentic AI capabilities. We help build these complicated tests, prioritize hypotheses, and set up tests automatically. You don’t need to sit there creating every variation and tracking conversion every day. The agent does it for you because that’s a job AI can do now.

Steve Hutt: It’s interesting because I think about some of the built-in forms, pop-ups, exit-intent offers, and scroll-intent triggers in tools like Klaviyo or Omnisend. From what I can see, they seem to look and convert very similarly because they’re native to those ESPs, those email service providers. Why do you think some of these native solutions hit a ceiling in the value they bring? Let’s contrast that with what Claspo is doing. You could choose not to use the defaults built into Klaviyo and Omnisend and use Claspo instead. What are the differences, and why do you believe the default solutions hit a ceiling?

Taras Talimonchuk: I can see this from the ESP’s perspective because I’m familiar with the problems they’re trying to solve. Their main focus isn’t identifying anonymous traffic, reading thousands of signals and events throughout a website journey, and creating behavioral segments. That’s not the primary value they give their clients. They have plenty of use cases to cover in email automation. That’s why they don’t focus on this, and it’s understandable. They do great automation and build great customer data platforms. Pop-ups aren’t their main lane.

Steve Hutt: Right.

Taras Talimonchuk: There’s a moment when a marketer, whether that’s a CRO specialist or an email marketer, notices, “I’m stuck at a 3% opt-in conversion rate on my website. What can I do?” They learn tactics and best practices around gamification, segmentation, and personalization, but they can’t implement them with their ESP. Then they start looking for pop-up apps in marketplaces like the Shopify App Store or the Klaviyo App Store. That’s how they find us.

Steve Hutt: Exactly. You mentioned gamification. If email capture is sitting at a 1% or 2% signup rate, that’s quite low, but it seems to be fairly common. When you add gamification, the interaction and the percentage of people who ultimately give you their email address are significantly higher. What do you think drives that gap between a regular pop-up or exit-intent offer and a gamified version?

Taras Talimonchuk: People love games. I think that’s the driver. It may not be obvious to think of the ecommerce shopping journey as a game, but it is, even without a gamified pop-up. The process of selling and shopping is a game. If you understand that and can play honestly with your visitor, you can win more than a conversion in the moment. You can win in the long term. Playing honestly is my point. Imagine two different cases. In one, someone gets a discount, makes their first purchase, and forgets about you. In the other, they play a game and have an experience with the brand, not just a discount. They have a nice, playful experience, and you leave them with a good memory of that first shopping experience. That’s why gamification works so well.

Steve Hutt: That’s amazing. I’ve gone to your website, and I’m seeing a lot of templates built around the different goals a brand might have, from growing an email list to increasing sales and straight-up lead generation. There are quite a few options, depending on the use case. What I also find interesting, and I mentioned this at the top of the show, is the default offer of 10% off in exchange for an email address as a first-time visitor bonus. You’ve found that a smaller offer can convert better. Instead of being extra aggressive and offering 15% off, sometimes 10% off converts significantly better. What does your data tell you about the merchants you work with? I’m also curious about why. People want to understand how they can give a lower offer and get a higher conversion rate for email capture.

Taras Talimonchuk: Honestly, Steve, I have data that I’ll gladly share with you, but my interpretation is just guesswork because I don’t know exactly why this happens. We see a 7% conversion rate for offers ranging from 1% to 10% off, and a lower conversion rate of 6% for offers ranging from 11% to 15% off. It looks like it’s better to give 10% off than 15% off because you’ll get better conversion. But then the conversion rate jumps higher for offers of 16% to 20% off. It’s 17%, which is very high. One possible reason is that gamified pop-ups are included in this dataset. With gamification, you might see that you can win up to 50% off, but marketers can manage the average prize. The average might actually be 10%. That could help explain the better conversion because the advertised offer is bigger. At the same time, we investigated revenue per visitor. We measured not just conversion but also the revenue event afterward. We saw that offers of 1% to 10% off generated better revenue than higher discounts, which makes sense. A higher discount can give you better conversion, but you may attract discount hunters. That’s one guess. Another is people’s tendency to copy the experiences of others. Merchants look at what others are doing and say, “They’re giving 10% off, so I’ll do that too.” Shoppers see 10% off regularly, and if they see a different figure, perhaps they don’t trust it. I don’t know.

Steve Hutt: That’s a good point. That could be it. What about only showing the pop-up to new, non-subscribed visitors? I think that’s probably best practice, but I’m curious about your perspective. A lot of major brands seem to get this wrong. There are Shopify stores I shop at where, whether I’m logged in or not, the personalization can be really poor. Even in my emails, I’ll get women’s clothing offers when they know I’ve only purchased men’s clothing. That’s a separate failure on the ESP side. From a pop-up perspective, what does your data tell you about showing an offer only to new, non-subscribed visitors and giving logged-in customers or previous visitors a different experience?

Taras Talimonchuk: This is technical. Every pop-up app offers a system for identifying unique users and targeting new users and returning visitors. But we found a technical gap in the market. Many of our competitors, although I don’t know whether to call ESPs competitors, don’t do this. They’re more like frenemies.

Steve Hutt: Fair enough.

Taras Talimonchuk: As I mentioned before, this isn’t their main job, so they don’t build that complex fingerprint. We’ve built a system that identifies unique visitors using multiple signals, not just a cookie or a Google Analytics identifier. It’s a complex technical solution that helps us dramatically improve the efficiency of targeting new visitors. When it comes to email pop-ups, new visitors are a desirable segment because we need to capture their contact information.

Steve Hutt: That’s amazing. Let’s pivot slightly to the AI assistance you have, this agentic AI option within Claspo. Can you talk about that? I’m interested in the intelligence built into these frontier models and the optimization that can happen. It can take some work off a marketer’s to-do list and let the agent or system make modifications. What is your AI assistance service actually doing within the platform? Are there any case studies, even anecdotal examples, where someone turned it on and you could see what happened and which experiments it ran? I’m curious about what the product does and why people might want to implement it.

Taras Talimonchuk: It’s such an interesting, exciting field. Sometimes I sit at the end of the day watching these steps and thinking, “You can do this, this, and that at the same time.” I feel like the bottleneck is that I can’t prompt enough. Regarding Claspo and pop-ups, we built a component SDK a few years ago. That was good foresight from our product management team because they knew the agentic era would require a strong technology foundation to build the MCP and open our platform to agents. What can Claspo do with AI now? We can build components and games. For example, your client might say, “I don’t want a spinning-wheel pop-up on the website. I want a Mario game or Tetris. I want a different game that no one else has. Build me that.” You can prompt our component and say, “I want Tetris or Mario in this pop-up. Build it for this brand. Here are the brand guidelines.” Claspo can build a component that no one else uses, just you and your client. That’s one thing our AI adoption makes possible. Another is conversion rate optimization. As I mentioned, it’s complex. First, you need benchmarks. Every CRO framework needs a benchmark as a starting point. We have those benchmarks from billions of page views and pop-up views, which allow us to provide a good starting point and set the right hypothesis from the beginning. Then agentic AI helps take that campaign, initially set up based on our averages, and improve it for your traffic and website. It analyzes segments, tests hypotheses, and keeps improving pop-up conversion. Those are the two main things AI helps with: conversion rate optimization and creative freedom.

Steve Hutt: I love the creative freedom. It’s interesting that you can create a competitive moat. You brought up the game example, but I think that gets at how AI can be impactful for brands: human interaction and human creativity. You can’t just say, “Make me something creative.” The question is, “What are you thinking of?” The human has to come up with the idea and then prompt it in natural language. You don’t even have to type it. You can use a voice tool and talk to the system, and then this can come together. I think that’s really cool. I can also see the A/B testing opportunity. That’s a good use case: let the system come up with an A/B test and identify a winner for conversion. If you’re not testing, you’re not improving. That’s a standard marketing principle. I can see how your solution helps with writing, translating, suggesting tests, and picking winners. That’s really neat.

Taras Talimonchuk: That’s how Google Ads and Meta Ads work. You start with suggested messages, for example. Those messages aren’t excellent, but they aren’t bad. They’re a good starting point. Then you improve, run A/B tests, and keep improving. When humans do that, it’s complicated. Now agents can do it. Steve, a third thing AI opens up across marketing technology is connectivity. Claspo’s MCP can connect with Klaviyo’s MCP and Shopify, and everything can work from one Cursor window. It’s amazing what’s happening right now. People are moving away from using each tool’s interface. From one window, they can manage tasks that require Claspo, Klaviyo, and Shopify to work together, using one prompt.

Steve Hutt: I know.

Taras Talimonchuk: It’s amazing.

Steve Hutt: I’m a heavy Claude user, and I have many MCP servers connected, mostly for the media company side of things. I use Ahrefs for data on keyword rankings, competitiveness, and gap analysis. I use another tool that connects to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and I have a few others. It’s interesting that the workflow is there. I didn’t realize you had an MCP server. That’s a value-add for power users who use Cowork or Claude and can access MCP directly on an account. That brings me to another question about the Shopify app. It sounds like a one-click install. What happens when someone installs Claspo on their store? What’s going on in the background? What’s the ingestion process? Is it understanding orders or products? I don’t know what it’s ingesting from the company. Is there some hand-holding around the next steps once that process is finished?

Taras Talimonchuk: The first thing that happens when you install the Claspo Shopify app is that you add our script to your website. Then you connect certain Shopify features with Claspo, such as promo codes. You get dynamic promo codes from Shopify into Claspo. This is a pain point when merchants offer discounts on their websites and scammers steal the promo codes and put them on aggregators. That fraudulent activity is a problem, so we connect the promo codes to help avoid it. We also connect the system that passes the promo code to the cart. If you click a promo code in a Claspo pop-up, for example, it will automatically be added to the cart.

Steve Hutt: I see.

Taras Talimonchuk: There are many other parts to our Shopify integration. Then you go to your Claspo dashboard because we have a separate interface for the builder, and you create your first campaign. You can start with ready-made CRO pop-ups, templates, and tactics with proven conversion rates. You set it up quickly, adjust it to your brand, check that the targeting and triggers are right, and run the campaign. Then you can request improvements, and we make those improvements with the AI agent.

Steve Hutt: Yeah.

Taras Talimonchuk: That’s what the overall process looks like.

Steve Hutt: That’s amazing. As far as connections go, that’s the Shopify part of it. I always bring this up because there are skeptics who say, “I don’t want to keep adding apps. I’m worried about whether they’ll play nicely together.” What’s your approach to connecting with Klaviyo, Omnisend, and other tools? I want to make sure the data and everything else work well together.

Taras Talimonchuk: I know and understand that concern. I’ve read articles where SEO specialists researched the impact of Shopify apps on Core Web Vitals. If something is done incorrectly on the technical side, it can hurt performance. From our perspective, it’s simple because we load our script asynchronously, so it has no impact on Core Web Vitals. Regarding orchestration and connectivity with other apps, we have direct integrations with ESP systems. We’re working on deeper integrations with Klaviyo and Omnisend. We had basic integrations, and now we’re making them deeper so our systems can communicate in both directions. If you have a Klaviyo segment, for example, you can target Claspo pop-ups to that segment. I don’t see connectivity as an issue for us. Everything is set up here.

Steve Hutt: Something else I noticed, and I think it legitimizes Claspo, is that you have Built for Shopify app status. That means something. Shopify doesn’t grant that badge to everybody. They have high standards for performance, data integrity, design, and integration. I think that badge speaks to the performance of what you’ve built. It’s part of how you’re positioning the product, and Shopify agrees about things like fast loading and privacy-friendly settings. When I was researching for this recording and reading the reviews, merchants were saying the pop-ups load extremely fast and the app didn’t slow down their website. That’s self-reported, but these are real merchants who are incredibly happy with the platform.

Taras Talimonchuk: Performance impact is easy to measure. We even show it in our account. Once you install the script or app, you can see the impact on your performance. We’re honest about it. We’ve tracked that metric for ourselves from day one.

Steve Hutt: Yeah.

Taras Talimonchuk: We show that metric to merchants too. Regarding the Built for Shopify badge, we don’t have that badge. We have a Shopify Partner badge.

Steve Hutt: Okay, that’s it.

Taras Talimonchuk: The reason we don’t have it is that we don’t have the built-in Shopify interface. Our pop-up builder gives you design freedom. It’s like Figma. If we moved it inside Shopify’s interface, we’d lose many of the interesting things that help our pop-ups shine.

Steve Hutt: That’s amazing. What do you think the next steps are? We have agency partners listening who provide done-for-you marketing services for their clients. Then we have founders and marketers listening who are looking for opportunities. We’ve chatted for half an hour, and I think there’s an opportunity here. A lot of people don’t know what they don’t know, or they’re using something more basic that’s built into their ESP. What would you tell agencies, and what would you tell marketers at these Shopify businesses? What should their next steps be?

Taras Talimonchuk: I think the next step is an open dialogue with agencies about agentic AI. We should rebuild our workflows. Agencies can now do more. They can focus on creativity and ideas for improving conversion while paying less attention to routine work, such as managing multiple accounts. Agentic AI can do that easily and much more cheaply than people can. Creativity, and conversion rate optimization as a result of that creativity rather than just routine work, is the future. That’s the dialogue we should have among vendors, agencies, and brands.

Steve Hutt: That’s amazing. We’re nearing the end of the show, but we had a conversation before recording, and I understand you have an offer for listeners who want to learn more and try the solution. Can you share the details of that listener-only offer?

Taras Talimonchuk: Yes, sure. Every new user can claim a 20% welcome discount on all Pro plans. Pro plans in Claspo are plans for higher volumes of page views. To claim it, type “fastlane” in the support chat, and our customer success team will apply the promo code for you. Also, if your agency works with DTC brands that have more than 50,000 monthly visitors, and you’re interested in testing Claspo against your current solution to capture more email addresses and phone numbers, find me, Taras Talimonchuk, on LinkedIn and send me a direct message. I’ll help.

Steve Hutt: Beautiful. I’ll put your LinkedIn details in the show notes at ecommercefastlane.com. I’ll also include a link to the app. The app is free to download from the Shopify App Store. I think the free plan covers up to 3,000 page views, so you can try it, see what the interface is like, and decide whether it could be impactful for your business. It connects with Klaviyo or Omnisend, so there’s no cost to install it and test it. Then you might say, “I think I can really get rolling with this.” If you move to one of the paid plans, I believe there’s a 14-day free trial. If you choose to continue, you can get the Fastlane bonus by messaging the customer service team through the chat widget. That’s really cool. Thank you for coming on the show today. I’ve learned a lot.

Taras Talimonchuk: Thank you.

Steve Hutt: This has been lovely.

Taras Talimonchuk: Nice conversation. Thank you.

Steve Hutt: Take care. That’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. I hope this podcast offers you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my personal goal of helping you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful, thriving company powered by Shopify. Thanks for investing some time today and listening to the show. I’m so proud and excited that you have a growth mindset and are a constant learner. I truly appreciate you and your entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy the rest of the week, and keep thriving with Shopify.