Don’t discount homepage overlays as overly spammy

When online shoppers head to the Tommy Hilfiger website, they are immediately confronted with an overlay capture form, inviting them to sign up for the Tommy Hilfiger newsletter. The overlay also offers 20 percent off the next purchase for those who opt in to the newsletter.

If this sounds a little spammy to you, you’re probably not alone. What you might be surprised to hear, however, is that the clothing company more than tripled their e-mail list in one year’s time by implementing the overlay. The secret to their success, therefore, lied in testing – and lots of it.

As one would expect, there are a myriad of ways to use overlay and a myriad of designs in which to deliver it. And it all depends on the customer’s reception of how it’s delivered, which can easily be gauged by paying close attention as soon as the overlay is initially implemented and all the way through the course of its use.

In the video above, Jared Blank, vice president of eCommerce at Tommy Hilfiger, goes into detail about how and why the company decided to use the overlay capture form on its homepage and how it built its e-mail subscriber list by using it.