What is a slide-in and what are they used for?
You're probably familiar with pop-ups. That annoying box that pops up on a website asking for your email address. In the middle of the screen while you're reading. Most people hate it and hit "close". Some hate it so much they leave the website. It's costly in visitors and yields very little in conversion rate.
When people realized how much it cost in visitors, they started thinking "what can we do?". Or "can we make it a little less violent?". And you can. You can do a slide-in.
But what is a slide-in?
A slide-in is essentially the same as a pop-up. But instead of appearing quickly in the middle of the screen, a slide-in slides in from the side (or from below or above). It's less obtrusive and often the user can easily use the website anyway. The user doesn't feel the need to close it immediately.
There are all kinds of software for slide-ins. Danish Sleeknote makes a very flexible solution for slide-ins. You can also choose to code a slide-in yourself or have it coded. It's basically just a box that has a form or a discount code. But it can be expanded by, for example, saving a cookie so the user doesn't see it again for the next month. Or a delay that only shows it on the 3rd page view or when the user scrolls. It can also have built-in split testing. So before you choose your solution, you should probably look at how many page views you have per month and then divide the price of the solution by that. In addition, you need to look at what features you need. If you have 50 visitors a day, split testing might not be that important a feature.
When implementing your slide-in, you should consider whether it worsens your page speed and whether it hurts your bounce rate. In addition, you should look at how well your slide-in converts. If it's not converting at all, then you really need to adjust it. If you offer a discount code, it's easy to see if it's being used. But if it's a newsletter sign-up, you need to set up some tracking on that part.
We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.