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July 25, 2021

ShopPop Review

With ShopPop, you can start customer conversations, manage customer support, and ultimately increase sales.

With pop-up widgets and messenger features, you can be sure to stay in touch with your customers every step of the buying process.

Whether ShopPop is crucial to business success or just another tool you won’t find much use for depends on the features you’re looking for and how you want to market your online store.

Below we go through the ins and outs of ShopPop, its best features, and how it stacks up against similar tools in the online marketing space.

First, let’s look at some quick pros and cons.

ShopPop Pros and Cons

Pros

Gives you immediate and direct access to your customers
Automates customer concern responses
Uses one inbox to manage all customer messages
Sends smart notifications to help reduce abandoned cart rates

Cons

Analytics features have their limitations
No direct link between a flow and the audience segment
Not the best tool for basic marketing

ShopPop Features

What features make ShopPop stand out from other messaging apps? Here’s an in-depth look at its key features:

Abandoned Cart Recovery

An effective abandoned cart recovery strategy can increase your sales margins significantly. But only if you’re equipped to execute one. With ShopPop, you can send abandoned cart reminders via Facebook Messenger.

This makes sure your message doesn’t get lost in spam (or a sea of other, more urgent emails), and you can also include links in your message that lead straight to the products they’ve left behind. The abandoned cart recovery feature is a surefire way to ensure your abandoned cart reminders are being seen.

According to ShopPop, the average Messenger open rates are anywhere from 80 – 90%. Clickthrough rates are a whopping 56%, and abandoned cart messenger conversion rates hover around 33%. If you’re a marketer that has experience with the classic abandoned cart email strategy, you know very well these Messenger numbers blow traditional email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates right out of the water.

The best part is that ShopPop automates your Messenger cart strategy for you. Once you’ve set it up, you can set it and let it work in the background every time users abandon their cart.

Because of features like this, paired with many other robust tools powered by automation, ShopPop stands out as a frontrunner in the chat marketing space.

Retargeting Audiences

It’s getting a lot easier for marketers to reach their target audience. ShopPop makes it possible to reach your customers once they interact with your ads through automated conversations.

The downside? Using this powerful feature does require that you’re familiar with social media ads, specifically Facebook.

Once you grow your audience through the many touchpoints ShopPop offers—meaning through Messenger, pop-ups, or QR codes— you can then export your customer PSIDs to the Facebook ads manager and create a custom or lookalike audience. From there, you can start running ads to target known customers and reach new ones.

The cool thing is that once you get your ads out there, ShopPop’s click-to-messenger feature helps you connect and collect data for new customers once they opt-in.

The ads and messenger feature can be a solid tool for online businesses that depend on Facebook ads to make sales and grow their audience. The fact that you can automate a lot of this process makes it that much more appealing.

If you’re using methods other than Facebook ads to reach your target customer, this might not be the feature that sells you on ShopPop. It’s worth knowing it’s there if you decide to venture into Facebook ads in the future.

Message Automations

Automations make a lot of the online world go round. ShopPop knows this. And it’s why it has integrated automation into just about every feature that can use it. Through its pop-up widget, you can start conversations with customers with premade conversation templates.

You can automate offering a discount code so that your customers are enticed to click on the Messenger button and opt into your list.

On Facebook, you can create pretty simple rules for automating engagement with customers if they have questions, comments, or concerns. You can also automate the segmentation process. So once your audience opts-in through either Messenger, the chat widget, or pop-ups, they’ll get sorted into the correct categories to receive the right targeted messaging.

Chat Widget

As a chat marketing tool, you already know ShopPop also comes with the now-classic What Widget. It pops up on the corner of their screen and is always there available to answer any questions. A nice feature it comes with is that your customers can choose which channel to contact you through.

That can be by Messenger, Whatsapp, Twitter, Instagram, phone, or email. You can also link to external websites if you want to funnel audience traffic to specific landing pages.

If you’re stuck on how to create your automated interactions, ShopPop gives you templates so you can modify them for your business.

Comment-To-Messenger

ShopPop leaves no rock unturned as far as ways to get your ideal customer to interact and exchange information with your business. Its comment-to-messenger feature lets you set up rules that automatically message anyone who comments on your posts.

The more your automated process does this, the more of an audience your business builds over time (unless users opt-out). The usefulness of this feature is pretty self-evident.

We already know that open and click-through rates are much higher when you connect with your audience on Messenger. Once you craft your post and create a predetermined Messenger flow that it’ll send to commenters, it’s only a matter of connecting the two and letting ShopPop do the rest.

However, tinkering on Facebook might take more know-how. You’ll need to be sure you know the ins and outs of Facebook marketing to get the most out of this tool.

Additional Features

I’ve highlighted the top features ShopPop offers to help you grow your business with more personalized customer interactions. However, ShopPop’s list of features doesn’t stop there. Here’s a quick rundown of the additional perks of using such a powerful chat marketing tool:

Custom fields: ShopPop lets you collect data that then gets saved to individual user profiles. It also allows you to save emails and questions for qualifying leads.

Advanced statistics: ShopPop would be remiss not to include data that informs your marketing efforts through the app. With its analytics feature, you can learn more about your sales efforts, your open rates, and how well your audience is growing.

Persistent menu: Once your customers are interacting with ShopPop’s chat widget, it’ll automatically show them your dedicated menu options to help users browse and find answers faster. This is a helpful feature to make sure your pop-up widget is as useful as possible when people use it.

Audience filters: With audience filters, you can preset filters that’ll keep your customer data organized while also syncing with Zapier. Audience filters help take some of the work off your plate. Instead of having to sort incoming audience information manually, ShopPop takes care of it in the background.

Custom shareable URLs: Want to share a URL that’ll funnel customers into your premade flows? ShopPop allows you to create custom URLs that are easy on the eyes.

QR Codes: You can create QR codes that help you build a direct messaging list to market to and share your latest products with. With ShopPop, you can easily create a QR code that connects to a designated chat flow. It’s yet another valuable and creative way to reach and stay in touch with your most valuable customers.

ShopPop Pricing and Package Options

If you want to try the perks of ShopPop without any commitment, you can try it free to chat with the first 50 people who come across your site. You get access to comment-to-messenger features, widgets and opt-ins, and an inbox where you can manage it all.

ShopPop charges by the number of people you come into contact with. You’ll get a better idea of how much it will cost once you estimate the average of how many messages you’ll receive. Then visit the pricing page to toggle through pricing options.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what the first few pricing tiers look like for its Creators, Services, and Brands plan and its Ecommerce option:

Creators, Services, and Brands

50 people for $0
5,000 people for $79
10,000 people for $49
15,000 people for $69
20,000 people for $89
30,000 people for $109

Ecommerce

50 people for $0
100 people for $8
500 people for $22
1,000 people for $45
2,500 people for $119
5,000 people for $179

ShopPop counts each person you interact with as ‘subscribers.’ Once your customer interacts with you through a platform like Messenger, they’re automatically subscribed. If you’re a smaller business that sees solid results by selling through direct messaging, a pricing tier based on the number of people you interact with can be more cost-effective.

ShopPop also boasts clients like Roc Nation, BBC, and Universal. So if you need enterprise-level solutions, you can get in touch with them here to strike a deal that works for you.

ShopPop Reputation

If you take the time to listen to what real ShopPop users are saying, the sentiment is generally positive. It’s easy to fall in love with ShopPop’s features because they take things beyond simply being able to chat with your customers through its widget to answer questions.

While more basic chat apps can be pretty cookie-cutter in nature, ShopPop makes sure your customers are met with many options to help them navigate any inquiries they may have. Users also love that ShopPop is a Facebook marketing partner and offers plenty of creative ways to reach out and connect with customers on social media.

Ecommerce store owners and online business creators love the fact that you can count on ShopPop’s customer support any time you have a question or an issue. It’s helped them find new and more intimate ways to connect with customers and meet them where they’re already hanging out.

Besides being praised for being user-friendly, ShopPop also has a reputation for being extremely easy to integrate with the rest of your tech stack through Zapier. Online, you’ll often find mixed reviews about a lot of tools, but ShopPop isn’t one of them.

All in all, ShopPop can be a great investment for online businesses trying to level up their sales and marketing game. It takes your marketing strategy beyond just being able to message and interact with your customers automatically if they land on your site.

ShopPop makes it a point to equip you with the tools to relentlessly go after your audience where it’s already hanging out. While it’s important to remember to use each tool carefully so as to not abuse its capabilities. ShopPop has taken merely being able to create automated chat features to a whole new level.

The cherry on top is that its pricing structure isn’t too bad either. It’s accessible for businesses barely getting their start and trying to make their first few sales. But it also delivers if you’re an established brand looking for new ways to market to its customers and stay top of mind. After all, it’s called the All-In-One Chat Marketing App for a reason.

You can quickly start using ShopPop for free. Once you go over the customer limit, it’ll simply charge you the next tier up. Get started with ShopPop for free here to make more sales and grow your brand’s audience.

April 16, 2021

Platform News: Using :focus-visible, BBC’s New Typeface, Declarative Shadow DOMs, A11Y and Placeholders

There’s a whole lot of accessibility in this week’s news, from the nuances of using :focus-visible and input placeholders, to accessible typefaces and a Safari bug with :display: contents. Plus, a snippet for a bare-bones web component that supports style encapsulation.

Now may be a good time to start using :focus-visible

The CSS :focus-visible pseudo-class replaces :focus as the new way to create custom focus indicators for keyboard users. Chrome recently switched from :focus to :focus-visible in the user agent stylesheet and, as a result of that change, the default focus ring is no longer shown when the user clicks or taps a button.

When switching from :focus to :focus-visible, consider backwards compatibility. Your keyboard focus indicators should be clearly visible in all browsers, not just the ones that support :focus-visible. If you only style :focus-visible, non-supporting browsers will show the default focus ring which, depending on your design, “may not be sufficiently clear or visible at all.”

button {
  background: white;
}

button:focus-visible {
  outline: none;
  background: #ffdd00; /* gold */
}

A good way to start using :focus-visible today is to define the focus styles in a :focus rule and then immediately undo these same styles in a :focus:not(:focus-visible) rule. This is admittedly not the most elegant and intuitive pattern, but it works well in all browsers:

Browsers that don’t support :focus-visible use the focus styles defined in the :focus rule and ignore the second style rule completely (because :focus-visible is unknown to them).
In browsers that do support :focus-visible, the second style rule reverts the focus styles defined in the :focus rule if the :focus-visible state isn’t active as well. In other words, the focus styles defined in the :focus rule are only in effect when :focus-visible is also active.

button:focus {
  outline: none;
  background: #ffdd00; /* gold */
}

button:focus:not(:focus-visible) {
  background: white; /* undo gold */
}

The BBC created a more accessible typeface

The BBC created their own custom typeface called Reith (named after the BBC’s founder Sir John Reith). Their goal was to create a font that supports multiple languages and is easier to read, especially on small devices. The font was tested with mixed-ability user groups (dyslexia and vision impairment) and across different screen sizes.

We [the BBC] were using Helvetica or Arial. We also had Gill Sans as the corporate typeface. These typefaces were designed a hundred years ago for the printed page [and] don’t perform well on today’s modern digital screens.

Reith Sans can bee seen in use on BBC Sport

Note: If you’d like to inspect Reith Sans and Reith Serif in Wakamai Fondue, you can quickly access the URLs of the WOFF2 files in the “All fonts on page” section of the Fonts pane in Firefox’s DOM inspector on BBC’s website.

`display: contents` is still not accessible in Safari

The CSS display: contents value has been supported in browsers since 2018. An element with this value “does not generate any boxes” and is effectively replaced by its children. This is especially useful in flex and grid layouts, where the contents value can be used to “promote” more deeply nested elements to flex/grid items while retaining a semantic document structure.

Unfortunately, this feature originally shipped with an implementation bug that removed the element from the browser’s accessibility tree. For example, applying display: contents to a <ul> element resulted in that element no longer mentioned by screen readers. Since then, this bug has been fixed in Firefox and Chrome (in the latest version).

View on CodePen

In Chrome and Firefox, the screen reader informs the user that the “Main, navigation” contains a “list, 2 items.” In Safari, the latter part is missing because the <ul> and <li> elements are not present in the accessibility tree. Until Apple fixes this bug in Safari, be careful when using the contents value on semantic elements and test in screen readers to confirm that your pages are accessible in Safari as well.

Set `opacity` when overriding the color of placeholder text

Accessibility experts recommend avoiding placeholders if possible because they can be confused for pre-populated text and disappear when the user starts entering a value. However, many websites (including Wikipedia and GOV.UK) use placeholders in simple web forms that contain only a single input field, such as a search field.

Placeholders can be styled via the widely supported ::placeholder pseudo-element. If your design calls for a custom color for placeholder text, make sure to specify both color and opacity. The latter is needed for Firefox, which applies opacity: 0.54 to ::placeholder by default. If you don’t override this value, your placeholder text may have insufficient contrast in Firefox.

.search-field::placeholder {
  color: #727272;
  opacity: 1; /* needed for Firefox */
}

The placeholder text on eBay’s website is lighter in Firefox and doesn’t meet the minimum contrast requirement of 4.5:1

Declarative shadow DOM could help popularize style encapsulation

One of the key features of shadow DOM is style encapsulation, wherein the outer page’s style rules don’t match elements inside the shadow tree, and vice versa. In order to use this feature, you need to attach a shadow DOM tree to an element (usually a custom element, like <my-element>) and copy the element’s template (usually from a <template> element in the DOM) to the element’s newly created shadow DOM.

These steps can only be performed in JavaScript. If you’re only interested in style encapsulation and don’t need any dynamic functionality for your element, here is the minimum amount of JavaScript required to create a custom element with a shadow DOM:

customElements.define(
  "my-element",
  class extends HTMLElement {
    constructor() {
      super();

      // find <template id="my-template"> in the DOM
      let template = document.getElementById("my-template");

      // make a copy of the template contents…
      let content = template.content.cloneNode(true);

      // …and inject it into <my-element>’s shadow DOM
      this.attachShadow({ mode: "open" }).appendChild(content);
    }
  }
);

For an example of style encapsulation, see Miriam Suzanne’s <media-object> element on CodePen. The scoped styles are located in the <template> element in the HTML pane. Notice how this CSS code can use simple selectors, such as article, that only match elements inside <media-object>’s shadow DOM.

JavaScript may soon no longer be required to create this type of style encapsulation in modern browsers. Earlier this week, Chrome became the first browser to ship Google’s Declarative Shadow DOM proposal. If it becomes a standard, this feature will also make it possible to use Shadow DOM in combination with server-side rendering.

The post Platform News: Using :focus-visible, BBC’s New Typeface, Declarative Shadow DOMs, A11Y and Placeholders appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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August 15, 2019

Weekly Platform News: HTML Loading Attribute, the Main ARIA Specifications, and Moving from iFrame to Shadow DOM

In this week's roundup of platform news, Chrome introduces a new attribute for loading, accessibility specifications for web developers, and the BBC moves visualizations to the Shadow DOM.

Chrome ships the loading attribute

The HTML loading attribute for lazy-loading images and iframes is now supported in Chrome. You can add loading="lazy" to defer the loading of images and iframes that are below the viewport until the user scrolls near them.

Google suggests either treating this feature as a progressive enhancement or using it on top of your existing JavaScript-based lazy-loading solution.

This feature has not yet been added to the HTML Standard (but there is an open pull request), and multiple links to Google’s documentation are listed on its Chrome Status page.

(via web.dev)

Overview of ARIA specifications

The main accessibility specifications for web developers:

Name	Description
ARIA in HTML	Defines which ARIA role, state, and property attributes are allowed on which HTML elements (the implicit ARIA semantics are defined here)
Using ARIA	Provides practical advice on how to use ARIA in HTML, with an emphasis on dynamic content and advanced UI controls (the “five rules of ARIA use” are defined here)
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications)	Defines the ARIA roles, states, and properties
ARIA Authoring Practices	Provides general guidelines on how to use ARIA to create accessible apps (includes ARIA implementation patterns for common widgets)
HTML Accessibility API Mappings	Defines how browsers map HTML elements and attributes to the operating system’s accessibility APIs
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)	Provides guidelines for making web content more accessible (success criteria for WCAG conformance are defined here)

Related: “Contributing to the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide" by Simon Pieters and Valerie Young

Shadow DOM on the BBC website

The BBC has moved from <iframe> to Shadow DOM for the embedded interactive visualizations on its website. This has resulted in significant improvements in load performance (“more than 25% faster”).

The available Shadow DOM polyfills didn’t reliably prevent styles from leaking across the Shadow DOM boundary, so they decided to instead fall back to <iframe> in browsers that don’t support Shadow DOM.

Shadow DOM [...] can deliver content in a similar way to iframes in terms of encapsulation but without the negative overheads [...] We want encapsulation of an element whose content will appear seamlessly as part of the page. Shadow DOM gives us that without any need for a custom element.

One major drawback of this new approach is that CSS media queries can no longer be used to conditionally apply styles based on the content’s width (since the content no longer loads in a separate, embedded document).

With iframes, media queries would give us the width of our content; with Shadow DOM, media queries give us the width of the device itself. This is a huge challenge for us. We now have no way of knowing how big our content is when it’s served.

(via Toby Cox)

In other news...

The next version of Chrome will introduce the Largest Contentful Paint performance metric; this new metric is a more accurate replacement for First Meaningful Paint, and it measures when the largest element is rendered in the viewport (usually, the largest image or paragraph of text) (via Phil Walton)
Microsoft has created a prototype of a new tool for viewing a web page’s DOM in 3D; this tool is now experimentally available in the preview version of Edge (via Edge DevTools)
Tracking prevention has been enabled by default in the preview versions of Edge; it is set to balanced by default, which “blocks malicious trackers and some third-party trackers” (via Techdows)

Read more news in my new, weekly Sunday issue. Visit webplatform.news for more information.

The post Weekly Platform News: HTML Loading Attribute, the Main ARIA Specifications, and Moving from iFrame to Shadow DOM appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

June 7, 2019

Microsoft Deletes Its Own Image Database for Face Recognition

Microsoft isn't the only entity these days questioning the ethics behind facial recognition.
Image via www.vpnsrus.com

In a quiet move that likely reflects Microsoft's growing concern over the misuse of facial recognition technology, the company deleted its own MSCeleb database, a collection of 10 million images that has been used to train facial recognition systems across the globe since its release in 2016.

As the BBC points out, "the deletion comes after Microsoft called on US politicians to do a better job of regulating recognition systems" due to their "broad societal ramifications and potential for abuse."

February 3, 2019

12 Must-Hear WordPress Podcasts With Fresh Episodes for 2019

We’ve updated our list of must-hear WordPress podcasts for 2019. If you haven’t joined the podcast party yet, you’re missing out on intelligent and entertaining information from the brightest minds in WP. But first, fun-fact. The name podcast was coined way back in 2004, by BBC journalist Ben Hammersley when he combined the words iPod […]