How to set up popups in Klaviyo
If you already send email through Klaviyo, you don't need a separate tool to start collecting subscribers — Klaviyo can show a signup popup on your site and drop new emails straight into a list. It's not the most obvious part of the product, though, so here's the plain-English walkthrough: how to build one, where the settings that actually matter are hiding, and how to tell if it's working.
This is a genuine how-to, not a pitch. If Klaviyo is your email platform, its built-in signup forms are the natural place to start.
Step 1: Create the form
In Klaviyo, signup popups live under Signup Forms (sometimes shown as "Forms"). Create a new form and you'll be asked to choose a type — Popup is the overlay that appears on top of the page, Flyout slides in from a corner, and Embed sits inline in your page. For a first email-capture popup, choose Popup.
Klaviyo will ask which list the form feeds. Point it at the list your welcome flow is built on, so new subscribers actually get the email you promised them. This is the step people skip, and it's why some popups collect addresses that then hear nothing.
Step 2: Write the offer, not the "newsletter"
Inside the builder, keep the form to one ask and one reason to say yes. "Get 10% off your first order" beats "Sign up for our newsletter" every time, because the first is a trade and the second is a chore. If you're giving a code, make sure it's a code your store will actually honor.
Keep the fields minimal — email, maybe a first name. Every extra field lowers the number of people who finish.
Step 3: Set the timing (this is the part that matters)
Under the form's Behaviors settings you'll find when it shows. The defaults are rarely what you want. The two settings worth your attention:
- Trigger. Klaviyo can show the form after a delay, after a scroll percentage, or on exit-intent. Exit-intent and scroll are almost always better than a short timer, because they wait for a signal of interest instead of interrupting.
- Timing. If you use a delay, set it to something like thirty seconds, not three. A popup that fires the instant the page loads is the number-one reason visitors close the tab.
Step 4: Target the right people
Also under Behaviors is targeting — who sees the form. At minimum, tell Klaviyo not to show it to people who've already subscribed, so your existing customers aren't nagged. You can also limit it to certain pages, or to new versus returning visitors. A form that greets a returning visitor differently than a first-timer converts better.
Step 5: Respect the dismiss
Find the setting that controls how often the form reappears after someone closes it, and set it so a dismiss is remembered. Showing the same popup on every page of a session is the fastest way to make someone resent you. Fire once, take the no, move on.
Step 6: Publish and measure
Once it's live, Klaviyo shows the form's own analytics — views, submissions, and the rate between them. That last number, the share of people who saw the form and actually filled it in, is the one to watch. Impressions alone tell you nothing; a form shown thousands of times with a handful of submits isn't working, it's wallpaper. Change one thing at a time — the offer, the trigger, the timing — and watch that rate move.
When you might want something alongside it
Klaviyo's forms are a solid place to start, and if they cover you, you're done. Where people reach for something more is usually one of two moments: they want triggers or per-prompt measurement beyond what the forms offer, or they want the same prompts running on a site Klaviyo's forms don't cover as cleanly.
That's the gap our own exit intent popup software fills — and to be clear, it works alongside Klaviyo, not instead of it. Klaviyo stays your email platform; the prompts are just the capture-and-measure layer in front of it. If your Klaviyo forms are doing the job, keep them. If you've hit their edges, that's the reason to look further.