Your Pop-Up’s First Click Is Costing You Signups.

TL;DR: The “do you want 20% off? yes/no” step before the email field is pure friction. Cut it, or make it earn its place.

From the audit vault: Flagged in audits of a functional-drinks brand and a craft-kit brand: both ran a micro-commitment step in front of the form, and both were advised to remove it or replace it with a mechanic that captures data.

What the extra step is supposed to do

The theory says a small yes makes the bigger yes more likely. In practice, on pop-ups, the extra click is one more chance to close the box. Tested across large volumes of traffic, the two-step version consistently performs slightly worse than a clean single step.

When a step is worth keeping

A step earns its place when it captures something: a qualifying question, a preference, a scratch-card interaction. If the first screen collects nothing and exists only to warm the visitor up, it is friction dressed as strategy.

Same rule for the SMS step

An optional phone-number screen that most people skip trains users to skip screens. Either make the SMS ask a committed part of the journey with its own value, or remove it and ask later, post-purchase, when trust is higher.