SMS Popup Examples: Collect Phone Numbers the Right Way

What an SMS popup actually is

The mechanics are ordinary. ChilliPopup ships eight input types (Text, Email, Phone, Number, Long text, Dropdown, Date, Checkbox) and twelve ready-made fields, including Phone Number and an Email Consent checkbox. Each field has a placeholder, a Required toggle, and a box or underline visual variant. Building the thing takes ten minutes.

Everything difficult about an SMS popup happens before and after that: deciding what you are going to text people, and deciding where in their visit you deserve to ask.

Why a phone number costs more than an email

Email and SMS look like two fields on the same form. To the visitor they are not remotely the same transaction.

An email address is a filter. It arrives in a place they already ignore, at a time they choose, in a list of forty other things. A phone number is a channel with no filter. It lights up the lock screen, it sits next to messages from their family, and it follows them to dinner. When a stranger asks for it, the visitor is not evaluating your discount — they are imagining the worst version of what you might do with it.

The practical consequence is simple: the reward has to carry the ask. If your email popup offers 10% off, the SMS version cannot offer 10% off as well and expect the same result. Either the offer is bigger, or the text itself is the thing they want — the shipping notification, the restock alert, the early link.

Design the reward first. In an SMS popup the headline and the offer do the persuading; the field list stays as short as you can make it.

Where SMS belongs: after email, never instead of it

The most common SMS popup mistake is swapping the email field for a phone field on the same popup, in the same moment, with the same offer. You keep the traffic and the offer, and you replace the cheap ask with the expensive one. That trade rarely pays.

Treat capture as a ladder instead — the same idea as progressive profiling, applied to channels:

1. Rung 1 — email. One field, first visit, a clear reward. This is the campaign that builds the list; see how to build an email list for the detail.
2. Rung 2 — the number, once something has been delivered. After a purchase, after a code has been used, on a restock alert, or on the claim screen of a prize game.
3. Rung 3 — nothing. There is no rung 3. Do not follow the phone number with a birthday and a size question in the same breath.

That direct link is worth dwelling on. Every campaign gives you a copyable link that opens it on arrival. A line at the bottom of your welcome email — "Want your order updates by text? Add your number here" — reaches exactly the audience you want without needing any cross-campaign targeting at all.

Consent, done properly

This section is general good practice, not legal advice. The rules that apply to you depend on where your customers are, which carriers deliver your messages and what you send them, and they change. Read this as a floor to build on, then check your own obligations with someone qualified before you launch.

The five things a consent line should carry

• Who is texting. Your brand name, not "we".
• What the texts are. Order updates? Offers? Both? Say which — and if it is both, that is two separate purposes and arguably two separate ticks.
• How often. A rough, honest number. "About 2 to 4 texts a month" is a promise you then have to keep.
• How to stop. The reply keyword your provider supports.
• That charges may apply. The standard "message and data rates may apply" line.

Three rules that are not negotiable

1. The box starts empty. A pre-ticked consent box is not consent in any regime worth respecting, and it is the single fastest way to turn a list into a liability.
2. Consent is its own field. Not implied by the submit button, not buried in a link to your terms. Add a Checkbox field carrying your consent sentence, and switch Required on so the popup cannot be submitted without it.
3. Marketing consent is separate from the transaction. If someone gives you a number so you can text them a delivery update, that is not permission to text them a sale. If you want both, ask for both — visibly.

Two smaller points that matter more than they look. First, keep the record: the tick is stored with the submission, so the consent and the number live in the same row in your dashboard's Collected input data table. Don't split them by collecting the number in one campaign and the permission in another. Second, make the popup dismissible. A close button that works, and a visible "No thanks" option, are part of consent being real.

Six SMS popup examples with copy you can paste

Each of these is a separate campaign with its own display rules. The copy is written to be lifted and edited — swap the brand, keep the structure. The usual copy rules apply throughout: one idea, one reward, one button.

1. Delivery updates on the order-confirmation page

Usually the best-converting SMS ask, because the text is a service and the customer has just paid you.

• Headline: "Want your delivery updates by text?"
• Body: "We'll text you when your order ships and when it's out for delivery. That's it — unless you tick the offers box too."
• Fields: Phone Number (required) + Checkbox consent (required).
• Button: "Text me my updates"
• Rules: page URL contains /thank_you or your confirmation path, Time Delay 3 seconds, frequency once every 30 days, and show again after conversion switched off.

2. Early access to a drop, for returning visitors

Works when your stock genuinely sells out. Do not use it if it doesn't — the promise is the whole offer.

• Headline: "Get first pick. By text."
• Body: "Drops sell out in hours. Subscribers get the link 12 hours early."
• Fields: Email (required) + Phone Number (optional) + Checkbox consent.
• Button: "Join the early list"
• Rules: audience returning visitors, Page Count trigger at 2 pages (counted within the browser session), frequency once every 14 days.

3. The two-step ask: email first, number second

Build this one as a survey so it has real steps. Screen one takes the email and is required. Screen two offers the number and is not.

• Step 1: "Get 10% off your first order" — Email, required. Button: "Send my code".
• Step 2: "Want the code by text too? It arrives in seconds." — Phone Number, optional, plus the consent checkbox. One button: "Finish", with the opt-out written into the copy underneath it — "Leave it blank and we'll email the code instead."

Everything answered arrives as one submission, so someone who leaves the phone field blank and presses the final button still lands as an email signup. Three honest caveats. Steps run strictly in order, so there is no branching and no control that skips a screen — pressing the button with an empty optional field is the opt-out. Someone who closes the popup on step two never submits at all; on a survey that is kept as a partial response, not a signup. And if someone steps back, a text or email field comes back empty and has to be retyped — put the required identifier on the screen they are least likely to revisit.

4. Restock alert on a sold-out product page

The purest form of the ask. The number is not marketing collateral here; it is the delivery mechanism for the thing they came for.

• Headline: "Text me when this is back"
• Body: "One message, the moment it's back in stock. Nothing else."
• Fields: Phone Number (required) + Checkbox consent scoped to this alert only.
• Button: "Alert me"

5. On the claim screen of a prize game

A spin wheel, scratch card, slot machine or claw machine puts the ask after the win: the visitor plays, the claim screen collects their details, and submitting it reveals the prize. That is the easiest place in the whole site to collect an expensive field, because they are claiming something rather than signing up for something. The mechanics are covered in the spin to win popup guide.

• Claim screen headline: "You won. Where do we send it?"
• Fields: Email (required) + Phone Number (optional, labelled "Text me the code — it's faster") + Checkbox consent.
• Button: "Reveal my prize"

The outcome is decided server-side, so the prize cannot be rigged from the browser, and the odds per prize are yours to set.

Games move the ask to the moment after someone has won. That is when a phone number stops feeling like a cost.

6. Cart abandonment, on exit intent

The riskiest one on this list, and the one most people build first. It only works if the offer is real and the copy admits what it is doing. See exit intent popups for the trigger detail — and note that exit intent is a desktop mouse behaviour, so use a Page Scroll trigger around 60% on mobile instead.

• Headline: "Leave it with us — we'll hold your cart"
• Body: "Add your number and we'll text you one reminder plus a 15% code. One message. Then we stop."
• Fields: Phone Number (required) + Checkbox consent.
• Button: "Text me the code", with "No thanks, I'll finish now" underneath.
• Rules: page URL contains /cart, exit intent, once every 7 days, show again after conversion off.

How to keep the SMS form short

Every field you add is another reason to close the popup, and the phone field is already the most expensive thing on the page. Practical ways to keep it short:

• Two inputs is the ceiling. Phone plus consent, or email plus optional phone plus consent. Nothing else.
• Kill the name field. If you are not personalising the first message, it is decoration. If you are, make it optional and put it last.
• Use the Phone field, not a Text field. That is exactly what the ready-made Phone Number field is there for — don't rebuild it out of a text input.
• Write the placeholder like an example, not an instruction. A sample number in your market's format beats "Enter your phone number".
• Only one required field beyond consent. Required is a gate; use it once.
• Design for the thumb. A phone keyboard covers half the screen and the consent line sits right underneath the input. Test the popup on an actual phone before you publish it.

If you want a fast first draft, describe the popup in a sentence and let the AI generator lay it out — then delete the fields it added that you don't need. Deleting is much easier than designing from an empty canvas, and it is a good forcing function for how short the form should be.

One sentence drafts the layout, copy, colours and fields. For an SMS popup, your job afterwards is mostly deletion.

Getting the numbers out and into your SMS tool

This is the part people forget until launch day. ChilliPopup stores every submission and shows it in the dashboard's Collected input data table, with a Collected fields breakdown of the top values per field. What it does not do: send you an email when a submission arrives, export a CSV, or push the row to an SMS platform. The editor's Email & integrations tab is a placeholder today.

So there are exactly two honest ways to move a number:

1. By hand. Open the campaign's analytics, read the Collected input data table, and copy the numbers into your SMS provider on a schedule you actually keep. For a restock alert that runs once a fortnight, this is genuinely fine. For delivery updates, it is not.
2. With a few lines of your own JavaScript. The pixel fires a browser event on every submit carrying the submitted data, so you can forward the number and the consent flag to your own endpoint the moment it is captured.

window.addEventListener('chillipopup:submit', function (e) {
  if (e.detail.popupUuid !== 'YOUR_SMS_POPUP_UUID') return;

  var data = e.detail.data;   // check the exact field keys in your
                              // dashboard's "Collected input data" table

  if (!data.smsConsent) return;             // never forward an unticked opt-in

  fetch('/api/sms-optin', {                 // your endpoint, your SMS provider
    method: 'POST',
    headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
    body: JSON.stringify({ phone: data.phone, consentedAt: Date.now() })
  });
});

Forms, surveys and quizzes fire their own equivalents — chillipopup:form_submit, chillipopup:survey_submit and chillipopup:quiz_submit — each carrying the answers under its own id key (formUuid, surveyUuid, quizUuid), so listen for the right one. This runs in the visitor's browser, so treat the endpoint as public and validate the number server-side before you ever text it.

What to measure

Every campaign gets its own analytics page: Views, Unique views, Clicks, Submissions, Conversion (submissions divided by views), Field inputs, an interactions-over-time chart, an event breakdown, shows by device, and the two collected-data views. Four readings matter for an SMS popup.

Read conversion against the popup's own history, not against your email popup — the two are asking for completely different things.

• Conversion, compared against itself. An SMS ask will usually convert below an email ask. That is expected, not a failure. Compare this campaign to last month's version of this campaign.
• Field inputs versus submissions. If far more people started typing than finished, they reached the phone field or the consent line and changed their mind. That is a copy problem, and it is the most useful signal on the page.
• Shows by device. If mobile views dominate but mobile submissions don't, the layout is fighting the keyboard.
• Collected fields. The breakdown of top values per field is your junk detector. A pile of identical or obviously fake numbers means the field is required in a moment where it should not be.

One thing to know before you look: the funnel, completion rate, average time and Drop-off Analysis views exist for surveys and quizzes, not for popups and forms. So if you build the two-step version of the ask as a survey, you also get drop-off ranked by the last field a session touched — plus partial responses, showing what people entered before leaving without submitting. That is a strong reason to build the two-step version as a survey rather than a popup.

Five mistakes that turn an SMS list into a liability

1. Pre-ticking the consent box. It inflates the number you collect and invalidates the permission you claim to have. There is no version of this that ends well.
2. Bundling transactional and marketing consent. "Text me my delivery updates" is not permission to send a Black Friday blast. Ask separately, and only send what each tick covers.
3. Replacing the email popup instead of adding to it. You trade a high-converting cheap ask for a low-converting expensive one, on the same traffic, for the same offer.
4. Breaking the frequency promise. If the box said 2 to 4 messages a month, four is the ceiling — not the average. The frequency line is the only reason they ticked.
5. Collecting numbers with no sending plan. No provider chosen, no first message written, nobody owning the handover. The list ages, the context evaporates, and texting it six months later is worse than never having asked.

When not to run an SMS popup at all

• You have nothing to text. No shipping updates, no drops, no time-sensitive offers. SMS is for urgency; without it you are paying a conversion penalty for a channel you will use twice.
• Your customers are spread across many countries. Rules, formats and carrier expectations differ by market. Start with one market you understand.
• You have not built the email list yet. Fix rung one first. An SMS popup on a site with no email capture is optimising the wrong end of the funnel.
• Nobody owns the sending. If the answer to "who sends the first text and when" is a shrug, do not collect the numbers.

Build your SMS popup in ChilliPopup

Forty minutes, five steps, no code beyond the optional snippet above. If the pixel is not on your site yet, start with the one-line install guide — the same script serves every popup, form, survey, quiz and game, so there is nothing extra to embed later.

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