How to Make Spin-to-Win Wheel Popups [+Tips & Examples]

Why try using a popup wheel?

Well, even the most dedicated deal-hunters can grow indifferent to the discount popups they see in more than 50% of stores they visit. That’s why, if you really want to grab your visitors’ attention, you need to change your tactics and go beyond regular popups.

Spin-the-wheel popups (also called pop up wheels and gamified popups) are the popups you’re looking for. They are fun, engaging, and add a bit of a thrill to the shopping experience.

Plus, creating a popup wheel is easy.

So, let’s take a closer look at the spin-to-win wheel popups and see how you can use them to maximize conversion rates in your store.

What is a popup wheel?

A popup wheel is a type of opt-in that shows website visitors a spin to win wheel game. After entering their contact details, visitors can spin the wheel for the chance to win a prize. Spin-the-wheel adds “gamification” to your site and makes standard marketing activities (e.g., signing up for a newsletter) more fun.

You probably came across other names, such as gamified popups, discount wheels, wheel of fortune popup, or spin a wheel popup. These all refer to the same effective and engaging popup tool.

Here’s an example of a popup wheel in action:

The popup wheel is composed of several segments, each having a different prize visitors can win. Prizes can be a discount, free shipping, a gift, or any other incentive you want to offer.

Spin-to-win popups are not just fun—they can improve your conversion rate by up to 30%. Considering that the average popup conversion rate for many large e-commerce brands is 3.75%, it’s clear that you can achieve a lot with a wheel popup.

To give you some real-life examples, we asked a few e-commerce entrepreneurs to share their experience with the spin-to-win popups:

• “We see about a 20% opt-in rate via Wheelio [a spin-to-win app]” Tom W. Brown, Posted Protein.

• “With spin-the-wheel, we got a much higher opt-in. Six to ten times the conversion rate of our regular newsletter popups.” Meri Geraldine, Gardens of the Sun.

• Robert Botto, an online conversion expert, reports a 6% conversion rate for spin-to-win popups on his blog.

Adding a spin-to-win popup to your website is an excellent way to engage with customers, entice them to buy with the rewards they can win, and collect emails on your website.

If you'd like to start right away, get a free account in Wisepops:

When it comes to using popups, the popup timing is essential and you need to find the sweet spot for your audience.

You can add a delay or display your spin-the-wheel popup as the visitor is about to exit. These modifications will help alleviate the pressure on your visitors and improve your conversion rate.

Also, by not letting your popup appear too soon, you’ll get more qualified leads. After all, if you collect someone’s email before they have even had a chance to get to know your brand and products, chances are that you might not succeed in converting them.

2: The wheel should match your brand style

No matter what kind of popup you want to add to your store website, ideally, you want it to align with your brand visual identity. Your spinner wheel is no exception.

A generic spin-to-win wheel won’t look great alongside your branded content and products, will it?

With the best popup software, you can easily change the look of your wheel and even add custom visuals to complete your brand identity and provide a better customer experience.

Take a look at the example below.

One of our customers completely tailored his spin-to-win wheel popup to reflect the spirit of the site’s Halloween promotion. They customized the colors, popup copy, and added a visual to make an original and memorable popup experience.

3. Send a dedicated sequence for spin-to-win subscribers

Spin-to-win wheel popups can be a gamble—some visitors win and some do not. Those who didn’t get what they wanted may find a way to cheat the system. Some disgruntled visitors will submit several unused or fake email addresses just to keep spinning the wheel until they win what they want.

This can lead to your precious email list filling up with low-quality email addresses that can ruin your email campaigns and hurt your email domain reputation.

Meri Geraldine from Gardens of the Sun sums up the problem:

“If you use gamification, you need to be super diligent about your list hygiene. In short, list hygiene is about keeping active subscribers on your newsletter, and suppressing inactive subscribers. Some people will sign up in the hope of winning the grand prize. Afterward, they may not open your emails, or even mark them as spam. These subscribers affect your email deliverability to other subscribers that do want to open your emails. You need good systems in place to remove these people from your list, or to stop sending to them if they don’t open.”

That’s why, just to stay on the safe side, we recommend the following countermeasures:

1. Implement a sunsetting mechanism that’ll help you confirm whether your subscribers still want to hear from you.

2. You can also create a wheel popup without a requirement to provide an email address. It’s a viable option if you care more about enticing the visitors to buy rather than collecting leads. (You can still grow your subscriber lists with the newsletter signup forms.)

4. Spin-to-win wheel prizes

The second risk is that visitors will try to cheat using more refined methods than just entering their old abandoned email address.

First, users can clear their cookies to play again and again until they win the biggest prize.

Second, visitors with a technical background can hack the wheel’s code to land on the prize they want.

For those reasons, we recommend you avoid giving away prizes that are too valuable. It’s also safer to use a solution that includes anti-spam protection such as Recaptcha or Cloudflare’s IP reputation system.

5. Create responsive spin-to-win wheels

In terms of numbers, mobile shoppers have surpassed desktop consumers. They browse, pick, and pay for their goods using their phones or tablets. And they expect the same shopping experience they would get on a desktop.

That’s why your pop-ups must display properly across all devices. Otherwise, not only will your spin-the-wheel look odd but will also prevent visitors from viewing it in full, entering the game, or even closing it.

As a result, your potential buyers will leave without even giving your offer a chance. You can easily design mobile popups with Wisepops editor or use popup templates. Take a look at the example of a mobile-optimized pop-up template you could have on your website:

Wheel popups: summary

Wheel popups can give a significant boost to your list building and sales. Since they use gamification mechanics, they have higher conversion rates and user engagement.

To make the most of them, display them on exit or add a delay so that they don’t appear immediately after the visitor lands on your website.

Take steps to limit people cheating or gaming the system. Treat your spin popup as an incentive rather than a sole reason for customers to visit your store. Consider adding verification requirements for better security.

And finally, when designing your awesome spin-to-win wheel popup, don’t forget about mobile users. Your popups need to look great on all screen sizes. (Fortunately, this isn’t going to be an issue with our simple popup editor.)