$10 off is beating the pants off of 10% off, and not just on opt-ins
For most retention marketers, the default discount pop-up isn't really a decision anymore, it's a habit. Percentage off feels like the safe, "bigger" number, so it goes live and never gets a second look. That habit is worth questioning.
We just wrapped an A/B test with BeanGoods, the dachshund apparel and gear brand, pitting a flat $10 off against a 10% off offer. Same full-screen sign-up, same audience, same everything. The only variable we changed was how the discount was framed.
The assumption we were testing
Conventional pop-up wisdom says a percentage should win, especially as cart size climbs. Take a $60 order: 10% off nets the shopper $6, well short of $10. On paper, the percentage should feel smaller and convert worse once the math stops favoring it. That's the assumption most brands build their offer strategy on, and most never test it.
What we ran
Both variants used the exact same full-screen sign-up unit, shown to the same audience, at the same time. The only difference was the offer: $10 off vs. 10% off.
What we found
With a few hundred shoppers in each variant so far, the flat $10 off is winning across every metric we track:
+45% email opt-ins
+100% SMS opt-ins
+50% AOV among shoppers who saw the $10 offer
2 influenced orders vs. 0 for the 10% variant
It's not just winning on sign-ups, where you'd expect a flat dollar amount to have an edge on lower carts. It's ahead on every measure we track, including average order value, which is the exact metric conventional wisdom says a percentage should protect.
Why this matters for your pop-up strategy
It's early. This is a small sample from one brand, and we're watching closely as volume grows before calling it. But the signal is loud enough that we're now running the same $10-off-vs-10%-off test across multiple clients to see how it holds up outside of BeanGoods.
The takeaway isn't "switch to dollar off." It's that how you frame a discount can matter as much as the discount itself, and that's not something you can reason your way to from a spreadsheet. It's exactly why we push every brand we work with to test offers instead of assuming them.
If you've got a 10% off pop-up running on autopilot, it might be worth putting a dollar-off variant up against it and seeing what your own audience actually prefers.
