You did everything you can to capture leads while they are browsing your website. Strategically placed lead generation forms, gated content and made sure lead journey is carefully designed. But how do you capture prospects right before they are ready to close or navigate away from your website?
Using exit intent pop-up, you can gain those extra few prospects, but only if planned out and implemented correctly. Visitors already made an important decision to browse your website and there still might be some interest even though they are leaving. Some are leaving to shop around and might plan to come back, so an exit intent pop-up serves as a way to keep you on top of their list and gets your foot in the door with a prospect.
What are exit intent pop-ups?
Exit intent pop-up attempt to display a special message or an offer to websites visitors that are planning on leaving your website. This is usually done through monitoring the position of the mouse cursor on your website.
For a visitor to exit a page, they either try to close the browser tab or window or reach for the address bar in order to search for a new website. These are situations where an exit intent pop-up should display. Usually, top 10 pixels of your website don’t have any content, so a cursor entering this area is a good way to trigger an exit intent pop-up.
The goal of the exit intent pop-up is to give visitors one last exposure to your value proposition and either make them reconsider leaving or capture their contact information.
How to make an exit intent pop-up more effective?
Exit intent pop-ups can be annoying but remember that the visitor already showed an intent to leave your website. That is why it’s important to carefully choose which visitors are served this pop-up and which are not. Keep in mind that your loyal or repeat visitors need to eventually exit your website. You don’t want to display this pop-up to them.
Regardless of if you are using an out of the box exit intent pop-up plugin or coding your own, you need a way to track your visitors. This will help you determine who gets to see the pop-up and who doesn’t.
There are few logical ways to differentiate visitors from subscribers or customers. An obvious sign that a visit is already registered or using functionality only available to customers is access to account dashboard, or logging in. Using cookies, you need to make sure these visitors are not served the exit intent pop-up.
Some other examples of pages that should trigger this exemption are checkout success, registration success, or similar confirmation pages that only display when a visitor has filled out a form successfully.
Important elements of exit intent pop-up?
Now that you defined when an exit intent pop-up should show, it’s important to carefully plan out its content.
An exit intent pop-up should have a very short and straight to the point message. The goal is to capture visitor’s email. If you are running an online shop, you can offer a discount on their first order or if it’s a content website, offer a subscription to a mailing list.
“10% OFF YOUR FIRST ORDER” is a great attempt to relay the message the visitor may have missed while browsing the website. By providing their email, visitors would receive a discount code in their inbox and you would gain a lead.
Gamification of the exit intent pop-up is another effective way of capturing leads. Great example is a “spin the wheel” approach. A visitor would provide an email address in exchange for a chance to spin the wheel and win a prize. Prizes are usually order discounts and you can control the success rate of each prize.
What are some examples of good exit intent pop-ups?
WordPress Plugins:
Shopify Plugins:
Conclusion
Regardless of what your personal opinion of exit intent pop-ups is, it’s a valuable tool that can give you additional leads and potential customers. As annoying as you might find these, what is the harm of annoying a visitor that has already showed an intent to leave your website.
As long as it’s carefully planned and implemented, an exit intent pop-up can be a very effective solution to more conversions.
