Exit Popups — Grab Those Site Visitors Before They Leave
Don’t you wish you had a last chance mechanism to keep people engaged on your site or a way to grab their email address before they leave potentially forever? The good news is the ability to do this exists now. Here’s how it works.
What Are Exit Popups?
Exit popups or exit intent popups are designed to grab your site visitor’s attention right before they decide to leave your site, potentially forever. They can be customized to provide an extra discount for a product already in the cart or to offer education or some other value.
We’ve all seen them and you’d be in rare company if at some time in your past, one of them didn’t look interesting.
Conversion Science claims up to 15% of your site users can be convinced to stay on a page and/or provide an email address for an offer.
The tool tracks the user’s mouse cursor and triggers the pop up typically when the cursor leaves the active browsing area. See below for specific uses.
How To Effectively Use Exit Popups
Once nice thing about exit popups, if created correctly, they shouldn’t get in the way of normal site browsing and exploration, which is a concern to website marketers. After all, your conversion goal should be the most important objective for your visitors. If your pop up is annoying or distracting it will certainly deter intended behavior.
Another benefit is this tool is so popular, it’s simple to implement. But your strategy is still very important so what do you want to accomplish?
You can request survey participation, lead opt-ins, emails, and discount codes especially for products already in the cart. If you do ecommerce you might want to request a phone number and opt-in request for text messaging.
Do NOT be spammy or you’ll lose your opportunity. This means provide value specifically in the subject matter that pertains to your potential customer. A discount on something in the cart is a no brainer as who doesn’t want to save?
But if you are offering education, make sure it relates specifically to this site visitor. You can provide an exit pop up specific to a blog article or web page that provides more information on this subject. You don’t want to build an email list of people that won’t eventually convert.
You need a great headline to grab attention and portray value. Short, sweet and effective is the formula. Provide your call to action as well.
Like everything else in digital marketing you will want to analyze the effectiveness and test, analyze and continue the testing process. What works best for you is the key to testing. Is it a testimonial, some hard-core performance stats, the number of five star reviews you have?
By testing over time you can develop a history of effective techniques for your exit pop up and be confident that it is working. Document your changes and the percentage of times the popup works.
VERY IMPORTANT – Analyze your engagement time on pages where your exit pop up resides to see if your engagement time goes up or down from the use of the pop up.
A Word About Mobile
The trigger parameters are different on mobile and you must take care when putting them on the mobile version of your site! Pushing the back button, scrolling up, switching browser tabs and idle time on page can be setup to trigger exit popups.
To start on mobile, you might consider experimenting with just one trigger type to start and see how it goes.
Bring ‘Em Back
So grow your email list and increase your customer base with this simple tool. Testing is SO crucial from your copy to your imaging to the trigger parameters. Document everything and keep at it and you should see some positive results.
