7 Tips To Maximize The Effectiveness of Exit Intent Popups

Did you know you could be missing on a massive opportunity to convert more site visitors and increase sales by not actively growing your online store’s email subscription list?

There’s a new digital marketing technology, called “exit-intent popups”, that helps site owners and administrators improve their conversion rate by displaying a message to visitors as they are about to leave your site.

We’ve seen improvements in conversion rates of 3-5% by setting up exit-intent popups on a site. It takes little effort to setup and you see results, immediately.

Here’s how exit-intent popups works: whenever a visitor tries to leave your site, by closing the active window, clicking the back button, or clicking on a link in their bookmarks bar, a popup appears with a message. This message gives you a final chance to convert your visitors, just as they are about to leave your site.

Exit-intent is a really exciting technology because it offers an inexpensive way to convert more visitors without bothering the customers and subscribers you already have. Below we look at 7 ways you can use exit-intent popups to boost the conversion rates in your online store.

1. Build Your Subscriber List

Email marketing is one of the most effective strategies online marketers can use. People who give you permission to email them are a valuable marketing asset. A strong email list gives you the opportunity to promote your product or service every month to people who have already indicated an interest in what you have to offer. This is a win-win situation.

Our data shows that by using exit-intent technology to ask visitors to join your list as they are about to leave your site, the average content or e-commerce site can:

• Achieve signup rates of between three and five percent
• Double or triple this rate by offering a free e-book, special report, or coupon
• Convert between nine and ten percent by offering incentives

This is a noticeable improvement, especially when you can get the exit-intent software up and running in almost no time. Plus, when visitors signup for your list, you can market to them over the long run.

 

2. Be simple

Exit-intent popups help you distill your value proposition to just one message. When a visitor is on your site, you have only seconds to convince them to stay and make a purchase. Exit-intent popups give you a second chance to keep visitors on your site and teach you what simple message will convert your visitors into buyers.

Keeping things simple with one clear message or call to action is a necessary part of success in a world of short attention spans.

 

3. Use it to Instantly Recover an Abandoned Shopping Cart

Another way exit-intent popups can boost your conversion rate is by instantly recovering a shopping cart a visitor is about to abandon.

The instant a visitor moves to leave your site and abandon a shopping cart without completing the checkout process, you can use exit-intent popups to save the sale.  The best way to do this is by offering some type of incentive to complete the checkout process, such as a discount or free shipping. Studies indicate that popups of this type are successful about 10 percent of the time. You can go even further, by not requiring buyers to input an email address, you can increase the rate by nearly 15 percent.

 

4. Use it to Recommend Other Content or Products

When visitors leave a site without converting, it might mean they have a hot date or need to use the restroom. However, it usually means that they have not found what they were looking for, and plan to look somewhere else. Instead of simply letting them leave, you can use an exit-intent popup to redirect them to other content or products.

This is especially helpful when you have a “must-see” product that you want to show your visitors. Using exit-intent technology gives you the opportunity to show this product to your visitors, no matter what subpage they landed on your website. This “must-see” product could be a new arrival or one of your best performing items in stock.

 

5. Test Your Messages

Exit-intent software is an excellent way to run A/B tests on your marketing messages. It is a quick, inexpensive, and effective solution.

A/B testing performed the traditional way is time-consuming and expensive. It takes a lot of man-hours, effort, and money to build competing landing pages, drive traffic to those pages, and then analyze the relative effectiveness of the messages on each page.

With an exit-intent popup application that offers A/B testing functionality, you can immediately test alternative headlines to see which is more effective. While we designed our company’s exit-intent popup software, OptiMonk, with this type of A/B test functionality, we initially intended it to improve the conversion rate of the popups. We soon learned it could be used to test any type of marketing message for a brand, and it works like a charm!

This type of testing lets you discover which of your marketing messages is most effective, and thereby improve your conversion rates, with very little effort or preparation. Exit-intent popups significantly reduce the cost of running A/B tests. 

 

6. Use exit intent popup tools that are easy to manage

There are tools like our OptiMonk software, that make managing exit intent popups as easy as 1 + 1. Getting started with a simple setup is important so you can see results fast.

Use a simple message and start from your existing site and value proposition. Being able to easily edit the content and design to match your site is important. You should be able to get setup and running with your popups in as little as 15 minutes. Pre-defined templates make it easy to tailor popups for the most common use cases.

7. Make them fast

When you design your popups use as few pictures as possible so they load quickly. Keeping your message simple and using one good picture will make the most immediate impact. You have only a moment to keep a visitor on your site, don’t make her read too much information or wait for a hi res photo to load.

Here’s a few more technical tips to keep your popups lean and loading fast: Don’t use special fonts that need embedded fonts. Try to design popups that use simple HTML and CSS, this will make them load in an instant and keep them compatible across browsers.

By converting more of the traffic you are driving to your site, exit-intent popups helps you make the most of your marketing dollar. By following these 7 tips, you can increase conversion rates by 5 or even 10%. What’s more, you can use exit-intent popups to build your subscriber base. Get started using exit-intent popups and start capturing lost sales today!