Exit intent popups reduce site abandonment

Today’s online customers are sophisticated - and often impatient. As a marketer you need to use new approaches to keep website visitors engaged and to reduce bounce rates. Fortunately, there are effective approaches to intervene at the exact moment before a visitor abandons a website - commonly known as exit intent popups.

Target and engage bouncing visitors

The technology to reveal this fleeting moment tracks the user’s mouse movements and a possible intent to leave (the upward movement which breaks the pane of the browser window, for example). When this happens, you can trigger an overlay (similar to a pop-up) that entices a visitor to stay or take action.

By tracking a visitor’s mouse movements, you can determine their normal interaction and what is likely to be exit intent popups. To keep them on your page, use Webtrends Optimize to create valuable offers such as discount codes, newsletter signups or ‘click & chat’ engagement.

Create valuable Exit Intent Popups offers

Discount codes - You don’t want to just hand these out freely to every visitor out there. You may want to be specific with your segmentation and leverage a variety of sources to define your segments. Recently, we’ve leveraged everything from offline customer-centric data, real-time in-session data, and historical browsing/purchase behaviour in order to only target high value, high loyalty segments with discounts.

Newsletter sign-ups - You’re only going to want to prompt if you recognise that the visitor is not an existing subscriber or appears to be a prospect/new visitor. You can take segmentation a step further with newsletter overlays by collecting more information about a visitor, giving you the opportunity to more effectively personalise outgoing emails or return visits to the site. Make sure you leverage A/B testing to understand the effect of including an extra field or two.

Call or chat assistance - Engage the visitor live. Be sure you’re offering help, not selling something. See if they have questions and make sure you give them the answers they’re looking for.

Take the battle to mobile too

Another key point to remember is that although you cannot track mouse movements on tablets or phones, exit intent popups targeting is still available.

Let’s say you’re an online retailer and your UX team identifies that a common pre-exit action visitors are taking is to highlight and copy the full name of a product. You recognise their intent is to copy the product name and look for better prices via a search engine – all after exiting your page. So how do you stop this? A pop up with a price match guarantee would be an effective approach. No mouse cursor tracking required.

When creating exit intent popups overlays, don’t forget to include logic that ensures the offer is only shown on exit, not to show it again based on certain actions and perhaps some segmentation based on your project’s intent. Ultimately, these customer experiences still need to be tested. Multivariate testing, specifically, is a great way to isolate specific learning from testing individual elements.

Review content of your most frequently exited pages

When a visitor leaves your website they may be gone forever. With the help of your analytics solution you should determine which are the pages that are exited from most frequently. You should also look at the average time a user is on the page before exiting. Your first port of call should be to review the content of the page and try to make it more compelling because even the most interesting of exit intent popups messaging will not always stimulate further interaction.