Effective CRO tactics for personalized exit popups

Fact: most visitors will abandon your site and landing pages without converting. It happens. Maybe they got distracted. Maybe your unique value proposition wasn't strong enough. Maybe they didn’t find what they were looking for. Whatever the reason may be, the question is this: What can be done to convert those abandoning visitors? 

Many successful e-commerce brands are employing exit intent technology to reduce cart abandonments, recapture sales, increase conversion rates and generate more leads. This post breaks down the most effective tactics for exit popups (also known as exit intent overlays) with detailed personalization examples you can implement into any revenue-driven e-commerce strategy. 

Exit intent technology is an algorithm that detects and reacts to site abandonment in real-time. Upon noticing exit intent (such as aggressive mouse movement to x-out of the page), the algorithm automatically triggers an incentivized popup to convince the abandoning visitor to take the desired action. 

Exit popups boil down your offering into a simple and concentrated version of whatever you’re promoting. They narrow down the analysis required to make a decision. If done right, exit popups can provide significant uplift and fulfill multiple revenue-based goals. But before we get into powerful exit popup tactics, let’s quickly highlight some all-too-common mistakes to avoid. 

Your exit popup should fulfill one goal. Only one goal. It should not be crammed with tons of content, multiple navigation mechanisms or too many calls to action. One goal: compel the user to make a simple decision.

There’s a common misconception that people appreciate many choices. In fact, the opposite is true, especially in sales. Providing too many choices can lead to analysis paralysis, overwhelming your visitor and resulting in a see-ya-later instead of a conversion.

Putting too many call to action (CTA)'s or decisions in your popup is a recipe for user confusion. Your message must make one point clearly and explicitly. If your goal is to capture newsletter signups, don’t also invite users to ‘check out our new arrivals’ or include another call to action that’s unrelated to the goal at hand.

Additionally, any call to action on an exit popup should state exactly what will happen if the user clicks on it. Instead of saying “yes,” “no,” “cancel,”or “ok,” on a call to action button, explicitly state your goal: “Yes, sign me up” or “Send me all the latest updates.” Keep it simple: one popup, one clear decision.

A poorly designed exit popup spells disaster for decision making and conversions. UI issues and bugs aside, some have so much content that they require a scroll bar or feature anchor links for other pages to send users to. 

Scrolling and anchor links make sense for lengthy web pages, not exit popups. 

Placing multiple navigation mechanisms or tons of text within a popup is an outdated approach that will distract the user from the decision you’re trying to convince them to make. A good rule to follow: if it’s valuable info but needs a scroll, it should be its own page, not an exit popup. 

Now let’s take a good look at how to use exit popups to engage visitors who are keen on leaving your website. 

To produce the most effective exit popup campaigns, follow our unique SPROUT

framework: Segment, Personalize, Recommend, Optimize, Urgency, Test. If you do, you may see a 267% conversion uplift like one of our clients did.

You need to ask yourself the following two questions when creating a tailored offer using an exit popup: Who am I reaching? What action do I want to influence?

What audience am I trying to reach?

The more personalized your popup is, the better your chances are of stopping site abandonment dead in its tracks. Instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, you can make your messaging segment- or context-specific. This entails making a conscious decision of what will work best for specific audience groups or pages rather than all your users and site in general.

• By  Cohort: Before you craft your copy, consider whom the offer is geared toward. Are you connecting with first-time visitors? Cart abandoners? Price-sensitive shoppers? Paid traffic? Registered users? Use your analytics data insights to get a good sense of your visitor's identity and then leverage audience segmentation accordingly. Taking the time to differentiate between patterns, referral sources and intent of individual audience groups will help you deliver a far more powerful and relevant message.

• By Context: Instead of taking a user-centric approach, you can take a context-centric one. Landing pages, homepages, blog pages, checkout pages, product pages and category pages can all feature exit popups unique to that page. If a user is abandoning the homepage, for example, chances are they haven’t interacted much with your brand or products. Triggering a welcome offer to homepage abandoners, for example, can provide the necessary encouragement to engage further with your site. 

It’s important to note that contextual targeting isn’t only limited to pages. Tailoring your message according to geo-location, device type or local weather forecast are especially effective methods of creating relevant messages that resonate.

What action do I want to influence?

Typically, exit popups aim to get users to view content, complete a form or direct them to a specific or underlying page. Which desired action is the right one? It depends.

If your goal is for the user to take in a short message (max two sentences), then having the user either choose to convert on or dismiss the message makes sense. If your goal is to gain a subscription, then providing a bug-free form with one clear call to action is essential.

A bonafide method of reigniting engagement is to layer personalization into your exit popups according to each user’s interests and site engagement patterns. You might consider tailoring and personalizing your message with dynamic variables such as:

• The user’s name
• Product affinities
• Real-time intent
• Subscription status

Making a personalized reference reinforces the connection between the user and your brand, demonstrates that you understand their needs and can greatly increase your chances of re-engagement.

A very effective yet underused tactic is to use exit popups to cross-sell and upsell products. Featuring personalized product recommendations in your exit popups is a proven way to improve recirculation and reduce exit rates. Do this by first implementing automated recommendation widgets into the popup. Then, customize the widget’s conditions to recommend according to the products the user viewed or interacted with right before the abandonment. 

Popups that feel easy and simple to users are usually not the result of a quick and simple process. In order to create compelling exit popups, you need to be constantly testing design, calls-to-action and content. Continuous iteration and ongoing A/B testing and optimization is key to presenting the right message in the right context or to the right cohort. 

A powerful approach to exit intent optimization is to push multiple variations simultaneously and dynamically optimize the best performing combinations according to specific objectives or KPIs. Exit popups can be optimized according to goals—whether that goal is to improve click-through rate (CTR), generate more leads or increase revenue, for instance, is up to you. 

Creating a sense of urgency is a great way to call visitors to action and encourage immediate decisions. Creating urgency with an exit popup means placing the user in a situation where they will feel they are giving up on something valuable by choosing to navigate away. 

You can create urgency by putting attention-grabbing keywords (e.g. % off, now, new, best, sellers, most popular etc.) within a given time frame (by midnight, today only, last call, only 3 hours left, etc.) Doing so will induce a fear of missing out and intrigue your shopper to seize the opportunity at hand rather than run from it. 

Organizations that deliver the most effective popups are the ones that continuously iterate and analyze. Pay close attention to your data insights to see what’s working and what isn’t. 

Just because a page can technically have an exit popup, doesn’t mean it should. Just because a message worked for one segment, doesn't mean it will work for another. Just because an exit-intent tactic worked for your competitor, doesn't mean it will work for you. 

The only way to deliver the most effective exit popups is through constant analysis, testing and using data insights to gain a better understanding of your user base.