Why This Exit Intent Popup Generated 7,973 Leads and $50k in Revenue

‍From: Concerned marketer

“Hey guys, for some reason, my website popup isn’t converting well? We’re getting traffic. It’s getting views, but the conversion rate sucks! 😭 Why is this happening?”

Then there are messages like this:

From: Anthony @ Rudy Mawer

“Hey guys, one of our campaigns based on a ConvertFlow exit intent popup has generated over $50,000 in revenue in the last two months. This is a huge success for us that was directly measurable from ConvertFlow. We’ve also seen about 8,000 additional leads come in from this campaign.”‍

While we prefer getting emails like the latter, we also love it when our customers come to us for strategic help with getting more conversions.

So in this post, we’re going to look at exit intent popups in detail.

We’ll break down the exact popup mentioned above by Rudy Mawer (the one that generated over $50k in revenue). Then, use those same principles to show you how to build one that works for your site.

‍What is an exit intent popup?

An exit intent popup is a popup that appears once it becomes clear a user is about to leave a website. This usually happens when someone's mouse/cursor leaves the browser's main viewport, indicating an intention to navigate away from the current page or site.

Here's a simple exit intent popup in action:

At first glance, doing this might seem invasive and annoying. But as a marketer, it's a great opportunity to 'save' a visitor session that otherwise would have gone unconverted.

Remember:

That visitor was about to leave anyway. So you don't really have much to lose by testing out some last-ditch offers in an exit intent popup.

How do exit intent popups work?

It works by tracking your mouse movements, as well as your back button interactions, to measure visitor “exit intent”.

Then, based on this site activity a website popup is triggered. This catches the attention of the visitor and presents a message that hopes to re-engage them with new content or a lead capture offer.

How do exit intent popups trigger on mobile devices?

On mobile devices, there's no mouse movement to track—just touch controls. So it's a little tricky to identify when a user is starting to show an intention to leave or close the page.

The Rudy Mawer exit intent popup that generated $50K in sales

We've already mentioned that some exit popups work well, while others fall totally flat.

Why? It's all down to the overall popup design and offer contained within it.

With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at a real-life case study.

The exit intent popup we're focusing on was created by Anthony Accetturo on the Rudy Mawer website. At time of writing, it had generated:

• 7,973 leads
• Over $50K in direct sales

When looking at Anthony’s exit intent popup, we can see a few interesting characteristics that indicate why it’s converting so well:

1. It's incredibly eye-catching

Anthony went over and above to make sure he’s displaying a CTA that’s sure to get a visitor’s attention as they attempt to leave.

Here’s step one of the two-step popup:

Obviously, the pink and yellow colors do well to grab your attention. And the bold text and demanding headline play a big role, too.

Of course, these specific colors may not align with your own company's brand guidelines. Just make sure to ensure that the colors and styling you do use has the same attention-grabbing impact.

2. The copy and offer are genuinely compelling

In this case, the visitor has checked out an ecommerce product for a workout plan—which indicates purchase intent.

With this in mind, you'll notice the copy:

• Grabs attention
• Offers a clear discount
• Reiterates how it's the "perfect plan"
• Leans into FOMO marketing by talking about "missing out"
• Addresses objections via the guarantee

All in all, it's thoughtfully crafted to draw the abandoning visitor in, one last time, and present them with an offer they can’t refuse.

Source: YourStory.com

Also, take note of the conversational, friendly tone used for that initial CTA step shown above.

Then, Anthony wraps it up with a risk-reversing guarantee, along with a strong, clickable call-to-action button which leads to the next lead capture step:

Check out Anthony's customer story, and see how they used ConvertFlow to boost their conversion rate: Read The Story

3. It's targeted to those who'll be interested, and perfectly-timed

Even with strong copy and attention-grabbing design, a call-to-action will still fall flat if it's just not being seen by the right people.

So (with Anthony’s permission) we took a closer look 'behind-the-scenes' of his exit popup to see how it's set up.

No surprise that it's targeted to only show to people visiting a certain page. (The page that's relevant to the product being sold.)

But a really smart play is to carefully exclude existing customers who were tagged as having purchased the product in ActiveCampaign:

This allows for two key things to happen:

1. People don't see an irrelevant popup if they've already purchased
2. These customers can be targeted with further upsell and cross-selling strategies to grow revenue even more

Exit popup performance benchmarks: What to expect from yours

So what kind of quantifiable results can be directly attributed to the exit intent popup built with ConvertFlow?

In short, Anthony and his team generated an extra 7,973 leads, plus over $50,000 in additional revenue during a two month period. 

Awesome work Anthony!

But that’s an anecdotal example. We need to see an average.

At ConvertFlow, we’ve helped over 15,000 marketing teams launch conversion popups, landing pages, quizzes, and more with our all-in-one conversion platform.

So, I pulled up ConvertFlow’s most popular popup templates and sampled 1,000 exit intent popups created using these templates to see how they are converting.

Here are the results:

• ‍Exit intent popups sampled: 1,000‍
• Total unique popup viewers: 3,269,674‍
• Total unique popup conversions: 140,414‍
• Average popup conversion rate: 4.61%
  

Conversions in the context of an exit popup includes either clicking a call-to-action button or submitting a form. But does not include buttons or icons for closing out the popup.

What can we conclude? Exit intent popups work!

How NOT to use exit intent popups

Unfortunately, not all popups are created equal. So when we get an email from "concerned marketers” who are not getting the conversions they want, we take a deeper look at their case.

And almost every time, we find a CTA looking something like the one shown below:

Not a real popup, but you get the point 😉

Now there’s nothing wrong with a popup call-to-action that looks like this. It’s subtle, and not aggressive. It may also look clean on the website.

Hey, there are times when subtle calls-to-action convert. However…

Mistake #1: Subtlety doesn’t always get the attention you need

Marketing, by nature, is about capturing attention and guiding a person to take a specific action. Sometimes, when there’s not enough contrast, visitors simply don’t know what to pay attention to.

So don’t be afraid to make your calls-to-action standout. Creating contrast with design can help. Visual representations can help even more.

Here at ConvertFlow, we like adding team profiles to our popups:

This makes the popup message look conversational, rather than promotional. Plus, human faces have been proven to command more attention.

So, whenever creating a popup, take some extra time to think about the thought process of your visitors when they first see your popup. Is it eye-catching?

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should go wild, and annoy the crap out of your website visitors.

In fact, please avoid doing this. The other day I was on a site and was presented with a popup that looked like a gambling interface. I felt insulted, and immediately left the site.

Unfortunately, more often than not, marketers are so concerned about not disrupting their visitor’s experience, they fail to capture enough attention to drive the kind of conversions that will make their traffic generation efforts worthwhile.

Mistake #2: Triggering popups at the wrong time is a recipe for poor results

In addition to not investing time and attention in creating a visually-engaging popup, another common mistake we see is not setting the popup to trigger at the right time.

More than often, it’s obvious that much thought wasn’t given to when the popup should show on the page.

For example, triggering a popup three seconds after loading the site for a new visitor, may be annoying and prompt them to close it out without even thinking:

Give some time for the reader to actually consume the content on-page before hitting them with a popup. So leave a few seconds for your time delay ones, or simply rely solely on the exit intent versions.

Mistake #3: Less targeted popups = lower conversion rates

Another common mistake with popups is settling for site-wide targeting on most of your pages. This means you are disregarding the relevance of the content the visitor is currently consuming.

If you don’t have any popup targeting for your website content, by all means set some up, and you’ll see a boost in conversions.

But don’t just stop there. Create targeted exit intent popups for your content categories and even for your individual blog posts.

The more relevant your popup is, to the content the visitor is reading, the higher the conversion rates.

SEE MORE: What Are Targeted Messages? How to Convert More Visitors with a Message That Stands Out

Mistake #4: Failing to make a compelling offer

The exit intent popups our team sees that aren’t converting much, tend to have less-than-compelling offers being made to their visitors.

So what factors contribute to a low converting offer?

• The offer is not relevant to the content the visitor is consuming
• There isn’t much perceived value being created
• It doesn't solve a big enough problem for the reader
• It lacks clear visual representation of the deliverable
• It asks for too much information in exchange for the visitor's action
  

Remember the popup Anthony had set up on Rudy Mawer’s site, and how compelling the offer was?

It’s visually captivating, targeted, relevant, perfectly timed, and it makes a truly compelling offer to the visitors who are seeing it.

Mistake #5: Trying to code the popups yourself

For your website’s exit intent popups to be successful, you’re going to need:

• A fast way to create a lot of different popups for the different products, content pages and categories for your website
• Robust conversion tracking and analytics
• A way to split-test your exit intent popup messaging and offers
• API connections with your email service provider (if your popup collects contact details)
• The ability to control WHAT popup shows on certain pages of your website
• The ability to control WHO sees your popups with personalization rules (example: not showing newsletter forms to existing subscribers, or showing specific popups only to certain customers)
• The ability to control WHEN your popup triggers after the page loads
  

If you’re a marketer, trying to code this all yourself is probably not what you want to do. 

And even if you have developers on staff, having them custom code your popups may:

• Burn dozens of expensive developer hours per popup
• Waste your time waiting weeks or even months for the developers to launch popups and make changes
• Take away the control over your popups that you as a marketer needs to be able to report, optimize and further personalize your popups

How to create exit intent popups without coding

With ConvertFlow’s free no-code popup builder and dozens of free popup templates, making exit intent popups is a breeze. 

For example, here’s a simple cart abandonment popup template you can use for free:

Setting this up on your website is easy. Here’s how in six simple steps:

Step #1: Import the free exit popup template into your ConvertFlow account

Use this link to get the exit-intent popup template for free. If you have already signed up for a ConvertFlow account, using this link will import the CTA into your website. 

If you haven’t signed up for ConvertFlow, you’ll be registered on ConvertFlow’s free plan which you can use to launch your first three popups for free.

Step #2: Adjust the template’s content

You can use ConvertFlow's builder to tweak the template to suit your own website's brand and desired colors. You'll also want to edit the headline and offer to align with what you need.

Ideas include a discount code, free shipping, lead magnet, a bonus, etc. In this case, we’ll use a 15% off discount code as a special offer, so let’s adjust the text in the popup template:‍

Then, add any special offer instructions to the thank you step. Just scroll down in the ConvertFlow builder and edit the template text:

Note: You can add as many steps as you like here. But for a simple discount offer, two steps works perfectly.

Step #3: Connect the popup form to your email service provider

To do this, click on the form and then click “Confirmation Actions” to control what happens when it is submitted:

The form is already set to jump to step two, where the offer instructions are given. To add an email integration, click "Manage email integrations." In this case, I’ve connected MailChimp.

With MailChimp connected, let’s add an automation to add the subscriber to a MailChimp list, where we can follow up with future offers and promotions via email marketing:

‍Step #4: Launch the popup on your website

Next, click-through to the "Preview" page to get a look at your popup in action before it goes live.

If it all looks good, move along to the “Launch” page and then add a targeting condition to target the pages you want. As we're creating an ecommerce discount popup, we'll target all product page listings on our ecommerce store.

We can do this using the “If URL contains” targeting condition type, possibly checking for a keyword such as “/product”.

PRO TIP:

Using ConvertFlow’s advanced targeting conditions, you can also exclude existing subscribers and customers visiting your website, or target your exit intent popup only to people in specific contact segments:

From here, just toggle the switch to activate and if you haven’t already set up ConvertFlow on your website, you’ll then be given your ConvertFlow script. Here’s how to install ConvertFlow in your website CMS.

Now if we head to our website and visit a URL matching the targeting criteria, the exit intent popup should display when trying to exit the page 🙌

‍Step #5: Report on your exit intent popup’s results

Once you’ve launched your exit intent popup on your website, you’ll want to click to the “Overview” page of your popup CTA in ConvertFlow and start analyzing the results.

Here's what that looks like for a popup that's been live for a while:

You’ll want to look at the overall conversion rate metric of your exit intent popup as the primary key performance indicator (KPI), with the 4-5% average conversion rate benchmark in mind.

Step #6: Split-test your exit intent popup

You'll notice in the image above that there are two "variants" of the popup being reported on. This is because it's being A/B tested (aka split-tested).

Once a control variant has been established with significant statistics, it then may be a good idea to split-test another variation of your exit intent popup.

ConvertFlow makes split-testing easy. Just duplicate variant A to create variant B, C and so on:

Once you duplicate a variant, you can tweak its design in the builder. Test anything from button color, to trigger time, to an entirely different offer or value prop. (Just make sure to only test one change per variant.)

You can then allocate a percentage of popup viewers to that variant, like so:

Final thoughts on exit popups

Now that you’ve completed this guide, you’re ready to boost your website’s conversions with exit intent popups! 😎

Explore all of ConvertFlow's free popup templates, or get the free template below to launch your first exit intent popup for free:

If I can leave you with a single golden nugget to remember: Moving forward, continually keep asking yourself how your website popups (or any calls-to-action, for that matter) can be more compelling.

• Give your popup a little more thought;
• take a second to role-play the scenario; and
• do your best to look at your offer through the eyes of a new page visitor.
  

Chances are there are low hanging conversion quick wins, ready to be split-tested!