The visitors to your website bring huge revenue potential, but if they don’t stick around to take the next step then you’re missing significant opportunities to positively impact the bottom line. And losing ROI on your traffic-generating paid campaigns.
As a marketer, you will have spent many, many hours, creative juices and budget-building campaigns to drive visitors to your site. But what happens when they decide to leave?
There are various indicators that can be tracked and used to help build a healthy website with an enjoyable customer experience; exit intent is one of those elements.
Whether you’ve been working in the website space for a month or years, you’ve likely heard of exit intent. You’ve also likely seen it first-hand on many of the sites you browse in the form of a pop-up. Here we’ll cover what exit intent is and how it can be utilised to help support your conversion rate optimisation and lead generation.
How to use exit intent
If a visitor has decided to leave your site, you’ve lost an opportunity to provide value and drive revenue. That’s why it’s important to use these exit behaviours to trigger tactics that can convince them to stay while also adding real value for them. Understanding your audience is and will always be critical.
Here are a few ways in which you can engage your existing traffic.
1. Pop-ups
We have all seen, and used, pop-ups. They’re effective – when done well. When not done well they can be incredibly annoying. But if you know your visitor demographic and what will tip the scales to bring them over the line, pop-ups can be very useful. These often use some kind of enticement to convince the visitor to stay.
A few commonly used pop-up enticements are
- A discount code = value for money
- A free downloadable = helpful information
- A survey request = product improvement
- An explainer video = additional information
- Newsletter subscription = access to quality content
2. Chat
Chat is an incredibly valuable tool on any website for a multitude of reasons. Read here for supporting statistics as to why chat is important for your marketing in 2023. What we’ve found is that chat is a great tool to enhance your customer experience but it’s also a great conversion rate optimisation tool to re-engage visitors showing signs of leaving.
For one reason or another, your visitor hasn’t found what they were looking for. What better way to engage them than with a real person who can help them instantly?
Building an exit intent strategy
Once you’ve decided to utilise exit intent and build a re-engagement strategy, you’ll need to set clear objectives. These need to not only improve your conversion rate (whilst decreasing your exit rate) but, more importantly, they need to provide value to your visitors.
What will your target audience appreciate? A discount code, free advice, or downloadable content..? Even the best pop-ups messaging or chat greetings in the world are ineffective if you aren’t offering something of value to your audience.
If you’ve read any of our blogs you’ll see this theme pop up time and again, understanding your audience, their wants, needs and challenges is key for not just the success of your marketing campaigns but the business. Your entire website design should be built around the customer, and that will include how to target those who show signs of leaving.
Key Exit Intent Takeaway: All websites lose traffic, but there are ways to reduce this by engaging traffic on exit intent. And in doing so, you increase your opportunities to convert traffic into paying customers and increase the ROI on your paid campaigns.
