The Past, Present & Future of Exit-Intent Popups
What Is an “Exit-Intent” Popup?
Exit intent popups appear when the visitor is sick of you and starts to abandon you and your website. Just kidding, but you should view your visitors' intention of leaving as an opportunity to engage them further. This is what an exit-intent popup does.
A popup is a non-blocking overlay that appears on top of the website content. The trigger for showing it to a visitor is usually the cursor movement. Based on movement tracking, the exact time when the visitor is about to hover over the exit button is determined.
What Can Be Done Using Exit-Intent Popups?
Exit-intent popups are a smart choice for getting more value out of your existing traffic. An exit popup could be used for lead generation. That includes offering visitors a chance to access e-books, white papers, newsletters, etc. Downloading a PDF, signing up for your service, proposing interesting content, and showing a short promotional video are all examples of engagement. As for more salesy options, you can use an exit popup to offer a discount coupon, an abandoned shopping cart reminder, and more.
The Past: Annoying Windows-Blocking Popups
Until several years ago, exit-intent popups were blocking popups. Yes, those tiresome windows appear when you browse away from a website. Those pop-ups were all over the internet. Everyone used them, and visitors hated them.
These were the most annoying exit intent popup examples of all – pop-unders, pop-overs, and floaters. But they did manage to get the attention of the random visitors since they had no choice but to close the window. On their way out, visitors would be forcibly exposed to popup content. Many websites paid a high price for using such aggressive blocking options, but apparently, it was worth it for some of them. Popup blockers became more and more popular as browser add-ons. When both Firefox and Chrome added a built-in popup blocker, it was the beginning of the end of the blocking exit popups.
The Present: Non-Blocking One-Size-Fits-All Exit Intent Popup Overlays
Non-blocking exit-intent popups as we know them today started off as early as 2008. In this Warrior Forum thread from September 2008, "How do you make an unblockable exit popup," there is a reference to an Action Popup that provided such a service. Some of the Exit intent popup free tools offer an option that fires every time. Some of the services are more "intelligent" and allow you to define different rules for triggering the popup, thus preventing it to appear in some cases. Such rules define the popup audience. Some examples of popup audience segmentation include differentiating between people from a specific country, using a specific language, visiting during certain hours, or coming from a list of referrers.
It is important to be able to connect the popup to a user’s previous actions. For instance, you don't want to ask users who already subscribed to your newsletter in a previous visit to do so again. An exit-intent popup can be an excellent tool to help you snatch an email address from website visitors, and start turning them into leads. Sadly, even some of the best exit-intent popups don’t have that capability. That's unless a visitor has already subscribed organically via a form on the website, and not through the provider’s popup.
The Future Is Now: Custom Popup For Each Visitor - Personalization
In advanced personalization platforms the exit-intent popups will be generated automatically; in the same way that eCommerce websites such as eBay and Amazon know to suggest products you may be interested in, based on your behavior, previous interests, and your profile. The exit popups’ content can be custom-tailored to the specific visitor. Not only by segment or cohort but in completely automated and customized content. Real-time personalization it is.