All you need to know about exit intent popups
A while ago I decided to run some tests for a client using exit intent popups.
While I was running a poll, I discovered that a lot of people were not aware of our client’s promotions. They had a big discount going on and the possibility to pay in installments.
However, 50% of people didn’t scroll enough to actually see all this.
I’ve known about exit intent popups for some time now, although up until last year I didn’t use them. And to be honest with you, the technology wasn’t that advanced anyway.
But things changed and I decided to give it a go.
The results of the exit popup?
It recovered around 20% of abandoning users. This is crazy.
Moreover, because I presented the right offer to their users, our clients registered a 10% uplift in sales. This is even crazier.
All of this because of a simple exit intent popup.
With this in mind I decided to write an article about this kind of popups that I hope will cover all of your questions.
What does exit intent mean?
It’s a technology that tracks the mouse cursor movement of a user inside the browser viewport.
For non techies it means that it tells the computer to when you move your mouse out of the page. Like when you move your mouse up to close the tab or just switch to another one.
The exit intent works best on desktops, but some exit intent popups have implemented it for mobile devices.
Even if mobile traffic is booming right now, you will still get some traffic from desktops. So there is absolutely no reason for you not to try this kind of popups.
How does an exit intent popup work?
An exit intent popup will open up when a user is about to leave your website.
It uses the above mentioned technology to see if you are leaving the browser viewport with your mouse cursor.
Mobile exit intent popups use other signals, depending on the platform you want to use.
For example, if you decide to go with Privy, they state here that they look for 2 things:
1. Double clicking the mobile browser to “switch” between browser tabs.
2. Pressing the browser “back” button.
IMHO there are just a few people who do this. But then again, if they are about to leave, having an exit intent mobile popup will not hurt your business. It might actually cover up the costs of the platform that you will be using.
How do I create an exit intent popup?
You can create an exit intent popup by using a platform like Privy, OptinMonster, Informizely, Getsitecontrol etc.
There are a vast majority of platforms that allow you to easily create, design and launch your popup.
Some of them work for all websites, no matter what platform you are using. Click on the links below to scroll directly to your platform:
Examples of exit intent popups
The first example is from the guys that I like the most: OptinMonster.
Their platform is so easy to use that you don’t even need to be a designer to make a great popup. They also integrate with any and all platforms.
When you are about to leave their website, this exit intent popup appears and makes you want to stay for just a little while longer:
What really stands out is their copy. They emphasize the fact that an average of 70% of website visitors just leave your website without ever returning. Moreover, by pointing out this problem, they help you realize that an exit intent popup can save you some good amount of money.
If you are able to get just 10% of them back, how much would that impact your revenue?
In addition, they give you 2 options:
- You either get started right now. Which is a quick win.
- You have some questions. Which will take you to a sales page that explains how they can help you.
The 2 questions are taking advantage of a psychological effect. You are not presented with the option to close the popup, but rather they point you towards the same goal: purchase their software.
Since this is an exit intent popup, they have absolutely nothing to lose at this point. Your intent was to leave, they tried to win you back.
Next up is an exit intent popup from an ecommerce store.
Pura Vida sells bracelets and donates part of their profits towards wildlife conservation projects. They combined gamification with the exit intent technology to create an irresistible offer for users who are about to exit.
This is how it looks like:
You can either win a free bracelet or a 10% off discount code. This is so irresistible that almost anyone will spin the wheel. After you click that, they ask you for your email so they will send you a code to redeem your prize.
This helps generate sales, increase newsletter signup rates and loyalize customers.
If it weren’t for this exit intent popup, you can just imagine how much clients they would be losing.
Now it’s time to get your exit popup implemented. As no one likes to lose time, you can click on your platform below and jump to it’s section. I’ve covered the biggest platforms as well as universal exit intent popup makers that work on virtually any HTML website:
Best exit intent popups for Wix
Either if you host a blog or run an ecommerce store on Wix, I’ve got you covered.
Smart Popups & Forms
The highest rated exit intent popup builder on the Wix app market.
Poptin has a really easy to use interface with drag and drop capabilities. The popups that you will be going to create are mobile friendly and responsive.
If you don’t know exactly where to start, they have a few templates that you can customize. Just switch up the copy and add your site colors and you are good to go.
Poptin is great for small websites that are just getting started. Their free plan comes with 1,000 views per month for a single domain. However, you can create unlimited popups and test to see which one converts better.
Once you start growing your website, you can upgrade to their basic plan ($19.00 per month) which comes with 10,000 users per month as well as 1,000 autoresponders. This also removes their branding from your popup.
Conversion Popup
With a 3.2 stars rating, Conversion Popup might seem a bit worse than Poptin.
I have decided to include it in this list mainly because of its targeting capabilities as well as its really low price.
There are 2 different plans that you can go for. The free plan only allows you to get 10 leads (10 people can enter their email address or click on the popup button).
This is really low but it’s a great way to get a feel of how it works.
The good part is that their advance plan is just $4.34 per month while it allows you to get UNLIMITED conversions. This is a lot more than the 10,000 views offered by Poptin.
Form Builder Plus+ by POWr
The last option that I really wanted to include is Form Builder Plus+.
They do not offer a free version for their exit intent popups, but with $9.89 per month you’ll get a whole lot of other useful apps.
Their builder might seem a bit confusing at first. However, it has all the functionality you will ever need to set up the look, feel and targeting of your popups.
Exit intent popups apps for Shopify
What first started as an online snowboarding merch store, became one of the easiest to use ecommerce platforms.
Because it is so easy to use, more and more people are starting out their own multi million dollar ecommerce empires using Shopify.
I’ve gathered 3 of the top exit intent popup builders available on Shopify app marketplace.
Privy ‑ Exit popups & Email
Even though I am convinced that you have heard about Privy, I still wanted to add it to this list as the number 1 exit popup builder for Shopify.
They have by far the largest number of reviews in this segment. 23,536 store owners have reviewed this app and it still managed to get 4.6 stars. I’ve written about them in my 8 must have FREE Shopify apps that boost conversions article, but I just couldn’t skip them from this list.
Their free plan comes with 5,000 pageviews, unlimited popups and A/B testing capabilities. It also syncs with your store’s discounts so you don’t have to set them up again on another platform.
Privy’s editor is really easy to use for beginners, yet it has immense capabilities for a seasoned developer or designer.
It integrates seamlessly with email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo or Bronto. You can hook it up with your email marketing provider and set up an auto responder. More time for you, more fun for your customers.
Privy’s spin the wheel is one of the best exit intent popups on the market. You can set up how many times the users win a certain prize and directly send them an email with their promo code.
Once you start getting traction you can always update to a higher plan, easily and without any troubles along the way. All your data will be saved and you will be able to show your exit intent popup to even more users, without doing anything else.
Picreel
Picreel is another exit-intent popup tool grabbing eyeballs on the Shopify store.
It offers a free trial period of 30 days in which users can access all its premium features. I liked this tool, particularly because of the money-back guarantee they offer. If you don’t see your leads improving, you can get your money back within the first 30 days.
This lead generation and conversion optimization tool is noted for its beautiful popups that can be personalized to your liking and targeted to the right audience at the right time.
Whether it is sign-up offers, wheel of fortune, capture forms, or exit surveys – you can create a popup of your choice with the huge template library the tool offers.
They also offer A/B testing to help you test different popups and be sure of what works well for your business. Their exit-intent technology, combined with advanced targeting features, helps you display popups with relevant offers at the ideal moment.
And here’s my favorite part – Picreel integrates beautifully with over 700 CRM and email marketing software. Such integrations can easily push leads to your favorite tools and maximize conversions.
Justuno popups & CRO Tools
Justuno is an all in one CRO toolkit for your Shopify store.
Their free plan comes with 5,000 visitor sessions per month and includes all of its features. I find it really nice that for the first 14 days they don’t impose a cap on traffic. This makes it great for small stores or big ecommerce merchants alike.
What makes them special is their AI software that analyzes billions of data points from your customers. This takes personalization to a whole other level as each product recommendation is built for each unique customer.
Justuno offers so much more than just an exit intent offer. Give them a go if you don’t want to use Privy.
Email, Coupons & Sales popups
If you are looking for an all in one solution that seamlessly connects with email providers, this app is for you.
First and foremost, they have a free plan. This will allow you to give it a go without investing a single cent upfront. It’s great for starting stores with less than 1,000 visitors per month.
You’ll get all of it’s features, but you can test only 1 campaign.
Once you start scaling your business, you can upgrade on the go to increase the number of users that will see your popups.
What I like the most about Proof Factor’s popup, is that they have the magical Wheel of Fortune. It’s one of the best lead magnets available now for any ecommerce store.
You just add your discounts, change the colors and text and you are ready to go.
The Wheel of Fortune works so well because it takes advantage of a few psychological triggers. Your users will want to spin the wheel and find out what prize they are going to redeem.
In terms of rating, they have 5 stars from 97 store owners, which is absolutely incredible.
As an additional benefit, you’ll also get the social proof widget, that might increase your conversions, if used sparsely. But this is the subject of another article.
WordPress and Woocommerce exit intent pop up plugins
WordPress is the most used CMS of them all. From blogs to presentation websites and all the way to ecommerce, WordPress is the go to platform if you want maximum flexibility combined with an easy to use platform.
Since Woocommerce is a WordPress plugin, these exit intent popup builders will work nonetheless.
Popup Builder
With over 100,000 installs and a rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars from 1,281 people, Popup Builder is the go to WordPress plugin when you want to build your email list or recover abandoning users.
It works seamlessly with Visual Composer and Divi so you can design and publish your exit intent popups right from your favourite builder.
Popup Builder connects with the most used contact form plugins like Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms and Gravity Forms. It also integrates with WPML, which allows you to create different popups in different languages.
The downside is that you will have to purchase the Pro Pack to get the exit intent technology. But at the same time, you’ll also have access to a whole suite of functionalities that will take your website to another level.
You can get the exit intent popup for as low as $15, or purchase all addons for $47.96 per year.
I recommend going all in with them since the exit intent popup will be able to get you back the investment in no time (depending on the amount of traffic that you are getting).
Hustle Popup Plugin
Hustle has over 80,000 installs on active websites and managed to get a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars.
It is constantly updated so you won’t have to worry about hackers breaking your website.
It was built by the same team who created Smush image optimizer, which gives it a plus in trust.
With Hustle’s free version you are able to create 3 popups or slide ins with the exit intent functionality. It connects with most major email providers, but if you are using something different they also have a Zapier connector.
When you feel the need for more popups you can upgrade to their paid version with a 30 days free trial.
Popup Maker – Exit Intent popup
The last exit intent popup plugin for WordPress on this list (for now) is Popup Maker.
They got just above 7,000 installs and a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
I decided to add this plugin to the list mainly because of its proprietary mobile exit intent technology. Even though it might not work on all devices, having this capability is absolutely great.
Popup Maker works great will almost all wordpress page builders like Elementor, Visual Composer, WPBakery, Gutenberg, Beaver Builder and many more (according to their description).
They also have crazy targeting capabilities, allowing you to target based on referrer (if the user comes from Google or from Facebook), Geo targeting, language targeting and many more.
All these options don’t come for free. It is the most expensive out of all the other exit intent popup builders on this page. Pricing starts at $18.95 per month.
If you decide to purchase it you should know that the Gold Plan works all the way up to 500,000 pageviews per month, but you can upgrade it on the go as you scale.
Best exit intent popups for any other CMS or website
Because I wanted to focus this whole article about how easy it is to add an exit intent popup on any website, regardless of the CMS, I have chosen my top 3 favourites that work with GTM (Google Tag Manager).
You don’t have to know anything about programming to be able to add a small snippet of code inside GTM. Moreover, each one of the following 3 have extensive help documentation on how you can do it. It usually takes less than 5 minutes to get everything set up.
OptinMonster
I want to start by saying that we are not affiliated in any way with OptinMonster. I just think they are awesome.
OptinMonster has a tremendous amount of features. Maybe too many.
You will find any type of popup in their template gallery: slide ins, simple ones, wheels of fortune, etc.
I mainly used the full page exit popup from their gallery. This allows me to be sure that I have enough space to add all the information I need, while also attracting as much attention as possible to the page.
During the last few years we have all started to suffer from banner blindness. Meaning that we don’t even see a banner on a website. This happens because a lot of websites have been abusing banners.
Now this syndrome mutated towards popup blindness. Whenever you see a popup you immediately move your cursor towards the top right corner to close it.
I love the fact that OptinMonster has full page exit intent popups. Our tests have shown that this kind of popup is way better at attracting users’ attention than a classic one. You can go all in with this but I suggest you test all possibilities before anything else.
OptinMonster doesn’t have a free plan. It starts at $29 per month (for the exit intent technology). You get 14 days money back guarantee and a whole lot of functionalities.
Sumo
Sumo is one of the most used popup builders on the internet with over 500,000 installs.
They have a free forever plan that comes with all the functionality you need before upgrading to the Pro version.
The free version allows you to edit and publish as many popups as you want and a surprising email marketing addon that allows you to send as many as 10,000 emails per month.
The main limitation of Sumo for ecommerce websites is that it only works for the first $500 generated by it in sales. But if you do manage to get it going, it just pays for itself.
GetSiteControl
Last but not least on this list, is Getsitecontrol.
They are relatively new in the popup market, compared to the previously mentioned builders. Nonetheless, their targeting and design capabilities keep them apart from other services like this.
If you want to start using Getsitecontrol you should know that they offer a free 30 days trial packed with all their features.
Plans start at $19 per month per website as long as you have a maximum of 10.000 monthly views.
The highest tier plan is $49 and it comes with unlimited pageviews.
You can connect Getsitecontrol with Google Analytics instantly. For more advanced users they also have a Zapier connector.
They offer great targeting options like country, device, browser, OS, traffic source, IP, UTM and even some more.
