hether you work with e-commerce, B2B, or SaaS, attracting quality traffic to your website is likely among your top priorities as a marketer.
However, getting new visitors through the door is costly and time-consuming, so you want to make the most out of your hard-earned traffic.
After all, with customer acquisition costs going through the roof, you can’t afford to lose an interested prospect after they land on your website.
That’s exactly where exit-intent popups come into play.
With elegant, to-the-point exit-intent popups, you can target visitors who are about to leave your site and show the right message that will convince them to stay and take action.
When used correctly, exit-intent popups can help you:
Grow your email list;
Get more orders;
Increase order size;
Collect feedback;
And much more.
Here are seven different ways to use exit-intent popups to get you started—with examples and templates you can easily copy for your brand.
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What Is Exit-Intent?
Exit-intent is a technology that detects when a visitor’s cursor moves outside the browser window.
Since this action hints at the intent to leave a website, many marketers use this sweet moment as the last attempt to persuade visitors with a popup.
But there’s a caveat: Exit intent popups often come across as annoying—simply because marketers overuse them.
The key to creating exit-intent popups that don’t bother your prospects is to stay relevant for each visitor group.
For example, a first-time visitor who’s abandoning your homepage is at a different stage of the buyer’s journey compared to a returning customer who has $100-worth items in their cart. That’s exactly where exit-intent popups for e-commerce come into play.
If you want to keep your exit-intent messages relevant, personalized, and unintrusive, combine this technology with other targeting options available in your popup builder. Don't forget to also include custom logos and any other brand elements from your company.
Let’s take a look at seven ways to do that.
1. Turn Abandoning Visitors into Subscribers
Asking for an email address when someone is about to leave your website is nothing new. To do so in the best and fastest manner, many individuals seek to take the help of email marketing consultants to find the best possible ways to get new subscribers or customers. This has been a life-long strategy used for various startup marketing automation strategies and practices.

What I suggest here is to add more context to your email popups to make them relevant to the abandoning visitor, rather than show the same popup to everybody.
One way to achieve this is to use page-level targeting for your exit popups. 
For example, if a visitor is about to leave one of your product pages, they’re likely interested in your store but unsure about that product’s fit, quality, or price. Here’s how you can grab their attention and turn them into email subscribers:
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Now, if someone is browsing coffeemakers, they’re likely interested in coffee equipment, beans, and such. With an exit popup that only shows on specific product pages, you can make your email list more attractive to the abandoning visitor with a promise to notify them when they can buy these products for a lower price. It’s a much more compelling offer than “join our weekly newsletter.”
If you want to personalize this popup further, you can use a merge tag and update your popup copy automatically based on the product or category name the visitor is browsing:
With this type of exit popup, you’ll disturb much fewer visitors and get more subscribers who’re looking forward to hearing about your offers.
Remember, quality over quantity.
2. Prevent Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment popups are the most common use cases of exit intent.
Just because you cover the exits doesn’t mean that visitors will magically stop leaving your site, though. Your popup’s offer, design, and copy play a big role in persuading shoppers to stay.
If you’re already offering welcome discounts on your store, the exit-intent position is a great place to reiterate your offer. For instance, you may have a site-wide welcome slide-in that looks like this:
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For exit-intent, you can slightly adjust your copy to make it fit the context and drive urgency, like this:
This way, you’ll get more leads for your email list that you’d otherwise lose. Plus, you’ll give visitors a reason to stay and place an order.
And what if you’re not currently running any offers on your site? That takes me to my next point.
3. Offer an Incentive (to Some Visitors)
If you don’t want to discount your products for exiting visitors, I completely get you. Discount codes can hurt your profit margins and reduce your products’ perceived value.
Whatever your incentive is (a free product, shipping, or small discount), my suggestion is to offer it only to a portion of your visitors.
Not just any portion, though. Incentivize warmer leads—the serious shoppers—to complete their purchase. 
A valid indicator of buying intent in e-commerce is basket value. So consider offering, for example, free shipping to orders over a certain basket value and use exit-intent popups to remind shoppers they’re missing out on this opportunity.
If a visitor has, say, $50 in their cart and decide to leave your store, they can see this exit popup:
Whereas another shopper with only $30 doesn’t yet qualify for your offer and sees this popup instead:
By reminding the second group of visitors what they’re missing out on, you won’t only recover an (almost) abandoned cart, but you’ll also make them spend more and increase average order value. You can even use a branded QR code with a logo to showcase a custom discount coupon or an exclusive offer in the exit intent popup to re-engage leaving visitors.
4. Remind Benefits
So far I assumed you’re willing to spend money to make money. Meaning, you’re okay with taking a small dent into your revenue to get more visitors to stay on your site and keep shopping.
What if you’re not?
The good news is, you don’t necessarily have to offer anything extra to convince abandoning visitors. You can use exit-intent popups to remind shoppers what they’re about to miss out on.
Do you have a solid return policy, a bulletproof satisfaction guarantee, unbeatable product quality, or fast delivery? Remind visitors of these additional benefits of shopping from your store.
Three simple bullets often do wonders in this type of exit popup:
It’s one thing to hear what makes your shop unique from you—the store owner or marketer—and another thing to hear it from your happy customers. In other words, if you want to take this exit-intent popup one step further, use your customers’ words instead of marketing copy.
Insert real screenshots of your top customer testimonials or embed your Trustpilot reviews into your popups to add credibility and social proof to your claims:
Now your existing customers will help convince on-the-fence visitors to stay on the website and choose your store over others.
Zero dollars spent. Lots of potentially lost revenue recovered.

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