PLEASE DON’T GO: Three Exit Intent Tactics That Won’t Annoy Your Visitors

Exit intent technology (What is it?). Digital marketing’s version of KC and The Sunshine Band’s Please Don’t Go.

We’ve proven, through A/B testing, that using exit-intent technology to trigger an overlay can be an extremely effective way to salvage abandoning visitors. Examples of triggered content include discount code offers or newsletter sign-up prompts. Some might argue that these interruptions diminish the customer experience. With this in mind, below are a few tactics that may help you counteract this effect when running exit-intent campaigns.

Tactic #1: Segment, Segment, Segment

There are numerous advantages to focusing your exit intent messaging on specific subsets of your visitor base. You’re not going to want to just hand out discount codes willy-nilly to every visitor out there. The proposition of discount codes can damage your brand and drive non-loyal shoppers. A more powerful strategy is to reward your top customers – your most loyal visitor base – with discounts to maintain the ever-important high level of customer retention in a saturated, highly competitive market.

With one of our airline customers, we’ve recently leveraged a combination of offline customer-centric data, real-time in-session data, and historical browsing and purchase behaviour to target only high-value, high-loyalty segments with discounts. This resulted in a highly focused exit-intent offering that generated lifts in bookings of 16 to 20 percent across three segments.

On the acquisition side, you only want to prompt a newsletter sign-up if you recognize the visitor is new.

The point is that it’s important to stay focused on your campaign and think through segmentation logic that makes sense and aligns with your project’s intent (pun intended).

Tactic #2: Be Like Water

Your tactic doesn’t have to be an overlay. Think outside the box (pun once again intended). Expand your horizons (as Bruce Lee suggests) and consider presenting your content in a different form that may be less intrusive and enhance the customer experience, while attracting visitors back to the page.

Try triggering a 1 a user can dismiss) instead of the typical brash overlay that might disrupt browsing on the page. Or focus in on some specific content of interest, like the fact that an item might be low stock or low availability, and introduce a little cue:

To create a cue like this, you need segmentation to identify flights with five or fewer seats left. In many ways, everything always comes back to Tactic #1 (as you’ll see again in the final tip below).

Tactic #3: Be Helpful

You don’t have to thrust a loud discount or sign-up here message in front of the visitor. You can simply offer timely help to a visitor in need.

In a baseline we ran for a customer selling home insurance, we collected numerous visitor attributes through their inputs as they journeyed through the funnel – title (to determine gender), date of birth (to create age-range groupings), and more (refer to Tactic #1 again). Ultimately, tying these dimensions to step-by-step conversion rates and engagement across each page of the application funnel allowed us to identify several points of friction for visitors.

One key finding was that visitors in the highest age bracket converted at a much lower rate once they reached a particular stage of the funnel. The solution? To target these visitors with the offer of chat assistance if they had been idle for a specific length of time and exhibited an intent to exit. The results showed improved engagement and customer experience, as well as applications salvaged by the customer call centre team.

Please Don’t Go (Don’t Go Away)

Leveraging these tactics in your exit-intent strategies can not only improve your campaign’s performance but also help ensure you are not pushing visitors away because of the sometimes obnoxious ways exit-intent overlays are presented. Ultimately, these customer experiences still need to be tested, and continuously tested at that, so that you’re sure they work for your visitors. But the point is you can politely attract the visitor back to your site instead of beggin’ please, please, please don’t go.