This is a guest post by Kate Lynch. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.
Marketers often avoid popups due to an association with generic, intrusive messaging, but there are a variety of ways to leverage popups without hurting the customer experience. Furthermore, popups offer a number of advantages over alternative ways to drive traffic, subscriptions, and sales.
Popups are more complicated than ever before, so you may not know how to start implementing them in your campaigns. This article will cover some of the most effective ways to use exit-intent popups throughout your WordPress site. Adding even just a few popups could have a significant impact on sales.
What Are Exit Popups?
Popups can be used in a wide range of settings, but data indicates that exit-intent popups are one of the best options. These popups are designed to appear whenever a user is about to leave your website. While it’s impossible to predict exactly when this will happen, marketers have access to numerous tools that analyze customer behavior and determine the perfect time to trigger a popup.
Marketing automation services usually monitor the user’s cursor to identify the right time. Once it leaves your web page, there’s a good chance the visitor is planning to close the window or tab. Immediately showing your popup brings their attention back to your site and gives you another opportunity to make a sale.
Exit-intent popups are a great way to extend the customer interaction and keep them on your website for a little longer. They also lead to higher order rates and increase the odds that they’ll sign up for your newsletter. In general, longer touch-points lead to better results.
The Benefits of Exit-intent Popups on Your WordPress Website
There are several advantages of implementing exit pop-ups on WordPress. The highlighted few being:
Lead Generation
Most exit-intent popups offer lead magnets to give users an additional reason to stay on the site. E-books, online courses, and other informational resources are a great option, but you can also use a simple discount to get them interested in your products.
Users tend to view entry popups as annoying and distracting, so you’ll achieve a much higher subscription rate by moving your popups to the end of their visit. Make sure to develop a unique lead magnet that relates to your core message—it’s critical to differentiate your brand during the early stages of the customer journey.
Reduced Checkout Abandonment
More than half of all online shopping carts are abandoned, and abandoned carts are one of the top sources of missed revenue for e-commerce vendors. Cutting down cart abandonment by just one or two percent could lead to significant growth in sales.
Exit Intent with a Discount Offer to Reduce Abandonment. Image Source: OptinMonster
Unexpected shipping costs and other fees are one of the main reasons users leave online stores, so you can provide free or discounted shipping to give customers a chance to reconsider. A/B test different offers to see which ones lead to higher conversion rates.
Increased Sales
Higher sales are the most obvious benefit of exit-intent popups, and you’ll likely notice an immediate improvement. A lower cart abandonment rate will keep users on your site for longer and improve the odds that they make a purchase.
Different offers target different audience segments, so consider personalizing your popups based on customer information. Users who clicked through from a product ad, for example, as more likely to be interested in an offer on that product. Sending the same popup to every user will have a negative effect on sales.
Better Customer Data
Gathering customer data is critical to personalization in any marketing campaign. Exit-intent popups help you identify new contacts and turn first-time users into long-term customers. They’re more likely to enter their information if you offer something in return.
This is your first chance to learn about each new lead, so make sure to include a field for any relevant information. Phone numbers, birthdays, locations, and more can help you build more engaging campaigns. That said, it’s also important to keep the sign-up process short to avoid turning leads away.
How to Improve Your WordPress Exit Popups
While simply adding exit-intent popups to your digital marketing strategy will have an impact on sales, you can achieve even better results by consistently refining your tactics. This section will cover some of the most effective best practices for exit-intent popups.
Target Every Ad
As mentioned above, popups lead to significantly more sales when they’re directed at a specific audience. The most effective marketers craft unique content for each subgroup to maximize conversions and provide the most relevant popups possible.
Most marketing automation solutions make this simple, and they’ll gather the information you need to build personae for every section of your audience. Personalizing your exit-intent popups isn’t always a simple process, but it’s one of the most powerful ways to improve your approach.
Be Concise
Exit-intent popups target users who were about to leave, so they probably won’t look at the ad for more than a few seconds. It’s therefore critical to immediately offer a clear value that catches their eye and makes them reconsider.
The key to effective exit-intent popups is creating a sense of urgency and a fear of missing out on the offer. Discounts are often the most straightforward way to increase sales through popups. Many users will enter their information simply to access the offer.
Use Interactive Sign-up Forms
Static popups lead to more sales than nothing at all, but dynamic sign-up content consistently leads to better results. Some solutions allow you to set up gamified forms to offer a more interactive registration experience.
Again, A/B testing is the best way to identify your most effective option. Run each sign-up form on a small scale to see which ones to use on your site. Anything more interactive than a standard popup will stand out from the usual shopping experience.
Ask for Additional Information
Most marketers ask for just a few pieces of data during account creation. While it’s good to make the sign-up process as short and simple as possible, asking for more information gives you additional options when segmenting your audience. Users who are truly interested in your brand will generally be willing to provide this data.
Beyond their email address, consider adding fields for anything else that could be relevant. For example, some brands offer birthday discounts to increase subscriptions and give inactive customers a reason to come back.
It’s almost always cheaper to target existing customers than new ones, so retargeting inactive users is one of the most cost-effective tactics for increasing sales. Birthday rewards are an organic way to reach out to every user and keep your brand fresh in their mind. You can also ask for their phone number, location, and more depending on your approach to segmentation.
Sending too many emails is one of the most common factors behind a high unsubscribe rate, and you can adjust your frequency by asking users how often they’d like to hear from you. This adds transparency to the customer relationship and ensures that each user receives emails at the right frequency.
3 Leading Exit-Intent Popup Tools for WordPress
When it comes to exit-intent popups, there are two different kinds of tools available. You can have a tool that’s completely dedicated to exit popups, and tools that offer exit-intent popups as part of a larger tool kit.
Here are a few great examples from both categories:
#1. Omnisend
Omnisend is a tool that falls into one of the latter categories, offing exit popups as part of a much larger set of tools and features. However, this doesn’t mean that there’s less love given to the exit-intent feature, au contraire.
Omnisend’s exit-intent popups can be targeted using their smart segmentation, are completely customizable, and can filter out those who have opted-out to avoid annoying customers. It’s definitely a great tool to try out, especially since it does so much more too.
#2. OptinMonster
Like Omnisend, OptinMonster’s tool offers exit-intent popups along with other conversion tools. Creating popups with OptinMonster is easy: they use a drag-and-drop builder and they come with tons of neat templates you can customize. They also offer on-site retargeting, so you can target the right message to the right person.
#3. Ninja Popups
Ninja Popups is another popup-dedicated tool that offers a lot of exclusive features. From locking content with popups to A/B Testing of different popups, this tool has everything you need to employ the strategies in this article.
Final Word
You might think of popups as a distracting and annoying form of marketing, but they can be incredibly effective when used correctly. These tips will help you implement exit-intent popups throughout your website and improve both short-term sales and long-term engagement.
Author Bio
Kate Lynch is a digital marketing blogger who spends her entire day writing quality blogs. She is a passionate reader and loves to share quality content prevalent on the web with her friends and followers, keeping a keen eye on the latest trends and news in those industries. Follow her on twitter @IamKateLynch for more updates.
