Visitors leave your site without signing up
Catch leaving visitors with a relevant offer right before they close the tab.
When to use
You have meaningful website traffic but poor signup conversion. Especially effective on pricing and feature pages.
Hypothesis template
If we show an exit-intent popup offering [incentive] to visitors about to leave, we'll capture [target]% more emails because it's a last-chance touchpoint.
Method
The problem: 95% of your website visitors leave without doing anything. Most will never come back.
What Sumo found: Exit-intent popups — triggered when the mouse moves toward the browser's close button — convert an additional 2-4% of abandoning visitors. That's traffic you've already paid for.
The result: For a site with 10,000 monthly visitors, even a 2% exit-intent conversion means 200 extra leads/month at zero additional acquisition cost.
How to do it:
- Choose your offer: free resource, discount, email course, or extended trial
- Set up an exit-intent trigger (tools: Sumo, OptinMonster, or custom JS)
- Write a compelling headline: focus on what they'll miss, not what you want
- Show it only once per session — don't annoy people
- A/B test the offer and headline
- Follow up captured emails within 24 hours
Key insight: You're not interrupting — you're catching someone who was already leaving. The worst that happens is they leave anyway.
Success metrics
- •Exit-intent popup conversion rate
- •Emails captured
- •Popup-to-signup conversion
- •Bounce rate impact
Prerequisites
- Website traffic (at least 1,000 monthly visitors)
- An email marketing tool or signup flow
- Something valuable to offer (resource, discount, trial)
Common pitfalls
- •Showing the popup on every page visit
- •Using a generic "Subscribe to our newsletter" CTA
- •Not mobile-optimizing (exit intent works differently on mobile)
- •Aggressive popups that trigger on entry instead of exit
Source: Sumo. Data from 2B+ popup impressions shows 2-4% conversion on exit intent.
Suggested ICE scores
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