Love them or hate them, pop-ups work. If you've ever been online, you'll know what I'm talking about. Used for the first time in 1994 as a way to surprise website visitors with a (promotional and salesy) message, they've been around with the same purpose for the past three decades.
Even though most people would say they hate them, pop-ups are pretty effective. The average pop-up converts anywhere from 3-10%, which is an impressive result.
If you’re shying away from using them in your marketing strategy—don’t. Thanks to the wealth of tools available today, launching a pop-up that converts well is just a few clicks away.
Today, we’ll tell you about exit intent pop-ups as well as the best tools to implement them on your website.
An exit intent pop-up is the type of pop-up that a visitor sees on your website as they intend to leave. Thanks to modern tools, websites can more or less accurately determine when a visitor is about to leave your website and launch the popup.
Here are some ways a website “knows” that a visitor is about to exit:
As you can see, it’s not exactly science fiction. The great part is that when a customer is about to leave your website, you can show them an exit intent pop-up to make an enticing offer or to convince them to stay.
Since most website builders don’t come with this functionality out of the box, you’re going to have to use an exit intent pop-up tool. We’ve made a list of the best ones we’ve come across.
While technically not a pop-up tool, Survicate packs a mighty punch in this category. Ever wanted to run surveys through website popups? With Survicate, now you can.
Survicate allows you to run surveys on a variety of platforms, including emails, websites, and any place where you can show your customers a link. And thanks to our survey builder, you can easily embed a survey in a pop-up form that your customers see just before they exit your website.
Thanks to an intuitive builder, you can create pop-up surveys in minutes. Or even less than that, thanks to one of the 300+ survey templates readily available. These include all-time favorites such as CSAT, NPS, and CES.
If it sounds like something you might need, you'll love the 10-day free trial. It comes with all Business plan features, including 30+ native integrations, survey logic, and advanced attribute targeting, and gives you up to 25 survey responses.
Ready to get started? Sign up for your Survicate free trial now!
What started out as a simple pop-up tool branched out into much more than that. Today, Poptin can help you create pop-ups, add forms, collect information from your website, and even send automated emails to your customers and subscribers.
It has one of the best, most intuitive drag-and-drop builders in the game, and if you’ve ever used Paint, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to create a pop-up in Poptin. If you’re not keen on experimentation, there are plenty of templates that will help you get started.
Exit intent is just one type of pop-up you can create in this tool, with other formats including lightbox pop-ups, full-screen overlays, top and bottom bars, and slide-in popups.
The free plan looks promising, but it only works for up to 1,000 visitors. If you have a decent website, you’ll exceed the limit in a day or less. Paid plans start at $20 per month, which is good for 10,000 sessions per month and 1,000 autoresponder emails.
Similar to many other tools in this niche, OptinMonster started out as just a way to create pop-ups. Now, it calls itself lead generation software for marketers. In other words, it’s still a pop-up tool but with a bit more variety.
The drag-and-drop builder is functional and does the job fairly well. With a bit of tinkering, you can make your pop-up (or other content types) fit into your website’s design. Speaking of choices, there are plenty of them: lightbox pop-ups, welcome mats, countdown timers, sidebars, floating bars, inline forms, and many, many others.
Besides the variety of content formats, there is also a wide range of events and triggers for when pop-ups appear. Exit intent is just the tip of the iceberg. Other methods include inactivity triggers, scroll triggers, timed display sensors, scheduled campaigns during specific time windows, and many others.
There is no free trial or a free plan available, which is a bit of a let-down. As for the paid plans, they start at just $9 per month, giving you 2,500 pageviews. No need to worry, though, as plans don’t scale that drastically, and it’s only $32 for up to 100k pageviews a month.
Wisepops is a marketing tool split up into two different products—pop-ups and notifications. And while the former is pretty self-explanatory by now, notifications is a neat tool that lets you send notifications to website visitors. Be it a new product, a discount, or anything else, it’s a great addition to a pop-up tool.
Promising a 6.4% click-through rate for their pop-ups, Wisepop has a tall order to fill. Its drag-and-drop builder is top-notch, and you can customize your pop-ups to suit your needs. Some of the event types you can use with this tool include showing pop-ups on exit, after a certain period, on click, or on custom events.
When you get into pricing, it’s easy to see that Wisepop was built for bigger websites. Just like with the competitors, you pay for the number of page views per month, and the smallest package covers 100,000 visitors monthly. The pricing is very competitive, though, as you get all unlimited features for those 100k visitors for just $41 per month. There is also a free trial available.
What makes ThriveLeads different from the competition? For one, it was built to be used specifically for WordPress, and it functions as a plugin for this tool. While this makes it more appealing to some user groups, others will be deterred by this fact.
If you decide to use ThriveLeads on your website, there is a lot to like about the tool, including a variety of formats. Classic exit intent pop-ups, top and bottom bars, in-line forms, slide-in forms, everything you can think of is right there in the editor.
Besides a dashboard to monitor your pop-up effectiveness, ThriveLeads goes one step further to enable A/B testing. If you ever wanted to run a simple split test between two pop-ups based on copy or design, it’s effortless to do it within this tool.
Pricing is catered towards WordPress website builders, which means that the lowest plan you can opt for is $99 per quarter, while annual plans are $299. The good news is that this gets you all the ThriveLeads plugins, including the Quiz Builder and the Apprentice, to be used on up to five websites. In short, ThriveLeads is a great deal for WordPress developers and we recommend trying it out.
There’s a reason why Sumo is one of the biggest names in lead generation and pop-up tools—it simply works. Get a subscription, install the code, and you’re up and running.
However, Sumo was the big name in the game years ago when pop-up tools were in their infancy. Nowadays, its feature set may seem lackluster compared to the other entries on this list.
It comes with the basics of pop-up formats, including the list builder (the typical pop-up), the welcome mat, the scroll box, and the smart bar. While the editor is pretty good, all the competing tools here offer a larger variety of pop-up formats.
The free plan in Sumo is pretty generous: you can create email opt-in forms and customize them fully without paying a dime. To get advanced features such as custom targeting and A/B tests, you’re going to have to pay. At $39 per month, it’s a fair deal for the wealth of options and the ease of use you’d be getting.
Adoric calls itself a “conversion rate optimization tool,” but once you look through its offer and different use cases, you realize it pretty much boils down to different versions of pop-ups.
There are three practical steps to using the tool:
That’s about it. If you run an ecommerce store and sell any kind of goods, there is plenty to be liked about the templates. Some examples include Black Friday, Christmas, Hannukah, and Easter, to name a few.
One thing that Adoric prides itself on is the “falling gifts game” where website visitors can click on gifts falling down their screens. Based on its most popular use cases, the tool is a great fit for ecommerce businesses.
There is a forever-free plan that lets you use all of the features with some basic targeting for up to 1,000 page views per month. While it may not be a lot, it’s a decent start. Paid plans start at $9 per month for up to 7,000 page views, which means that if you get decent-sized traffic, you’re going to have to pay even more for the higher plans.
Self-named “the internet’s favorite pop-up builder,” Sleeknote aims for a large chunk of the martech cake. Similar to other entries on this list, it doesn’t settle for pop-ups alone—it also offers forms, sidebars, slide-ins, and more.
Unlike other tools that offer different types of pop-up formats, Sleeknote gives you different use cases for its tool. For example, you can use Sleeknote to:
Just like Sleeknote’s website, the pop-up templates in the gallery are beautiful and will make any visitor rethink their decision to leave.
In terms of pricing, Sleeknote has a generous starting plan that costs $49 per month. It gives you access to all of the features with unlimited campaigns and domains and you’re only limited to 25,000 responses per month. A free seven-day trial is also available.
By now, we hope you realize that exit intent pop-ups are not an evil contraption built to send spam to your customers’ devices. Instead, they should be viewed as a way to convert customers on the brink of leaving your website. Use your exit intent pop-ups wisely, and you’ll have happier customers and more money in the bank.
Your first pop-up tool should be versatile, so why not start with Survicate? You can easily win back customers who are about to close your website and collect precious feedback from them. Sign up for your free trial today!
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