The Hypothesis
Waiting until somebody has decided to leave your site isn’t the ideal time to ask for their email—even if the offer is good.
Without intent data, traditional exit intent modules often trigger popups on arbitrary timings or behaviours. Usually after the decision to exit has been made. This often misses the moment when such an intervention would be relevant.
On desktop sites, exit intent modules regularly trigger when the cursor moves into the browser bar. This is like stopping people at the exit door. Desperate and weird. On mobile devices, time on page or inactivity are common triggers.
The desktop measure is reactive. The mobile measure is often inaccurate, or inappropriate. These methods are not only based on device rather than the customer needs. They also fail to predict customer behaviour accurately, leading to ineffective interventions.
With intent data, specifically momentum and exit intent measures, retailers can predict whether a store visitor is likely to leave with high accuracy, allowing for more effective pre-emptive actions.
The Tech You’ll Need
- A Trading Platform (e.g. CRM system), to support email subscriptions or newsletter mechanisms and utilise intent data
- Personalisation or Experimentation Platform, to tailor on-site content and USPs based on customer segments
- The Made With Intent Platform or other system for identifying visitor who are likely to leave based on their expected behaviours and momentum
In combination, this tech allows for precise targeting of the people who are likely to exit your site, plus a way to store and use the emails you gather. This enables timely and relevant interventions onsite, but also offsite via email. That’s for another email-focused play (like this one) though.
Setting This Up
Here’s how you can set up more appropriate email capture using the Made With Intent platform.
The Target Segments
Referring to our intent-based segmentation framework, this strategy applies to any segment within the abandoner category. Focusing on those with a high intent to exit and dips in momentum is the right place to start. Examples of these segments include:
Last Chancers
As Last Chancers have shown high intent to purchase, are showing high intent to exit and a low intent to return it shouldn’t be a shock to see this segment as the #1 opportunity for this play. This is likely your last chance to engage them on this purchase journey, so consider offering hail mary discounts if relevant to your brand. Getting to this segment before they decide to leave is all the more crucial as it’s unlikely you will see them again any time soon.
First-time Abandoners
This segment consists of site visitors who have not been identified before and are likely to leave due to decreasing momentum or high intent to exit. Using an overlay to capture their email for continued nurturing makes sense, but consider appropriate messaging. Is a discount necessary, or have you got other offers or USPs you can share? Think about giving them a reason to return or remember you.
Abandoning Evaluators
Customers who are evaluating a product but are likely to leave are an obvious target. They have demonstrated enough intent to evaluate a product, so offering a discount or similar incentive before they leave is recommended. The level of your offer here should depend on your brand, current initiatives and urgency—but this person does seem to be in the market.
Basket Abandoners
This segment is made up of people with items in their basket who are likely to leave the site. This is a high-priority opportunity to convince them to stay or capture their email for future engagement. This not only offers a way to convert right now with an impactful incentive, but a way to reengage should they exit the site.
The Impact
Appliances Direct increased their exit intent newsletter subscribers by 2.6x
Appliances Direct had a standard newsletter pop-up setup. It was shown when a cursor moved into the browser bar or, on mobile, when a visitor had been on a product page over a certain amount of time.
Using Made With Intent, Appliances Direct ran two new variants. The first triggered when the visitor momentum was decreasing i.e the behaviours being exhibited were inherently negative. The second triggered when intent to exit increased moderately. This meant that any popup would show before the person decided to leave the site, making it a predictive behaviour
Both variants outperformed the current pop-up twofold, with each getting twice as many submissions and seeing an increased signup rate between 50% (v1) and 113% (v2). Equally, both variants surfaced the pop-up to less visitors than the standard control highlighting the importance of pop-ups being shown at the correct point in a customer’s journey.
“Through Made With Intent, understanding customer intent has added well over £1m in incremental revenue in less than 6 months. It is our secret weapon.
Nick Glynne, CEO & Founder, Buy It Direct Group
How Ernest Jones leveraged our intent data to drive greater email capture
Ernest Jones were initially utilising Bloomreach exit intent rules to fire their email capture pop-up, and wanted to understand whether our momentum intent data triggers would improve submission rates.
To test this we created multiple variations, comparing our momentum based triggers against Bloomreach and standard exit intent rules (i.e. mouse movement).
Our momentum based triggers resulted in collecting +106% more emails than the generic Bloomreach solution and +44% more than standard exit intent execution. We also observed an additional +86% uplift in purchases for customers who were served our pop-up.
“We're able to prioritise how we engage our customers at the most appropriate time. Not only have we seen experiences improve conversion rates upwards of 10%, we're also seeing improved engagement metrics in our remarketing activities too.”
Jo Homer, Head of UX and Product, Signet Group
By leveraging accurate exit intent data, retailers can predict and prevent customer exits more effectively. Leading with appropriate messaging at appropriate times, also makes it possible to secure a better outcome even if the exit does still happen.
Done right, this adds up to increased engagement, a better experience and improved email opt-in rates. If this sounds good, why not learn more about how Made With Intent can help you unlock post-visit intent. There are also more evidenced plays in our intent-based playbook.
