In this article, I have gathered some impactful exit intent website overlay case studies to show you how this innovative and interactive optimization strategy can help your online business grow. Get inspired by the following exit intent website overlays case studies and discover what techniques you can implement in your e-commerce business.
#1 Bonia used exit intent overlays with surveys that lead to a 28% increase in conversions in a product category
- Background
Bonia is one of the top luxury fashion retailers in Asia. They are based in Malaysia and have over 700 offline shops and 70 boutiques. Its online shop business strategy is focused on leather accessories, such as bags for women and men, wallets and watches. In 2014 Bonia reported sales of 691.61 million Malaysia Ringgits (US$ 194.11 million), which increased by 9.4% compared to 2013.
- Challenge
The offline stores of Bonia are very famous in Asia, but this doesn’t make it easier to sell the products online, as you can’t be there to treat the cognitive biases of a customer. You can get quantitative information from Analytics about your customers (of course, if the account is set up correctly), but you can’t have a conversation with them. But with the surveys feature from Omniconvert you can actually do this. Surveys offer the opportunity to ask your visitors why are they leaving your website without buying.
- Solution
On exit surveys aka qualitative research are a goldmine in terms of insights from the visitors that are not buying. In the first place, we asked them if they did find what they were looking for on Bonia.com:
If they were answering YES, we asked them why they did not purchase anything/ did not finish the order.
- Results
After 2 months of running on the website and a sample of 1000 answers, our survey concluded that:
- 85% of the respondents did not find what they were looking for and
- only 15% of them did find what they wanted, but something stopped them from buying.
The main objection of the ones that found what they were looking for, but did not buy, was the budget. The other part of the visitors were looking especially for Watches, Bags and Wallets (the heroes of the website).
- Key takeaways
Based on the insights provided by this survey, we started to plan and implement a new experiment. We built a hypothesis meant to validate the findings: visitors need to see these main categories (watches, bags, wallets) right away when they land on the website. We have added the Watches category in the navigation bar, split between the Men watches and Women watches and also emphasized the Bags and Wallets category together with maximizing the font size.
#2 How Melimelo got a 67% increase of the add-to-cart rate
- Background
MeliMelo is one of the leading brands of fashion and jewelry in Romania. The two founders, Hubert Larmaraud and Stephane Dumas started with a modest store and they have now grown their business and are steadily expanding.
Their focus on quality products and a collaborative relationship with suppliers and partners were key to building the business that it is today. Their expansion into the digital world now sees an average of 120k visitors per month and grows steadily.
- Challenge
MeliMelo is a very popular retail store. Their aim was to increase the online trust in the brand and to improve their online conversions and sales. Commonly found in online stores, are frictions that can prevent or hinder a visitor from proceeding to the next step. Trust plays a very important part in reducing this friction and also helps increase buyer confidence for an online product.
It was noted that customers were visiting the physical retail stores to purchase their products more than they would online. MeliMelo wanted to replicate this customer behavior and increase their purchasing in their online store. After a thorough audit and analysis, Omniconvert recommended applying a treatment to a specific area. The focus was targeted toward the lower end of their sales funnel. Which was revealed to be an area of significant exit.
- Solution
The experiments’ focus was based on the hypothesis that if we show visitors reasons to trust the MeliMelo website, including benefits of online purchasing, then they would readily add more items to their shopping cart. To do this, MeliMelo and Omniconvert addressed the visitor on the product page. After Qualitative research was conducted on the product page, it was noted that visitors:
- Knew what they wanted to buy;
- Wanted details about the product;
- Were concerned on the return policy;
- Were price sensitive on delivery policy and delivery time.
In consideration of the objections and buyer concerns, a website overlay was created to address the return policy, the free delivery within specific locations and the two-day delivery time across the country.
- Results
Over a period of 15 days, the desktop visitors from major cities were shown this experiment. Traffic was split evenly (50/50) between control and variation.
With this experiment, MeliMelo received:
- An increase of 67.61% in shopping cart entries
- A significantly lowered bounce rate
- A 97% statistical relevance
- Key takeaways
Location segmentation can help you create personalized messages for visitors and give them reasons to buy your products. Optimizing to create long-term relationships with online customers is vital when you already know that have chosen your products and services in your retail outlet. The customer experience is at the core of any optimization process. Focusing on developing meaningful relationships through improving trust and eliminating their objections can increase your revenue and strengthen your eCommerce business.
#3 Website overlay with filter personalization increased revenue by 66.75%
- Background
As a leading online retailer selling genuine and original manufactured, Watchshop has grown its services and now stocks thousands of different types of watches. Since their establishment in 2009, the online store now ships all over the EU. They maintain an excellent level of customer satisfaction and all their products are fully guaranteed ensuring their clients are cared for.
- Challange
Before starting any experiment, the analytics data is audited and analyzed by a team of CRO specialists and a data analytics expert. They help assess and discover new opportunities for increasing conversions.
The visitor behavior history was researched and an interesting opportunity was discovered. There was a potentially valuable and underperforming segment with engaged users that were not using the price filter. It was agreed that this target audience would be suitable for an experiment.
With this information, it was decided to influence and help visitors start using the price filters more often. If the engaged visitors did not use the price filters, a reminder for them to do so was applied. This would help them make a decision based on their personal needs and preferences. Visitors using price filters will generally have a higher conversion rate by comparison.
Omniconvert applied a treatment based on the hypothesis that if we prompt an exit poup-up overlay, showing available price ranges to visitors, we will help them close the sale faster. This was also isolated to visitors that haven’t used the price filters before.
- Solution
For this web personalization experiment, we selected the following target segment: We isolated the visitors that were had viewed 2 pages or more, containing certain keywords (banner related), had not used price filters and had not been involved with any previous experiments before.
The personalization experiment was also targeted with brands synonymous to high quality such as Q&Q, Casio, Timex, Fossil and Orient. When a visitor displayed an exit behavior intention on these specific brands, an overlay with a price filter would be triggered. A different pop-up, as well as changes in message copy, were custom designed to match each brand.
- Results
On control, the conversions to sale were much lower when compared to the variation page. The experiment was segmented to all visitors with traffic evenly split (50/50).
The results from this experiment:
- An increase of 6% in conversion rate
- Uplift of 1.68% in revenue per visitor
- Validation with 99.21% in statistical relevance
#4 On-exit overlay increased Samsung’s revenue by 26% in a two-week timeframe
- Background
Founded in 1938 as a trading company, over the next three decades, Samsung diversified into areas including food processing, textiles, insurance, securities and retailing. They entered the electronics industry in the late 1960s and followed with construction and shipbuilding industries in the mid-1970s.
They generate more than $300 billion USD annually from product sales and services and are one of the world leaders of the smartphone sector. With over 400 million global visitors to their website and a phone market share of 20% and growing, Samsung is increasingly popular with today’s tech-savvy market and smartphone aficionados.
- Challenge
Samsung was introducing to the smartphone market a brand new model, the Samsung Galaxy S6. A goal was set to convince as many visitors as possible into buying the new Samsung Galaxy S6 within a two week pre-launch time frame. With the consumer electronics market growing rapidly, Samsung were keen to increase the number of orders for the S6 model in advance.
- Solution
For a limited time, the Galaxy S6 was available online for pre-order with all partners and distributors. To stimulate people in pre-ordering online, Samsung included a free charger as an additional incentive.
The Omniconvert treatment created a campaign focused only on a specific target: customers that were specifically interested in smartphones. When an exit behavior was noticed, a web overlay was triggered and lead them to an appropriate landing page.
Several variations were tested with the message in copy. The most successful one was the following design:
The personalization experiment is displayed when the visitor shows an exit behavior. This behavior is commonly either moving the mouse towards the URL address bar, or, to the tab/ browser close button. In real-time, visitors who wanted to leave the page without reading about the current offer for the Galaxy S6, were the targeted audience. In addition, visitors who presented an interest in the smartphone category and haven’t seen the current offer on the website, were also included. This was achieved through the advanced segmentation engine and by adding URL exclusions.
- Results
This campaign reached a small percentage of shop visitors. The precisely matched customer segmentation found the following results:
- An additional 26% increase of revenue
- 2% of those that saw the creative made a purchase within 2 weeks
- The creative had a 7.6% click through rate (CTR)
- 60% of visitors further stayed on the website instead of leaving
- Key Takeaways
Commonly, with exit intent website overlays, the control is set to 0% as the person is considered 100% lost. The exit personalizations increase the chance of the visitor being brought back into the sales funnel or, at the very least, bring them back for further engagement.
The ultimate purpose of web personalization and real-time marketing strategy is to transform a website into an interactive medium that facilitates the communication between customers and companies.
Differentiating your online business and providing relevant, persuasive content has the potential to turn visitors into customers. Web personalization and detailed segmentation will allow you to engage with your audience at a whole new and much higher level.
#5 An addition 25% increase in leads was achieved by Provident
- Background
Provident specializes in Home Collected Credit (HCC) and are one of the leading home credit providers in Europe. They have 2.8 million customers in 11 European countries as well as in Mexico and Australia. As part of the International Personal Finance (IPF) group, they are one of the largest employers in the region and one of the strongest 250 international companies traded on the London Stock Exchange.
With over 125k visitors per month and over 65% coming from an organic search, they are fast becoming the leading online service for small loans.
- Challenge
Google Analytics (and most analytic platforms) is able to reveal data which indicates where there is a visitor exit point. It is able to help assess the quantitative data from your website. For more in-depth and insightful views on visitor behavior, surveys become the foundation to a series of successful and successive testing experiments.
One of the aims and necessities of Provident is to generate more leads from their website. With this goal and focus in mind, Omniconvert reviewed the Google Analytics data to research visitor and customer behavior. The audit and analysis revealed that there was a high number of visitors that left the website without completing the contact lead form.
- Solution
With data from the audit and analysis, Omniconvert applied a survey treatment in order to gather more leads. This experiment was set to trigger when exit behavior was detected. A simple 3 step survey was created with multiple choice answers best suited to the data made available through our initial research.
The first question contained a key element which was the often overlooked. The ‘open’ question. This type of question serves a number of purposes such as inviting the visitor to provide an answer, letting the visitor know that their answer is important and the ‘open’ answer also serves as further insight for the business.
The minimum requirement in the last step was for a name and contact number. This was vital for two main reasons. It validated a legitimate visitor with a genuine enquiry and also let the visitor know their inquiry was important and they would be called personally.
- Results
The survey was active for over two weeks and was segmented to all traffic. The experiment was shown to all visitors that displayed an exit behaviour of either navigating to the URL address bar or towards the exit function found in the top right corner of a browser.
The Survey was able to gather:
- A 25% increase in leads from all traffic
- Overall increase of 10% in response rates
- Successful validation of hypothesis
- Key Takeaways
There isn’t only one approach to gather leads and every industry will require a slightly different approach. Consistently applying new surveys in different ways is a great way to increase leads and keep visitors engaged on your website.
#6 Website conversions increased by 60% for Get Maine Lobster
- Background
Founded in 2010, GetMaineLobster.com is a division of Black Point Seafood and Black Point Gourmet. They hand-select the finest Maine lobster and seafood as well as a range of finest quality beef. They ship throughout the United States and have a passion for making Maine seafood readily available.
With 55k website visitors (and more seasonally), connoisseurs of fine seafood know that GetMaineLobster.com is the best place to find fresh lobsters, awesome recipes and help in finding the best-catered dining experiences available in the United States.
- Challenge
Anyone who knows seafood can understand that fresh quality seafood can be difficult to source, especially if you live far from the ocean. With modern shipping and online shopping, high-quality seafood can be available to everyone. As an online retailer for fresh seafood, understanding visitors was important. They needed to know who they were and what they wanted to supply the fresh products available.
Having this in mind, Omniconvert took a deep dive into the data to audit and analyze the visitor behavior. A moderate proportion of traffic was noted to be new visitors. The high converting segment consisted in returning visitors. Yet, the returning visitors also had high exit rates.
One of the challenges was to address the exit traffic. Visitors were noted to shop and exit in a pattern. Understanding the visitor better was the key to create a better experience for them and reduce the exit behaviour. The traffic was there, but transitioning them from shopping to buying was the ultimate goal.
- Solution
Omniconvert and GetMaineLobster started by launching a series of qualitative surveys. Information based on analytic data is a great foundation to any strategy. To complement this data, we asked for their feedback as it provided insights direct from the visitor that will end up with the product. With this feedback, Omniconvert was then able to create an elaborate and targeted experiment.
The insights revealed that visitors were concerned about the delivery of live lobsters. Some had no knowledge on how to cook them. Pricing was a common concern and tied into this were also potential customers that wanted to purchase products as gifts for family and friends. Along with the pricing insights, there was a high level of feedback regarding price range and what they felt lobster was worth.
With this insights data, Omniconvert created an advanced treatment involving a survey within a triggered overlay. When a visitor displayed an exit behavior, such as navigating to the URL address bar or towards the browser close function, a multiple choice survey was be triggered.
In total, this experiment involved a survey with 2 multiple choice questions and 9 overlays. Each of the creatives used for the website overlays was custom designed with consistent CTAs (for button and message copy) as well as linked to specific pages related to the visitor answer selection. It was an interactive method to address objections in real time.
- Results
Successfully, this experiment ran over 14 days and was segmented to all traffic. In addition, a lead collector for emails was deployed.
This successful experiment provided:
- Successful re-engagement to exit visitors
- An increase of 51% in conversion rates
- Additional 7% revenue generated from exit visitors
- Increase in email leads by 9%
- Key takeaways
Traffic analysis is the first task in finding how to address a particular area or segment of your traffic. Following that is how to use this information to improve conversions and lead visitors closer to make a purchase. Critically important is how to address exit visitors to ensure that they are re-engaged.A big part of the research that goes into CRO has to do with who your customer is. Testing is a big part of making sure your online store is effective and helps you know exactly who you’re dealing with and what they prefer.
When you continuously optimize your online store, you start to understand your customers better which leads to an improved overall shopping experience. The better the user experience for visitors, the more customers you acquire from the same amount of traffic you already have—meaning you don’t just save money, but you actually make more of it since it’s costing you less to acquire each additional one.
#7 Testing an exit intent overlay increased the newsletter sign-up rate by 279% for Wall-Street
- Background
A publication part of Internetcorp, Wall-Street.ro is one of the most read online newspaper for business.
- Challenge
The average visitor stays on a website for approximately three minutes per visit. It is important that they are engaged and brought back in this time frame regardless of subsequent visits. One of the most successful channels to increase returning visitors is through email. Unlike other social media channels, such as Facebook or Twitter, an email guarantees that the reader is focused on only reading the email.
To be able to start bringing more engaged traffic to their website, WallStreet.ro had to start collecting more data from their visitors: their email address.
With existing subscribers, Wall-Street.ro was able to initiate personalized communications by email. This experiment targeted visitors that were likely and eager to engage in a personal conversation with their digital news provider and may currently not be subscribed.
- Solution
In the original web page (control), there is an obscure subscription panel that is lost in the page content. Visitors could come and go without being asked anything. The newsletter subscription form was placed on the left sidebar and was not a very prominent feature (measuring on average about 320x210px). Keep in mind that when a visitor exits, they are lost 100% and so the control is not required in exit variation testing.
The control version
The Omniconvert treatment involved two custom-created exit intent overlays both with a persuasive message copy and an image or graphic that was related. They were applied and measured based on lead collection and each variation was split tested evenly (50/50) for the visitor traffic.
Variation 1
This overlay informs them that they can choose their reading interest by industry and displays the main benefits of subscribing to the newsletter. A subtle affirmation is also applied in the form of a tick.
Variation 2
This variation applies a similar message, shows the categories of interest and has a positive image of excitement and happiness.
- Results
The aim of designing two variations simultaneously was to test which approach persuades better. The traffic was made available to all visitors and was tested over a two-week period.
The variations tested brought:
- An increase of 279% in sign-up rate for variation 1
- Variation 1 successfully overtaking variation 2
- 99% statistical relevance achieved on both variations
- Over 50% reduction in bounce rate (visitor exiting)
- Key takeaways
The benefit oriented variation with a relevant message in copy converted much better. The variation focussed on graphics and visuals while successful did not perform as well. This experiment was able to prove that words and images in combination are powerful. They can make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful personalization.
To sum it up, considering all the examples above, we can easily say that on exit intent overlays create a great bridge in your conversion funnel and will help you connect with visitors faster and better.
Check out the case study section on the Omniconvert website and find out even more successful examples from clients such as OLX, Telekom, ING Bank, University of London or Tripsta.
