Show HN: ExitIntent – Convert bouncing visitors to leads and customers
exitintent.ioMaybe I'm not "most users", but that would immediately kill any interest I had in a site I was browsing. The way I view it is, my attention is something I bestow upon a website, it's not something you have a right to grab without my permission like this.
On a more constructive note, how do you intend to deal with false positives among users that have multiple displays? If I were interested and wanted to share the link, by moving my mouse to the address bar it would trigger this popup.
On the other hand, if the user is already leaving the site, is there any reason not to try to bring them back? It seems like a no-lose proposition.
Of course, there is the possibility that the user is not leaving permanently, and your tactics actually convince him that he should. But I assume that the revenue gained from convincing would-be deserters to stay, outweighs the revenue lost by convincing would-be returners to desert.
I base this assumption on the fact that, like you said, all users are not like you. So many websites already employ this tactic, that many users as likely immune to it, or at least ambivalent toward it as a marketing tactic. I doubt most users who are seriously interested in your product would abandon purchase because of a distaste for your marketing tactics (or even that they would harbor such distaste). After all, you can't fault a company for trying to convert as many users as possible. This tactic is so common that if you abandon every product offering using it, you might be left with few high quality products from which to choose.
Seriously, though, this looks a LOT better than the other services that provide this. They're often based on "acceleration" and direction of the cursor. So, I usually set them off just while going to click on a link. If this really only goes off when the person takes their mouse off the screen, bravo. I also noticed in a comment on here that it only goes off once per user per site: again, the competition have (at least it seems to me in memory) hit me with their "don't leave us" screen multiple times on the same visit.
Summary: this has 2 superior functions their competitors don't have.
I think this is a useful viewpoint on the matter - "Should I use those annoying popups?" = http://socialtriggers.com/annoying-popups/
I suppose I can't really argue with the data (assuming it's generalizable). So it seems this tool will annoy people like me, but otherwise might be a net positive.
Thanks a lot for your feedback. As of now it does trigger on moving your mouse towards to the address bar, we would fix this soon.
This seems similar to bounceexchange[0], and I think the idea is generally good. Try to grab people's attention at the last minute when they're already planning on leaving your website anyway. Last-ditch effort that can't really upset too much, especially since you already lost them.
Of course it depends on how spammy those popups end-up being, but at least from a couple of sites that I've seen and who use bounce exchange, they do seem to get pretty spammy-looking in my opinion.
What I wonder the most is who would actually pay for this. The 'exit intent technology' as dubbed by bounceexchange can be easily done with a couple of lines of javascript. Perhaps it won't be as sophisticated, but it would achieve very similar effect. We ended up borrowing a small snippet from an open-source project[1] that does this and it's looking fine so far. All it does it checks if the mouse y-coordinates is below a certain threshold and then triggers the modal.
Perhaps the popups themselves and having them pre-designed or having a WYSIWYG editor and integrated without any coding would be a selling point here? (not being sarcastic, genuinely curious about the potential customer base for this).
[0] http://bounceexchange.com/ [1] https://github.com/carlsednaoui/ouibounce
I get the idea and I think it's clever. It might even work to convert leads. But as a user, I find it rather intrusive.
I've come by quite a few websites recently who fire this in my face prematurely. It feels rather annoying to get a "please don't leave us" pop-over when all I wanted was to move the mouse out of the way so that I could read the site's content (which is now impossible due to the aforementioned pop-over).
</rant>
The innovation behind Bounce Exchange is not an overlay or some Javascript code, it is the intelligence of the overall platform.
There are many underlying factors being analyzed which allow the platform to understand the users of a given website and address each one individually. This is not a simple challenge, and goes well beyond what a single user might realize or be able to articulate.
It takes a whole lot of continuous optimizing, refactoring and testing from a technological and business standpoint. The results this produces are unmatched, and this is why enterprise firms pay for it.
Thanks for your feedback
I agree that these popups might seem spammy. To avoid this ExitIntent popups are shown only once per user per site(or until you decide to reset the cookies)
We built the WYSIWYG editor with predesigned templates so that it would be easy for anyone to run popup campaigns.The idea is to help people generate leads from exiting visitors, and a popup campaign is one of the ways to do it.
This appears to be a clone of Bounce Exchange. The tactic works. Some of my clients have deployed it and site conversions went up dramatically. I personally don't love the user experience but it's hard to argue with the results.
It seems significant that the ExitIntent site doesn't use ExitIntent, aside from in the demo.
Is it because they know deep down it's annoying and spammy?
We do use ExitIntent on our site. Please click on "See it in action" link below. We kept it like this so that if user wants to see the demo multiple times , they can see it working. The actual exitintent wouldn't work if user wanted to see it multiple times, as popups are shown only once per user per site
Damn that was bad design. I clicked the massive green "Try it now" call to action, fully expecting that to be the demo. Since that comes before the tiny "See it in action" link, and it moves me to a new page, I didn't see it. Next I tried just actually going towards the close tab button, but the demo wasn't already activated. At this point I would have hit the close tab button if it weren't for these comments.
Once I click "Try It Out" I can't easily get back to the page I was on before -- both the logo and "home" link to a login page.
Thanks for pointing this out . We are fixing this now.
I ran across this technique on a couple of sites last week when going for the back button (no idea if they were ExitIntent users).
I thought it was a neat idea, and I stopped and played with the effect for a couple of minutes, testing its behavior. I may not remember the sites that did this, but it did make me pause and look at the popup as my pointer left the page.
Hi HN, We have built ExitIntent to help reduce bounce rates and convert exiting visitors to leads. We have tried to make it very simple for anyone to run popup campaigns on their sites. Would love to get the feedback of the community.
You're competing with SumoMe, which does essentially the same thing + is free (with one-off cash charges for upgrades/prettier templates, etc).
What's the differentiation here?
SumoMe is not exactly free(they have paid upgrades as you suggested). The differentiating factor is the WYSIWYG pop builder which lets you completely customize the popup to match your website.
So your differentiating factor is an UI feature that can be duplicated in a week?
$19-499/month seems pretty expensive for that.
This looks quite interesting. Looking forward to trying it!
How in the world can you build a subscription based business off what's effectively a glorified javascript and analytical data??
Things like this are why I use key commands or gestures for navigating from a page.
I hope you get punched in the face.