We’ve all seen exit overlays like these on our travels around the Internet. Mainly on websites trying to sell us something. Websites do that because these kinds of overlays work, just take a look at these numbers:

Student Money Saver used it to generate more leads by capitalizing on bounce rate traffic and got 4,458 new leads in one month. [source]

QuickSprout used it to build their email list. [source]

Cloudways used it to convert 6% more of their website visitors each month. [source]

Kitchen Cabinet Kings used it to recover almost 26% abandoned shopping carts. [source]

Exit overlays are great for increasing sales and revenue, but they can also be used for non-transactional goals as well. Goals like increasing newsletter signups, establishing your expertise, or getting more contest signups.

Note: For the purposes of this article, non-transactional means anything that doesn’t require the transfer of money between you and a website visitor.

Ways to Use Exit Overlays for Non-Transactional Goals

Establish your expertise

Customer relationships have stages you need to build upon, especially if you’ve got an expensive product or sell to an industry with a long buying cycle. So give away information they can use to make their decision instead of just asking outright for the sale. Ideally you should ask for their email address in return, but even just giving away the information can be helpful in the long run.

The goal with this overlay is to simply give the info away because you want your visitors to have it, no questions asked. You’re establishing yourself as the Go-To resource for your market, so that whenever anyone has a question or problem they’re trying to solve, your site is the first one they think of visiting.

Cloudways does this by offering a free trial without asking for a sale. They simply want to give away information about server security, and establish themselves as an expert in the field. (Yes, they’re asking for an email address in return, but that’s it, not an actual sale.)

Grow your email list

You may think this is the same thing as Establish your expertise, but it’s not. The goal of this overlay is to simply get an email address from your website visitor. You may do this by offering a free informational download, but you can also use a well-written CTA (call-to-action) as well. They can be just as high-converting as an informational download.



Manybooks.com

Increase visitors to unread pages on your website

Analyze your website analytics to see which pages are getting lots of traffic, and which aren’t. If the low-traffic pages have a lot of good information on them, try adding links to them in your exit overlay. (If they don’t revise the pages so they DO have useful information on them.) This tactic helps you increase traffic to those pages, as well as share valuable information with visitors.

UserTesting does this well by offering free CRM research to visitors, doubling their conversion rates.



Gather more contest signups

Let your users know about any contests you may be running with a contest exit overlay. Set it to appear only during the contest run and expire at the deadline.

Scicon did this last year for their 12 Days of Christmas contest and converted 80% of website visitors into contest entrants.

Advertise a pre-launch

A pre-launch opt-in campaign can be a great way to gauge interest in a new product or service, and an exit overlay can help you with that. Set one up either on the launch site itself and/or a related website and gather email addresses. You’ll find out whether your idea is viable or not without a big cost outlay.

ChipStarter does this with a landing page, however they could easily convert this into an exit overlay and convert interested poker players as well.

Find out more about your visitors

Visitors leave your website for all sorts of reasons, so use your exit overlays to find out why they are. Onsite retargeting technology lets you target specific user groups and pages, so you can find out more about your visitors without asking them anything directly.

For example, try one overlay for first-time visitors, one for cart abandoners, one for product pages, or one for landing pages. Study the results and then tweak your website and overlays accordingly.

SkinCareRx discovers more about their visitors through a quick survey on their exit overlay. Again, yes, they’re asking for an email address in return, however the additional information helps them stay on top of their product inventory and future marketing strategy.

Segment your audience

Good onsite retargeting technology lets you do a little A/B testing along the way. Try out different overlays to find out more about your visitors. For example, have Overlay 1 display when they click a certain button on Page 1, but Overlay 2 if they click a certain link on the same page. Or you could have Overlay 3 display for customers that bounce off your site after 30 seconds and Overlay 4 for the ones that are on your site for 1 minute or more.

Overlay 1:



Overlay 2:



You could even combine the two parts of your test into one overlay, as seen here (and elsewhere online, as this is a popular tactic right now):

Combine this with your website analytics, and you’ll have a better idea of what your visitors are looking for and how they’re behaving with your content. It can also give you better insight inside the averages of your site metrics, helping you to design better website content in the future.

For example, one test may show that your exit overlay isn’t performing well on mobile devices, yet you don’t know if it’s a technology issue or content/copy issue. By looking more closely at the segments, you notice that it’s the Android mobile phone users that are having issues, but not the Android tablet or iPhone/iPad users. You may have missed this detail by not looking past the overall average number into the individual segments.

Personalize a visitor’s browsing experience

Personalization is a big thing in online marketing today, so combining it with your exit overlays is a powerful way to capture your visitor’s attention. Use your site’s internal search functionality to see what kind of information visitors were looking for. Then add it to the exit overlay when they leave the site, through articles, products, other links that they may be interested in.

Timothy Sykes, a penny stock trader, author, and teacher, uses his overlay to personalize the content his website visitors see. Based on the option they click, he displays either his regular site or his Millionaire Trader program landing page site.

Exit overlays are for more than just purchases

Ultimately it’s all about knowing what your visitor’s goals are in coming to your website, and matching your goals with them through your exit overlays. Develop content streams that match up to the various visitor goals and line them up with your own business goals, and you’re set! You’ll generate the best results with your overlays when visitors want to do the same thing you want them to do.

That’s a complicated way of saying, “Line up your goal with what they want to do.” Hit that sweet spot and you’ll see your business grow.