5 real exit-intent popup examples to inspire your CRO efforts

An exit-intent popup survey helps you understand why visitors leave your site without signing up or making a purchase, so you know what to do differently to win their business.

To help you create your own (and improve your conversion rate in the process), we’ve rounded up six highly effective exit-intent popup examples from real brands. We also share step-by-step instructions to set up your first survey with Contentsquare.

5 exit-intent popup examples to inspire yours

The best time to trigger an exit-intent survey is when you want to

• Understand why users abandon a cart or leave your site prematurely

• Learn about what users prefer when launching a new product or feature 

• A/B test different variations of your site during a website redesign 

Finding out why users leave helps you identify specific issues that keep them from converting, so you can prioritize which to tackle first and ultimately grow your business.

To help you make the most of your surveys, here are six exit-intent popup examples from real brands, plus a few tips to help you get similar results.

1. HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy is a leading provider of inbound marketing and sales education, with 10,000 people signing up every month to take free courses and get certified. 

The problem

HubSpot had started offering its inbound marketing course in different languages, attracting new user personas as a result. 

Because of this change, its Inbound Certification landing page design and messaging no longer fit. So, the team launched a redesign to improve their user experience and drive more signups.

The solution

Eric Peters, Senior Growth Marketer (now Product Lead), turned to Google Analytics (GA) to gauge the page’s performance and spot trends and patterns that would help with the redesign.

However, since GA doesn’t tell the whole story—it tells you what’s happening without showing why—Eric placed an exit-intent popup on the page to ask people, “Why are you about to leave this page?”

The valuable customer insights from this simple survey helped the team identify three main issues to fix and how to fix each one.

Top three reasons HubSpot’s exit-intent popup respondents gave for leaving HubSpot’s inbound marketing page, along with a solution for each one.

These insights gave the team the confidence they needed to design and A/B test the new template for the page.

The result

The team saw a 10% increase in conversions on the new design of the English-language Inbound Certification page, which they replicated on other localized pages.

💡 Pro tip: ask open- and closed-ended questions in your exit-intent popup. 

Open-ended questions provide detailed, unrestricted qualitative feedback, helping you understand the ‘why’ behind people’s actions on your site. Closed-ended questions, on the other hand, provide quantitative data, making it useful for collecting structured, numerical feedback.

2. NerdCow

NerdCow is a UK-based web design agency that helps marketing teams build websites that resonate with their audience and generate more leads and sales. 

The problem

One of the agency’s clients, The Transport Library, is an ecommerce business that sells images of rail and bus photos from the past, stocking over 140,000 items in their shop. 

Conversions were low, so the business approached NerdCow for a website redesign to increase sales. 

The solution

Instead of jumping straight into the redesign process, Tomasz Lisiecki, founder of NerdCow, set up session recordings first to view replays of users navigating The Transport Library’s website.

From the recorded sessions, Tomasz found many users struggling to use the search bar. But even after simplifying the search function, there was little impact on conversions. 

Tomasz dove deeper into recordings, this time discovering that people scrolled for hours through the site’s product database without clicking any products. 

To find out why, he set up a survey to ask users two questions: “Do you have trouble finding the product?” and “Can you tell us which product you hoped to find?”

The popup survey uncovered a major pain point returning users had: they were looking for newly updated products but couldn’t find them.

However, solving this problem (adding an ‘uploaded’ badge to help them identify which images were new and another to show products they had already viewed) didn’t increase sales for The Transport Library: now, users were adding products to the cart—but they weren’t checking out. So, Tomasz used surveys again, this time to ask users a straightforward question: “What stopped you from buying?”

The exit-intent survey results revealed users simply forgot they had products in the cart.

To solve the issue, the team set up a cart abandonment email sequence to email people who hadn’t finished checking out. They also added a reminder to the website, so people returning to the site would be reminded of items in their cart. 

The result

NerdCow nearly tripled sales for The Transport Library in two weeks as a result of these updates.

3. Turum-burum 

Turum-burum is a digital UX design agency providing web design, prototyping, usability testing, product design, and consulting services.

The problem

Intertop, one of Turum-burum’s clients, is a shoe retailer with 114 stores in 25 cities and a site that drives 3.5 million monthly sessions. 

The company reached out to Turum-burum for help simplifying its customer journey and increasing overall conversions.

The solution

Turum-burum used surveys to collect feedback from Intertop’s customers. The exit-intent popup triggered as users tried closing the browser’s tab, asking, “Why would you like to stop placing the order?”

Survey results revealed that half of the respondents left the page because they were unable to place their order: the registration form contained too many fields, resulting in users abandoning their purchase out of sheer frustration.

To solve this, the team reduced the number of checkout fields to three, and added autofill functions to help users complete registration faster. 

As an added UX enhancement, they split the ‘Order’ page into semantic blocks, with a separate field showing the products and cost breakdowns.

The result

These changes yielded a 

• 54.68% increase in conversions from Intertop’s checkout page 

• 11.46% growth in average revenue per user (ARPU)

• 13.35% decrease in checkout bounce rate

💡Pro tip: use a tool like Heatmaps in conjunction with exit-intent surveys to ask users directly about their experience on pages you've identified as problematic.

For example, if your heatmap reveals users scrolling down your product category page and hovering over images but not clicking the ‘Add to Cart’ buttons, trigger an exit-intent survey to find out why they leave without making a purchase.

The responses will help you pinpoint the exact issues that prevent prospects from converting, so you know what to prioritize.

4. Hussle

Hussle is a digital marketplace that connects customers with the best gyms and spas in their area. It offers day passes and MultiGym passes that include access to digital fitness apps.

The problem

Luke Calton, Product Lead at Hussle, wanted to decrease the company’s churn rate. This started with finding out why users churned in the first place.

The solution

Luke set up exit-intent surveys to trigger after a user canceled their subscription, so the Hussle team could capture critical feedback in the moment. The team surveyed more than 1,000 churning users for actionable quantitative data. 

Knowing when and why users churned, however, was not enough—Luke also needed to identify trends in responses. So, he exported the survey responses into a CSV file before clustering common reasons into themes. This process revealed three key churn reasons:

• Hussle's service was too expensive

• The user moved location and no longer needed the service

• The user bought a membership directly with a gym instead

The result

The exit-intent survey responses, coupled with additional research findings, enabled the team to get buy-in for the creation of a new Hussle product that allows members to purchase gym memberships through the Hussle platform.

These churn reasons helped inform a brand-new product offering. We ask users a few questions on-site, and based on their answers, we recommend them a personalized pass.

If they’re more suitable for a gym membership, then we want to help them buy one. This not only supports our gym partners but also reduces our churn. It also helps us understand what our customers want and frames Hussle as a one-stop shop for any fitness pass.

- Luke Calton. Product Lead, Hussle

💡Pro tip: use an exit-intent popup to find out why your users don’t complete a task in-product. Then, watch recordings associated with your survey response to see exactly what users do just before leaving feedback, giving you valuable context—plus the ability to empathize deeply with their experiences (and learn your product's potential faults).

5. ClickMechanic

ClickMechanic is a UK-based auto repair marketplace enabling users to find and hire mechanics to fix and service their vehicles. 

The problem

The ClickMechanic team needed to uncover its conversion barriers to grow their business. 

The solution

To identify what prevented users from buying, they asked: “What ONE thing is stopping you from booking with us?”

The responses revealed two crucial insights:

1. The pricing was out of line with the rest of the market

2. Users didn’t know who their mechanic was before booking a repair

This information prompted the team to make the necessary changes.

The result

Updated pricing increased ClickMechanic’s revenue by 60% in two months. Additionally, adding the functionality to let a customer know who their mechanic was before booking increased conversions by 10%. 

💡 Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s AI-Powered Surveys to set up and analyze your survey in seconds. All you have to do is set a goal and let the AI do the work of creating, analyzing, and generating summary reports for your survey, so you can focus on acting on the insights and making changes to increase customer delight.

Use exit-intent popups to turn more website visitors into customers

Website exit surveys work best when you place them on your most important pages, and this varies depending on your business type and marketing funnel stage. 

If you work in ecommerce, for example, the checkout and product category pages would be perfect places for your survey. For product and UX teams, your product and pricing pages are ideal spots to gather relevant feedback. 

And remember: you don’t have to create a survey from scratch. Instead, get started with Contentsquare’s exit-intent survey for free to gather relevant insights from your site’s visitors and improve your customer experience, no matter what industry you're in.

FAQs about exit-intent popups