Exit Offers: Should You Use Them

Using an Exit Offer on your website is shown to increase your conversion rates.  What do I mean by conversion rates?  The number of visitors decide to act on a Call To Action on your website compared to the total number of visitors.  A Call To Action can be a product purchase or a request to join your newsletter.

Let’s take a look at what an Exit Offer is… By implementing some code on your site, it is possible for ‘the site’ to detect when your visitor is navigating away and display either a Pop-Up or another page making a last minute offer.  Allowing your visitors to look at your site and then making an offer as they leave your site makes a lot of sense.

Uses for an exit offer include:

A survey to ask your visitor their opinion.  By surveying your visitors as they leave your site, you are developing valuable, in depth market research which you can use to tweak your existing products and services or even create a new product or service to meet your target markets needs.

Asking your visitors why they didn’t buy.  This will allow you to review your products and services and package or price them more appropriately for your market.

To offer a “down-sell”.  If somebody doesn’t buy the product they are viewing, you can offer them a different product at a lower price and this will address price concerns.

Correctly implementing an exit offer, will allow you to build an on-going relationship with your visitor and turn them into a life long customer.

However, there are several issues with implementing Exit Technology.  The main ones being:

• Installing and configuring scripts can be difficult , confusing and time consuming
• It is often necessary to changing the linking code in your onsite navigation links to stop the ‘exit offer’ kicking in while the visitor is still browsing your site
• Pop-Ups are often blocked by browsers – thus negating the effect of your exit offer

I haven’t been overly enthralled with the use of exit offers in the past – mainly due to the amount of time it takes to install and configure them…

However, in this last week, I was asked to review Dave Guindans Exit Splash… a new product that will launch on April 21, 2009.  Knowing that Dave creates GREAT products, I was insterested in taking a look – even though I’m not a fan of exit technology.

I am now…  Exit Splash is a new breed of Exit Technology… Exit Splash ‘warns’ your visitor they are going to get an offer – by popping up a warning dialogue box, playing an audio and displaying an image on the page behind.

By playing an audio, Exit Splash will literally talk to your visitor and give them directions on what to do next to take find out what the offer is.  As you can use your own audio recordings – it is also possible to tell your visitors what that offer is.  I was pretty impressed with that.

And… if the audio instruction isn’t enough, the message is reinforced by an image that is displayed on the page behind the dialogue box. This image gives visual instructions on what to do next…. of course, you can use your own images that could also visually display what the offer is.

However, what really interested and amazed me, was that I didn’t have to add any special codes to my site navigation to stop Exit Splash acting when my visitors are ‘just browsing the site’.  Dave’s script is so smart, that it won’t load if you are changing pages on the site….

What about installing and configuring Exit Splash

Installing and configuring Exit Splash is incredibly easy.  All you need to do is FTP (or upload them through CPanel) the script to your server.

To get the code to add to your site to make Exit Splash work, simply point your browser to the configuration tool that Dave provides, answer a few simple questions and then cut and paste the generated code into your webpage.

It really is that easy and, Dave provides a bundle of video tutorials that will literally take you by the hand and show you how to install and configure the script from scratch.

There was one extra function that comes with Exit Splash that I got fairly exited about… a Viral Twitter Box

Twitter is like SMS on the web — it’s a way for each of us to communicate with our friends and followers in 140 characters or less.  It is a very powerful tool.

With the Exit Splash Viral Twitter Box, all you need to do is upload another small script to your server,  generate the embed code, put the Viral Twitter Box right into your page and watch your offer go viral.

Here’s an example of a Twitter Box – and yes, it does work, so feel free to Tweet Away and grab your gifts too…

Wouldn’t it be great to have your offer literally ‘go viral’ – right from your site.  Well, that’s possible with this fantastic little add-on to Exit Splash.