Internet Marketers Embrace Exit Offers… But Do They Work?
By Anna Johnson on August 19th, 2009Have you noticed the rise in Internet marketers and niche marketers using an exit offer message (‘exit offer’) that prompts a web visitor to stay on the webpage when they go to leave?
Annoying… or just smart marketing?
Well, of course some consumers are bound to find these exit offers – and the often accompanying chat windows – annoying, but as marketers, we want to know whether tactics like these deliver results or not, don’t we?
Do we see an increase in conversions, sales and profits by implementing an exit offer?
According to one source quoted to me, these tactics can lead to conversions in the range of 20-40 percent among ‘exit visitors’ i.e. people who are leaving the webpage.
Now, I’m not sure whether this source was referring to conversions in terms of buying a product, opting in to a list, or performing some other kind of action, but if it’s buying a product, I find a 20-40 percent conversion rate among exit visitors EXTREMELY difficult to believe.
The typical information product seller who gets a 1-3 percent purchase conversion rate among people who visit their website is doing well. Even if exit visitors are given a different, cheaper offer, it seems strange that they would yield a conversion rate in the range of 20-40 percent.
Then again, how is ‘exit visitor’ really defined? As you can see, we can’t really take statistics like these at face value, without really understanding all the variables, relationships and definitions involved!
Even so, the number and caliber of marketers implementing exit offers indicates to me that the tactic is probably working.
It makes sense that it would work, too. People leave webpages for all kinds of reasons but let’s assume that one such reason is that the product being offered is too expensive. When it comes to visitors who leave the page for this reason, it only makes sense that if the exit offer involves an offer of the same product at a cheaper price – perhaps for the digital rather than physical version – then a portion of those people will end up buying.
That’s just a classic, tried and true, down-sell approach in action.
I wonder, however, if the effectiveness of these exit offers is likely to decrease as more people in the same niche or market do the same thing. Will people who would otherwise stay on the webpage deliberately leave in order to take advantage of the exit offer? (Another reason why the conversion rate among exit visitors might be higher than expected). Alternatively, if some (or many) of these exit offers aren’t materially better than the original offer, will people come to ignore them?
Without personally testing this, I couldn’t say right now, but it will be interesting to see if the same Internet marketers are using exit offers 6 or 12 months from now…
