10 exit intent popup strategies to capture more leads

An exit-intent popup is triggered by a specific mouse movement, the moment a visitor's cursor moves toward the browser's close button or address bar, signaling they're about to leave. It's your last chance to make the ask before that visitor is gone.

The examples below aren't about design or copy specifically (for that, see our 18 exit-intent popup best practices to convert website visitors). They're about strategy: what you're actually asking for in that final moment, and why it works. We recommend targeting the type of exit-intent popup based on rules driven by the visitor's actions. Depending on which rule they trigger, you can personalize the exit-intent experience they see.

Let's look at 10 exit-intent popup strategies you can use on your website.

Decrease shopping cart abandonment

The average cart abandonment rate has held remarkably steady at around 70 percent for years, according to Baymard Institute's ongoing analysis, representing an enormous amount of lost revenue across e-commerce every year. Cart abandonment often reflects a failure to build trust, reinforce benefits or reduce a buyer's hesitation at the last moment.

Exit intent provides a final opportunity, prior to abandonment, for you to:

• Interrupt the buyer's decision and reinforce trust, benefits and any remaining hesitation.
• Offer a discount or promotion if the shopping cart is completed now.
• Offer the buyer a reminder email if they haven't signed in, so the cart isn't simply lost.

See six benefits of email marketing for e-commerce businesses for more on recovering abandoned carts after the popup, not just during it.

Highlight relevant content

A large technology provider found that customers who participated in its online community spent 25 percent more than customers who did not. The community provided relevant experiences, success stories and use cases that other customers could relate to and use to inform their own purchasing decisions.

Exit intent provides a final opportunity, prior to the visitor leaving your site, for you to:

• Highlight the availability of relevant content or resources, and navigate people directly to them.
• Use analytics to understand the visitor's original intent (what keywords brought them to the site, or which ad they clicked) and redirect them to content similar visitors found relevant.

Grow your email subscription list

Email marketing still returns $36 to $42 for every $1 spent, the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel. Organically building an email subscription list is one of the best ways to create an audience you can market to directly. For most businesses, promoting a newsletter isn't always obvious. They'll add existing customers, but neglect to actively promote the newsletter's availability on the website itself.

When a visitor is leaving your site, it's a great opportunity to promote your newsletter or another mailing list that may interest them:

• Provide a simple sign-up form, typically just asking for an email address.
• Reinforce the specific benefit of signing up for your list.
• Build trust by being clear that you won't share the email address.

See our step-by-step guide to building an email list for the fuller picture beyond just this one popup moment.

Ask for word-of-mouth promotion

According to WebFX's 2026 research, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations over a company's own messaging, yet word-of-mouth remains one of the most underused marketing channels for most businesses.

The key to word-of-mouth marketing is simply asking for it, and there's rarely a better moment than right as a shopper who just completed a purchase is about to leave your site.

• Use social channels, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and more, to make it easy for the visitor to share their experience. A single click should be enough to post a status or share a link.

Promote new offers or features

For some companies, especially those with a "house of brands," it can be hard to promote new offers, features or capabilities. The information may exist, but it's often buried in press releases, blog posts or other site content. Keep in mind that most visitors to your website don't arrive through the homepage. They arrive through search engines, so you can't expect them to find new offers on their own.

When a visitor is leaving your site, you can use exit intent almost like a small advertisement to promote what they might otherwise miss:

• An offer can be presented if the visitor has been idle for a period of minutes, a good way to refocus them if they stepped away or got interrupted.

Offer personalized recommendations

Personalization is about matching the visitor's experience to what they were actually looking for. This can mean promoting products they previously viewed, recommending related content, or tailoring their experience based on what similar visitors have found useful.

Exit intent presents a final opportunity to interact with your visitor before they leave. Just as you'd personalize their browsing experience, you can personalize the exit-intent experience too:

• Recommend products or content that similar visitors have found useful or relevant. This can turn what would have been an exit into a deeper visit, or even a purchase.

See eight benefits of personalization in your digital marketing for more on why this works.

Request ratings and reviews

According to BrightLocal's 2026 research, about 97 percent of consumers now read reviews for local businesses. Similar to word-of-mouth promotion, sometimes you just need to ask for a rating or review directly. A familiar example: the in-app review prompt Apple surfaces occasionally on iOS, since app publishers know exactly how much ratings and reviews matter.

When a visitor or customer is leaving your site, this is a great opportunity to quickly ask for a review:

• Most likely, they're already authenticated, so asking for a review can be as simple as requesting a rating and comment on a product they've already purchased.

While ratings and reviews are typically thought of as a B2C tactic, more and more B2B businesses recognize the value of reviews for their services too. See our six tips for collecting effective customer testimonials for more.

Request feedback on the experience

A visitor is leaving your site. Do you know why? Did they find what they were looking for? Do they need more help?

Exit intent provides the perfect opportunity to quickly ask a visitor why they're leaving:

• This could be as simple as a Net Promoter Score with a comment box, or a request to complete a more in-depth survey.

See our eight tips to create a successful customer survey for your business.

Cross-sell and upsell

If you've ever purchased a product from Amazon, you know it does a very good job of cross-selling and upselling related products. Similar to personalization, the moment a visitor is leaving your site is your last opportunity to help them find products or resources they may be interested in but were unaware of.

Exit-intent cross-sell and upsell should focus on:

• What products or content did other similar customers select that this visitor did not?
• What products are highly related to what this buyer already has in their cart or has purchased?

While exit intent alone won't answer those questions for you, it creates the opportunity to act on the answers once you have them.

Reduce bounce rate on content pages

In Google Analytics, bounce rate refers to the percentage of single-interaction visits to a website. A bounce rate above 70 percent for a blog post or article isn't unusual, and it isn't automatically a bad sign either.

Visitors bounce for a range of reasons:

• They finished reading the content they came for.
• They didn't find what they were looking for.
• They're price or comparison shopping.
• They got distracted and forgot what they were looking for.
• They were simply researching, not ready to act yet.

An exit-intent popup on these pages creates an opportunity to convert a departing reader into a newsletter subscriber, or offer them something else worth staying for.

Measuring what's working

The overriding goal of exit-intent popups, along with other interrupt-driven tools like welcome mat popups, is to improve your conversion rate optimization (CRO).

All of these tools help you understand your visitors better, through metrics such as:

• Impressions: the number of times the popup is shown to visitors.
• Navigate away: the number of times no interaction with the popup takes place.
• Call-to-action (CTA) click: the number of times the CTA itself is clicked.
• Dismiss click: the number of times (and how) the popup is dismissed, such as clicking "Maybe Later."

For the design and usability principles that make any of these 10 strategies actually convert, from dismissal behavior to frequency capping, see our 18 exit-intent popup best practices to convert website visitors.