How to get valuable feedback from your website’s visitors when they leave
Anyone who has managed a website that sells a product or service has at some stage wondered “why do people leave without purchasing?”
- Could they not find what they were looking for?
- Did they have a question? (you need to add live chat support)
- Is it too expensive?
- Something else?
These insights are super-valuable but how do you get them?
The answer — ask for feedback
You can guess or assume what the problem might be (which is about as useful as closing your eyes and pointing randomly at an option on your screen) — or you can ask for your visitors as they leave your website.
The case study — Bright Pilots
I’ve been working with a new startup called Bright Pilots. It’s an exciting and promising new platform lead by Ben Crothers that will improve the way teams work together.
Like all startups, it is continually learning about what current and potential customers find valuable and how to optimise the offer for them.
Bright Pilots prepared a list of reasons why visitors might leave without purchasing:
- Not ready to purchase right now
- Too expensive
- Class times don’t suit
- Isn’t relevant
- Need to check with manager first
We then needed to add a mechanism to collect this feedback.
The tool — OptiMonk
There are lots of tools that help you to add a pop-up to your website including Adoric, Getsitecontrol, OptinMonster, Sleeknote, Wisepops.
Many of these allow you to show a pop-up ‘on exit-intent’ — when a website visitor moves their cursor towards the top-right of the page to close the tab:
You’ve seen these before on numerous websites — a pop-up will appear saying something along the lines of “Hey, before you go, sign up to our awesome email newsletter.”
However, I chose OptiMonk (affiliate link) because it made it easy to do one thing well — create an exit survey.
The goal wasn’t to just capture an email address with a lead magnet or special deal. We wanted to understand why they were leaving.
In OptiMonk you can select the goal for the pop-up you create and from there you can choose to collect feedback:
The exit survey 🚪
I created an exit survey in OptiMonk using the 5 different reasons for leaving we had brainstormed earlier. It looks like this:
The custom steps 🚀
And here’s where it gets extra powerful.
For each of the options a visitor can select, I set up a link to a custom step:
These custom steps lead the visitor to a relevant option to invite them to share more or stay connected.
If a visitor clicks: “I like this, but I’m not ready right now”
They are invited to subscribe to the email newsletter and receive a useful resource →
If a visitor clicks: “I like this, but it’s too expensive”
They are invited to receive a 20% discount for their first class →
If a visitor clicks: “I like this, but the class times don’t suit”
They are invited to indicate when they would like to attend →
If a visitor clicks: “This isn’t relevant for me”
They are asked what skills they would like to learn →
If a visitor clicks: “I need to check with my manager first”
They are provided a link to access the ‘email my boss’ email templates →
The benefits
It took me just over two hours to learn how to use OptiMonk and get the survey up and running.
As a result, Bright Pilots is now:
- Gaining valuable insights from people who haven’t purchased (yet).
- Incentivising visitors to make a first-time purchase.
- Equipping visitors with tools to help them purchase.
- Encouraging visitors to stay connected.
You can do this on your website too. Get started with OptiMonk.
