Learn / Guides / Exit-intent survey guide
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 Hotjar.
Summary
Below are six exit-intent popup examples from real brands. Click through or keep scrolling to see all these surveys in action.
HubSpot Academy: increased conversions on its inbound marketing landing page by 10% with insights from an exit-intent popup
NerdCow: nearly tripled sales for its client, The Transport Library, in two weeks, using an exit-intent survey and session recordings
Turum-burum: drove a 54.7% increase in conversions and reduced bounce rate by 13.4% for its ecommerce client, Intertop, using an exit-intent popup and heatmaps
Hussle: continuously spots and resolves website bugs using an exit-intent survey
ClickMechanic: increased revenue by 60% and conversions by 15% with exit-intent insights
To get started with your own exit-intent popup, try Hotjar—it only takes a couple of minutes to get set up and start capturing invaluable data.
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 a Hotjar exit-intent popup on the page to ask people, “Why are you about to leave this page?”
This is what Eric’s survey looked like when a visitor was about to leave the page
The valuable customer insights from this simple survey helped the team identify three main issues to fix and how to fix 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.
Using both types of questions in your exit-intent survey gives you a more complete picture of the user’s experience on your site and what you can do to fix it
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 Hotjar Recordings first to view session recordings 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 an on-site survey using the Hotjar Surveys tool 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 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 an abandoned cart 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.
Set up your own exit-intent popup survey with Hotjar 🔥
Use our free survey template to find out why visitors leave your site without converting, so you can fix any issues. It only takes a minute to set up!
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 Hotjar 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 Hotjar Heatmaps in conjunction with exit-intent surveys to ask users directly about their experience on pages you've identified as problematic.
Heatmaps show you where users click, move their mouse, or scroll on a page
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 Hotjar Surveys to trigger an exit-intent survey 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
Hotjar’s 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.
💡Pro tip: use an exit-intent popup to find out why your users don’t complete a task in-product. Hotjar (that’s us 👋) used Hotjar Surveys to find out why users would start creating a survey with Hotjar AI, and then abandon the process before finishing.
Hotjar lets you view session recordings of users at the very moment they answer your survey (which we watched to see how users interacted with Hotjar AI in real time)
This cross-tool functionality lets you 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:
The pricing was out of line with the rest of the market
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 Hotjar AI to set up and analyze your survey in seconds—for free. 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.
Hotjar AI for Surveys saves you hours of manual work while surveying and analyzing feedback from your users
How to set up an exit-intent popup survey with Hotjar
To set up an exit-intent popup survey, get started with this free template.
After clicking the hyperlinked text above, you'll be redirected to the signup page where you can sign up for Hotjar using Google or by typing your email and password.
Once you sign up and answer a few onboarding questions (to personalize your experience), you’ll be asked to install the Hotjar tracking code on your site, so people can see and interact with your survey.
Type your site’s URL and click continue to access the ready-made survey template.
Once in, you’ll see the questions already set and ready to go. ✨
With a paid Business or Scale plan, click the ‘Appearance’ dropdown to customize your popup (the background, button, and text color, as well as the position of the survey).
You can also set the pages and devices you want the survey to appear on.
Finally, click the ‘Behavior’ dropdown to confirm the timing when users see the survey—in this case, as they are about to leave the page—and how often you want them to see it.
📝 Note: all responses automatically forward to your registered email if you’re using a free account. On advanced plans, get results sent to a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel where all relevant stakeholders can see it.
Once setup is complete, preview your survey, then click the ‘Create survey’ button to start collecting insights. It’s as simple as that!
Use exit-intent popups to turn more visitors into customers
Exit-intent popups 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 Hotjar’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.
Set up your own exit-intent popup survey with Hotjar 🔥
Use our free survey template to find out why visitors leave your site without converting, so you can fix any issues. It only takes a minute to set up!
