“Slowing watching you slip away
grasping sand running through my gripping fists
hearing the last breath of this life and feeling my world shatter around me
And then you were gone
My sweet love
My best friend
My beginning and end
Come back, come back to me
I beg you, please
Selfish as I am I want you here with me, please
Slipping through the night you went like sand through my fingers
Holding your hand and feeling you leave as you let go
No, wait
Take me with you
How can I, without you?
The bed is empty without you
Your pillow smells of you
Please let me go with you
Please, don’t go without me
It was so fast
You are no more
My sweet friend
Beginning and end
tear soaked sand running through my fingers” (source)
This poem might relate to the situation with cold website traffic coming to your website.
Okay, maybe the situation is not as dramatic as in this poem.
But do you feel like that regarding your real estate website and cold traffic not sticking around?
It might run through your fingers like in the poem and never return.
Actually, the average bounce rate, according to gorocketfuel.com, is 44 percent.
This means that 45 percent of your website visitors leave after a short period and never return.
Your effort and money to get traffic to your real estate website may drain.
This is where website exit surveys come in.
They can help you lose fewer website visitors, reduce your bounce rate, save time and money for cold traffic to your website, and help you generate more leads.
What is a Website Exit Survey?
An exit survey is displayed when visitors are about to leave your website.
It is usually triggered when the mouse cursor moves toward the browser toolbar.
This is usually when a visitor is about to leave your website.
Right then, it can ask your visitor why they are leaving.
Collecting this information allows you to find patterns and see what could be improved in different parts of your real estate business.
It can also let them opt in as a new lead.
Use Cases and Questions to Use for Website Exit Surveys
Shopping Carts
Not relevant to real estate are shopping cart abandonment exit surveys.
This exit survey is triggered when you add a product to your shopping cart, are about to pay, and then leave the website.
The usual questions asked are:
- “What made you quit shopping?”
- “Why did you decide to stop shopping?”
- “What would make you finish shopping?”
- “What additional information do you need to complete your purchase?”
Pricing Pages
This is triggered when a visitor comes to the pricing section of a website (often the case with software-as-a-service websites or other fixed-priced service websites).
This could also be used for a real estate website that offers services at fixed rates with different pricing plans (e.g., architects, flat rate realtors, home decorators, appraisers, etc.).
Questions that could be asked are:
- “What is not clear about our pricing to you?”
- “Compared to other providers you may know, are our prices lower, higher, or about the same?”
- “How much would you be willing to pay for our basic service plan?”
Goal Completion
You might have a specific goal that you want your website visitor to be able to accomplish on your real estate website.
Maybe you want to convince motivated sellers to help them get rid of their property. Or, as a realtor, get them to sign a commission agreement.
In these cases, you can also use a website exit survey to ask if their goal was achieved.
Questions you could ask in this case include:
- “Did you find the information you needed?”
- “How difficult was it to find the information?”
Landing Page Survey
Let’s say you have a landing page where visitors can enter into your sales funnel to, for example, download a lead magnet that gives them an overview of lease options.
However, your Google Analytics or different analytics software shows a relatively high bounce rate.
This means there is still quite an upward potential to increase your conversions.
By the way, in the beginning, this is quite normal for a single landing page.
Here, you could use a website exit survey to discover why people leave the landing page without leaving their contact details, signing up, or downloading the lead magnet.
Knowing that can shift the underperforming landing page in the right direction.
Without asking, you can only make assumptions, such as there is not enough information, the copy is too short or too long, or the value proposition is not easy to understand.
Questions you could ask are:
- “Why didn’t you sign up?”
- “What was missing that prevented you from signing up?”
- “What could we do to improve your experience?”
Use Website Exit Surveys to Generate More Leads
You don’t only have to use exit surveys to help you improve your website conversion rates.
They are also quite effective at generating leads.
Let’s say you are a real estate investor publishing current deals that you have under contract on your website. A retail buyer or a potential co-investor is looking to make a deal with you or buy the contract.
They usually leave if they don’t find what they are looking for.
In this case, you could have a website exit survey that offers several things that make them leave their contact information.
These are the questions you could ask:
- “Couldn’t find the right deal for you? We might have one for you that is not published here yet. Just leave your contact information, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.”
Maybe a seller is interested in lease options. Then, you could use this question:
- “Don’t understand lease options yet and how you could sell your underwater property? Just leave your contact information for a short 15 minute consultation.”
Further questions you could use:
- “Do you need further information about our offer?”
- “Would you like us to contact you with a personalized offer?
What’s The Typical Response Rate of Website Exit Surveys?
You might have guessed that this depends significantly on your copy in your website exit survey and how engaged the visitors are.
That’s why there is a large variety of response rates. According to the company Survicate, it’s between 5 and 60 percent.
To them, shopping cart abandonment exit surveys usually have the highest response rates, and goal completion surveys are the lowest.
Website Exit Survey Benefits, Pros, and Cons
As with everything in life, there are never only pros and never only cons.
The same is true for website exit surveys. So, here, you will get some pros and cons. Let’s start with the good news first.
Pros:
- Have usually high response rates, beating other types of website surveys
- The information you collect can reduce your bounce and exit rates.
- Can improve your conversion rate drastically with the insights they can give you
Cons:
- It can be perceived as annoying.
- Since some visitors may use them as their shrink 2.0. to unload their frustrations, results can be biased. Unfortunately, these people are more motivated to participate in a survey.
- The trigger is inaccurate since it can also appear when the person only wants to change a tab or click on another element on the upper menu.
0000;”>Website Exit Surveys’ Best Practices
Make It Short
To avoid too much friction, ask one or two questions. Why should the visitors answer more questions when they want to leave in the first place?
Therefore, multiple-choice questions are most suitable.
Let the participant know that the second question is also the last one.
That increases the likelihood that they will also answer the second question.
Adapt the Type of Question to the Page the Website Exit Survey Appears
You shouldn‘t ask the same question, such as “Why did you want to leave?” on all your pages.
It will become a tracking nightmare, and you won’t be able to analyze the data you collect well enough and reference it to a particular webpage.
Make It Kind of Pop
Very few visitors will notice if you put the website exit survey in the corner of your page.
So make it kind of pop.
You can have it fade or slide in, appear in the center, or use an overlay.
You might want to use also different colors than you usually use on your website.
Test Your Website Exit Survey
Almost nothing is more annoying than letting a week or more go by, checking if you collected some helpful information, and finding nothing.
You didn’t test whether the data a user can enter even reaches your backend.
So better test if it works well on all devices before you go live.
Balance Closed and Open Questions
Even though I recommend keeping it short and using multiple-choice questions, it doesn’t mean you should never use open questions.
The response rate will likely be lower, but you will allow the visitor to communicate their perspective.
Because if you only use multiple-choice questions, you only test your assumptions.
But you might have a dead spot where the answer to an open question could illuminate a user’s viewpoint and inspire you greatly.
The trick is that you can alternate between website exit surveys with closed and open questions, so you cover both.
And sometimes, you could even use replies to open questions as testimonials later.
Have A Mobile Friendly Exit Survey
This has partially been covered in the section about testing your survey. Nowadays, it should be almost a given to have a mobile-friendly exit survey for those working on mobile devices.
So, have a mobile-friendly exit survey because you might lose about 50 percent of potential participants.
Do A God-Father Close With Them (An Offer They Can’t Refuse)
Similar to collecting leads with an exit survey where they can opt-in, you can kick it up a notch and make them, at this very moment, an offer they can’t refuse.
If you are a realtor and the page you use the exit survey on is directed towards retail buyers, you could say something like: “Wow, not so fast! Before you go, let me make an offer you can’t refuse. If you work with us, we will cover your moving costs.”
Well, maybe this is a bad idea depending on the area or clients you are working with.
But, you will probably know better what kind of offer your clients will unlikely refuse. I hope you get my point.
Have The Right Timing
When you display your exit survey, the right timing will make or break the success with them.
The number of ways you can program the exit survey depends on the software or plugin you use on your website.
Most of them can be configured to be triggered once a visitor moves the mouse cursor to the top (where the page is usually closed).
Nobody wants to see a pop-up right at the start of their visit.
Some plugins can be programmed with more intelligent triggers. So you can display the website exit survey after a certain number of visits, URL patterns, and other custom variables.
This leads me to the last section of this article.
What tools, software, and plugins exist that you can use for website exit surveys?
5 Website Exit Survey Providers That You Can Start Using Today
Several providers in the market provide website exit surveys that you can integrate into your website.
So, without further ado, here they come:
1) Survicate
Survicate also provides you with more functionality than exit intent surveys.
They can provide you with general surveys and forms, net promoter scores, feedback buttons, exit surveys, mobile app surveys, and a feedback hub.
The latter can collect feedback from chats, reviews, conversations, and more.
Their basic plan starts at $0 with a max. of 100 responses per month up to $299 per month with 10,000 responses per month.
You can check it out here.
2) WisePops
WisePops, as the name already indicates, focuses more on the pop-up functionality but with intelligent and customizable display logic (you have many options for when and how the pop-ups are displayed).
It integrates with WordPress, Shopify, Magento, Mailchimp, and WooCommerce.
WordPress likely will be the most relevant to you as a real estate professional.
The basic plan is $49 monthly, including 100,000 pageviews and one website.
The pro plan is $99 monthly, including 500,000 page views and three websites.
And the Expert plan starts at $199 per month and includes five websites and 1,500,000 page views.
You can check it out here.
3) Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is part of Thrive Themes for WordPress Integration and offers not only exit intent surveys.
It has a wide variety of different WordPress solutions, including themes and additional plugins to generate leads.
One of them is smart links and exit intents. It comes with Thrive Leads as only one function amongst many others, such as opt-in forms, advanced A/B Testing, pre-designed templates, and analytics.
You could get Thrive Leads, all the other plugins, and WordPress themes for $19 per month (paid annually) as a Thrive member, or you can just get the Thrive Leads plugin for a one-time price of $67 (license for one installation).
You can check it out here.
4) Informizely
Informizely is an all-in-one survey platform offering slide-in and pop-up surveys with advanced triggers and targeting options, like exit intent, page scroll, idle time, and button clicks.
They have full-page surveys and can integrate surveys in emails, web apps, and landing page platforms, such as Unbounce.
The Essential plan costs $49 per month for one user and 500 survey responses. You can get an enterprise plan at $209 per month for ten users and 10,000 responses and all features.
You can check it out here.
5) poptin
Poptin convinced me with its user-friendliness. The company website is already quite clearly structured and doesn’t have much clutter.
Their product offers three functionalities: popups, forms, and autoresponders (email).
The popups can be created by dragging and dropping. You can program different triggers to display the popup by exit intent, such as traffic source, countries, specific dates and times, and specific web pages or new or returning visitors.
To decrease the chances of appearing annoying with your popup, you can hide it from converted visitors (leads).
They also offer A/B test functionality for the popups, analytics, many different design templates, and many integrations with email marketing providers and customer relationship management software.
The first plan is free for one domain and 1000 visitors per month.
The basic plan for one domain is $19 monthly, unbranded, and includes 10,000 visitors per month.
The pro plan is $49 monthly, including 50,000 visitors, four domains, and 5000 autoresponders.
You can check it out here for free.
Conclusion
Website exit surveys are tools that shouldn’t be underestimated.
They can shine some valuable light on blind spots you might have regarding your potential customers.
And by using the information you get from these surveys, you can improve your offer or copy and thus increase your conversion rates significantly.
By doing that, your website visitors aren’t “grasping sand running through your gripping fists” anymore, as cited in the short poem at the beginning of this article.
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