The latest trend in customer acquisition appears to be exit pop-ups. For those of you who aren’t familiar with them, they are dialog boxes that display as you move your mouse toward closing a website from your browser. The goal is to stop the user right then and give a last ditch effort to convert them by providing a special offer.

Implementing this can be as simple as adding a few lines of code to your site or paying a (relatively high) monthly fee to one of the few companies who provide this as a service. As long as these pop-ups convert, business will keep trying it. To be honest, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to increase your customer acquisition rates, however what’s odd is the wording on most of these pop-ups.

Take this pop-up from one of the service providers, Exit Monitor, as an example:

Everything is good until I get to the end where I read the dismiss link, “No thanks, I don’t want to increase my revenue.” Seriously? What pops into my head when I see that is actually, “No thanks Exit Monitor, I don’t want to work with assholes”. What’s odd though is that this wording has become common across many of the people using so called “exit intent technology”.

Check out this one from Bounce Exchange:

The dismiss call to action here is, “No, I like when visitors bounce”. Yet again, my response is “No Bounce Exchange, I can program your so called ‘technology’ in minutes. F-off”. I’m not going to go through a laundry list of companies I’ve seen using similar wording, but seriously, this doesn’t leave the customer with a great perception of your business. While I love the idea of trying to get people to convert at the last minute, using a condescending tone doesn’t help you build valuable customer relationships.