Reactful offers web optimization platform to stimulate visitors’ behavior

From the Reactful website

Marketers looking for ways to entice reluctant site visitors have another option today.

San Francisco-based Reactful is launching its optimization platform, which has been in beta for the last year with such brands as Kimberly Clark, Chegg, OralB, Accenture and Coca Cola. The platform, CEO/co-founder Jonathan Friedman told me, offers an easy-to-use combo of actions to stimulate user action.

A marketer chooses one of several goals from a menu, such as wanting to increase the number of visitors who fill out forms or who watch a video to the end. Reactful tracks visitor behavior to detect such signs as hesitation, interest or form abandonment, and with a few clicks, a marketer can set a specific reaction to stimulate visitor response.

A reaction could include, for instance, the visual shake of a button, a visual element like a button folding as a 3-D object, an overlay of text or the highlighting of a form. If a visitor is idle on a page, for instance, the platform might highlight the page’s registration button. All reactions are displayed without page reloading.

Twenty different reactions are currently included, with another 10 coming soon. Machine learning is employed to track and improve on what works.

The platform, Friedman said, is “the quickest way to actually take action on insights from website visitor behavior.”

He noted that during the beta phase, business financial tool Centage employed a reaction of a small overlay window with encouraging text comments for people who started to fill out a form and then stopped. Friedman said his company’s platform led to a 15-percent increase in forms being filled out.

There are a wide variety of competitors in web optimization, including Monetate, Optimizely and Adobe’s Target. Friedman said his platform is cheaper and easier to use than the higher-end tools and offers more user responses and machine learning than the lower end.

Reactful can be used with any website, including ones built in WordPress, and is integrated with marketing platforms Marketo and Hubspot. A marketer can test the reactions for specific user behaviors via an overlay in the authoring tool, and then implement it through a line of JavaScript on every page or in the site header. Pricing starts at $79/month for sites with up to 30,000 unique visitors monthly.

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About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.