Evergage, the start-up that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt New York in 2012 under the name Apptegic, has been quietly building its business for a year and is now launching a freemium model to help companies improve the click-through rates on their websites without the need for hiring a developer.
Though the name has changed, in part because people associated it too closely with mobile apps, Evergage co-founder and CEO Karl Wirth said that the product is fundamentally the same. Evergage looks at behavioral click-through data to identify which website features a customer is focusing on, and which aren’t getting many hits.
Using that data, marketing teams can then use a visual editor to build floating messages on top of the site to draw users’ attention to a particular feature. And depending on who the visitor is, they might be shown different pop-ups.
“We’re rolling out predictive analytics,” Wirth said. “We make suggestions to the market about what they could be doing. We’re able to say, we’ve seen people who have done these actions, you’ve shown them this message, and they’re converting to the goal at a higher rate. We suggest that you target people like them.”
If, for instance, a company wants their users to click through a particular promotion, they might have a call-out message open on top of it when the user is about to close the website tab. Another common and effective message is a membership sign-up box that pops up when the user enters the site.
The freemium product, called Evergage Lite, allows users to create up to three message boxes, which Wirth said is all some companies need. Letting businesses prove Evergage for themselves with the free basics seems like it will be a good way for Evergage to drive its own conversions to upgrades. For those who want to up the ante to 40 or 50 boxes, pricing is based on the site’s traffic.
Especially on websites that use log-ins, it’s crucial to not show a user the same information twice, Wirth said. If you have a banner asking visitors to sign up for a webinar, that banner should go away after they’ve signed up. And yet some sites keep it up, wasting the opportunity to push further conversions in a return visit from the user.
Adobe offers similar products with Adobe Digital Marketing Suite and Adobe Target, but Wirth said that their level of complexity often requires a developer to be involved, which racks up expenses for the company. Evergage aims to be a more cost effective alternative, so that marketing departments can manage the site themselves.
As Apptegic, Evergage raised a $3.1 million seed round in the fall of 2011 from Point Judith Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, and a number of Boston angel investors. Wirth said the company is running on revenue from its paying customers for the time being, but that they are planning to raise a Series A in the near future.