CloudEngage Introduces ActionPop Promotions

Portland, Oregon-based company CloudEngage, a platform that provides businesses with location, demographics, and weather information for their Web sites, today introduced its ActionPop Web site engagement tool, designed to increase customer engagement by means of virtual scratch cards that businesses can add to their Web sites.

ActionPop utilizes advanced layering technology that enables customers to interact with promotions by "scratching" or wiping to reveal hidden offers or messages. The scratch cards have randomized winners, and according to CloudEngage, the randomized nature of the rewards taps into the primitive part of users' brains and triggers them to take action. Additionally, by limiting tries to one per day, businesses can increase the chance that customers will keep returning.

"One of the things that we wanted to do was continue to push the envelope, particularly with dynamic modals," Paul Wagner, CEO and Founder at CloudEngage, says. "We were seeing great conversion rates with localized and weather-related content, but we wanted to go a bit further—because there are so many interesting animation libraries available, we realized we could create layered content that would make it more engaging for a Web site's visitors. It's one thing to geotarget or create localized content; it's an entirely different thing to actually bring the site visitor into the experience."

Businesses can also make the experience even more addictive by customizing the scratch card reveals with actions such as unwrapping a gift, lifting the hood of a car, and popping bubble wrap, among others. According to CloudEngage, the interactive component of ActionPop is essential in increasing customer engagement, with customers feeing a greater sense of ownership of promotions when they have worked to unlock them.

"[When] you visit most retail Web sites, one of the first things they prompt you to do is enter your email address to receive 10 percent off. For a site visitor, it's all been laid out there—this is the value of the exchange. With ActionPop, you can restrict revealing what your gift is or what your savings are until after the email is actually entered. That's a great example of driving the consumer to engage the content."

Wagner says that ActionPop is just as effective on mobile and gives the example of going into a car dealership and receiving a free ice scraper. The ActionPop promotion allows customers to digitally scrape away ice with a scraper. "The mobile version is really slick in that you visit the site, you're immediately presented with that engaging overlay, and it's as simple as clicking your finger on the screen and wiping it away," Wagner says.

Creating ActionPop modals is a simple process—businesses select an overlay image and drop a reveal image on top of it, and CloudEngage does the rest. ActionPop modals work on all devices, and businesses can further customize them with event triggers such as location, weather, and gamification to further personalize the promotion.