Nudgr has smart tricks to make you buy more stuff online

You’re about to leave an e-commerce site and then suddenly a message flashes up offering you a killer deal on the product you were just looking at. Depending on your outlook, that’s either really annoying or a brilliant user experience, but one thing’s for sure – it can be an effective way of generating sales.

Nudgr is a service that has recently launched to help sites avoid losing customers. Unlike some ‘exit intent’ scripts that identify when you’re about to close a browser tab based on your mouse movements, Nudgr learns from more complex behavior patterns around how you use a website. It then activates tailored ‘nudges’ to try to keep you around.

These ‘nudges’ can be adjustments to the UX, pop-up messages, ‘social proof’ messages or videos. While other machine learning-based services exist to monitor and react to users’ activity on a site (Conversify and Crobox, for example), Nudgr is focused tightly on exit intent. That’s not surprising, considering that it comes from Formisimo, the Manchester, UK-based startup that started out with a tool to help stop people abandoning Web forms and shopping carts.

Formisimo’s CEO Al Mackin says that tests with initial clients have found that Nudgr has achieved an average of 80 percent accuracy in predicting if someone will leave.

While Nudgr is being pitched as a tool for e-commerce sites at first, Mackin says that it may be offered to other types of website, including publishers, in the future.

So who knows, if one day you find yourself strangely compelled to spend an extra five minutes on The Next Web, it might not just be our quality content making you stick around.