Plyfe’s interactive widgets for your site have 46% engagement — and they’re free

If you ever wished your website could have a Tinder-like “swipe” poll, a timed trivia contest, a customized personality quiz, or a sweepstakes, you’re in luck. Plyfe is launching a free tool that lets anyone create these kinds of interactive elements quickly and easily.

The new free offering is a bit of a change for Plyfe, which spent the past year focusing on enterprise companies. Its client list currently numbers 25 companies, including IBM, USA Today, Ogilvy, Unilever, and Toyota. And it says that its widget-like Web “cards” have been viewed (and interacted with) millions of times.

But now it will offer a free consumer version, as well as a $100 per month subscription version aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.

“It’s more of an extenuation of the product offering” than a pivot, Plyfe founder and chief marketing officer Jeff Arbour told us. “There are some bells and whistles in the enterprise version that wouldn’t make sense for SMBs and consumers,” and vice versa.

Plyfe offers embeddable widgets in a variety of flavors. There’s a “swipe left/right” tool it describes as “Tinder for everything;” a trivia quiz builder, a timed trivia quiz, a scoreboard for displaying user rankings (perhaps from that trivia quiz), image- and video-based polls, a photo gallery, a photo carousel, a sweepstakes builder, and a personality quiz builder. The company releases two new types of cards every month, and plans to continue doing this, Arbour said.

Under the hood, Plyfe relies on the Ember.js framework for displaying interactive visual elements in a browser. Arbour says its widgets work on all platforms and operating systems, from mobile phones to desktop browsers to TVs. And the interface is designed to be relatively simple for non-coders to use, so marketing guys can create interactive elements without having to put a request in to the development team.

“You can build interactive layers to make your own assets more compelling,” Arbour said.

Examples of how the various widgets can be used range from the simple (a poll asking whether The Dress is white-and-gold or blue-and-black) to the slightly less simple (32 place names you’re probably mispronouncing).

In addition to the widget building tools, Plyfe also offers real-time reports for tracking how your widgets are doing.

The company claims that its widgets can have a significant effect on web marketing strategies, increasing conversion rates, engagement, and time on site.

For example, one client, Aloha, saw 54 percent engagement: More than half of the people who encountered a web page with a Plyfe quiz on it interacted with the quiz. USA Today found 16 percent of the people who viewed a web page with a Plyfe poll on it took the poll, over a six-month period — which is a pretty substantial level of engagement for a news site.

Toyota placed a social media-driven photo gallery on one of its pages as part of a campaign to stimulate donations of car seats. Of the people who visited that page, 34 percent clicked on the widget to scroll through the photo gallery, and the campaign eventually collected 6,000 donated car seats.

On average, the company says its cards have seen an average of 46 percent user engagement, a 71 percent completion rate, and a 21 percent rate of social sharing.

Plyfe was founded in 2012. It has raised $4 million to date, from Social Starts, Great Oaks, Scout Ventures, Cross Cut Ventures, Abundance Capital, General Catalyst, and other angels. It is based in New York, and currently employs 13 people.