Drive Brand Awareness and sales in the Lifestyle & Beauty Sector [Case Study]

Written by: Chloe Rowan


Birchbox is the UK’s number 1 beauty box. Subscribers receive a monthly box containing five samples of beauty products to test without having to buy the full-sized product. The boxes are tailored to suit the subscriber’s needs, for instance, a subscriber with straight hair would not receive a product for curly hair, but subscribers can also choose one of the five products they receive or select their preferred box design, adding a further element of personalisation.

The Campaign

 
Birchbox decided to launch a Whichit campaign. They identified their target audience as females aged 18-35, living in the UK and Ireland. They wanted a fun and innovative way to engage this audience, with the aim to increase brand awareness and drive sales.

The strategy was to create a 6-question Whichit quiz to collect actionable insights about their consumers’ makeup preferences and beauty routines. The quiz was to appear as a native ad, on a branded landing page, on the Birchbox website. The user would be presented with a different outcome based on their preferences, and each Engage Card offered a discount code and a clear Call-to-Action button.

Click on the image to discover your beauty horoscope.

The quiz featured attractive images and a series of fun questions about beauty routines, astrology, and the season’s favourites, allowing Birchbox to grab the audience’s attention and raise brand awareness from the start. The answers also provided Birchbox with valuable information regarding their target audience’s preferences including their influencers, favourite body feature, and preferred colour palettes.

The final question was “Are you a Birchbox Subscriber?”, which enabled the quiz to determine which personalised offer and Call-to-Action it should display on the Engage Card once the quiz was complete.

Success

The campaign ran on a Birchbox branded landing page within their website for 10 days and generated over 24,000 unique views. The campaign was a huge success, achieving an 89% engagement rate, made up of 60% potential new subscribers, and 40% existing clients.

Birchbox achieved 97% Completion rate and 89% Engagement rate in just 10 days thanks to Whichit. Click to read full case study.

Of the 89% who engaged with the ad, a huge 97% completed it, and 31% carried out the Call-to-Action. The ad was also shared on social media 113 times, amplifying the brand awareness.

Everyone who completed the quiz was taken to an Engage Card with a brief description of their beauty horoscope, the latest beauty trends for them to look out for, and influencers they should watch. Existing clients were then offered a free blending sponge with any purchase from the Birchbox online shop, while non-subscribers were given a voucher code to receive a 50% discount off an October box.

The answers collected throughout the campaign gave Birchbox vital product and rutine information. This data can be used to help personalise subscriptions and improve customer satisfaction during and after the campaign.

The audience enjoyed the interactive quiz, and it was such a success that Birchbox have continued to create Whichit campaigns as part of their marketing strategy!

Whichit for Advertiser’s next generation: designing to delight

Galit Gan
Co-founder & Creative Director

Here at Whichit, we believe that our user’s success, is our success. Since the launch of ‘Whichit for Advertisers’ platform in mid 2017, we've been working hard to make sure our customers continue to enjoy using the system. We wanted our user’s feedback to be at the heart of every new version we release, therefore the user-centric design approach means we understand our customer’s need and prioritise it.

User-centred design creates the opportunity for a business to design together with individuals who use the product or service they are offering enabling them to truly understand who their users are and what they need. By that, this design provides a common language for all types of users, no matter their profiles and characteristics.

Understanding our users

 
In our case, the product is a platform that gives marketers the ability to create interactive ad units that leave lasting impressions and generate high traffic volumes, in order to engage better with their audiences. To do so we needed to establish a common language for the diverse individuals that use our platform. These days, creating an ad unit requires expertise (design teams, web developers etc). Whichit for Advertisers’ concept is to make advertising easier and intuitive for everyone, not only for experts, and the platform’s user experience should support and reflect that.

“In the commercial world, it is common to make the mistake of prioritising business goals over those of the user. Our earlier product versions included as many proudly-developed features as we could, just so the users could ‘see everything we have to offer’. Taking out the guess-work and personal opinion was important for the new version. We’ve learned to analyze every touchpoint that our customers have with the product and matched their user-personas with their exact needs and goals. User-centred design should be implemented throughout the customer experience to make your product more efficient and satisfying, which eventually leads to increased sales and customer loyalty”

— Galit Gan, Creative Director & Co-Founder

Whichit for Advertisers’ concept is to make advertising easier and intuitive for everyone, not only for experts, and the platform’s user experience should support and reflect that.

User-Centred Design by Whichit

Today, we are very proud to announce the launch of our new and improved ‘Whichit for Advertisers’ platform, which is based on understanding our users’ needs, tasks and journey. We have also included new features for them to create beautiful interactive commercial ads their audience can't resist.

Here are some examples of how we’ve implemented the user-centred design in our new version:

1. A Creation Guide:

We believe that anybody can create interactive ads and run campaigns without depending on a designer, so we've included a step by step guide, with a checklist of tasks, that need to be completed before moving to the next stage.

With 'Whichit for Advertisers' our users can create interactive commercial content in minutes.

2.  New Features:

Polls and Surveys can be created in minutes with Whichit. We've made that process even easier by eliminated a number of steps in the creative process, by implementing new layout and tool bar when designing a post.

For example, users are now able to drag and drop an image from the library to the creative unit and apply a ‘drop shadow’ on the text overlaid on the image for each answer.

3. A commercial offer to support each user persona:

We identified four personas which all have different needs and goals when engaging with their audience.  Those who:

1. Want to attract audiences to a website/landing page

2. Want to reward audiences with a coupon/offer

3. Want to collect emails and other 1st party data to keep in touch with audiences

4. Want to create memorable experiences for audiences and for them to share their post to social but are not interested in offering something in return.

By implementing a unified language all users can relate to, rather than overly technical marketing and advertising terms, they can easily select the best option to achieve their campaign goals.

'Whichit for Advertisers' offers our users four Engage Cards with different Call to Actions based on their goals.

4. Touchpoints with target audiences:

Whichit’s ad unit can be distributed across multiple online channels. Instead of listing all the options, we ask our users what their marketing campaign’s objectives are: Do they want to engage with audiences on social media channels? or would the like to attract audiences from a new target market? This ensures they only see the relevant types of campaign that match their objectives.

Our users can choose different campaign objectives that best suit their marketing goals.

5.  A new and simplified user-flow:

Learning to use a new system is always challenging and time consuming. In the new version of ‘Whichit for Advertisers’ we’ve simplified the on-boarding process by only presenting features that are relevant to the user’s progress, keeping them informed about their progress at every stage. For example, a user will only be able to navigate through to advanced functions after completing the basics, as getting their too early may cause confusion.

Elliott Saray, Senior Developer at Whichit says that alongside a series of technical improvements, the new version of the SaaS platform also boasts a myriad of user experience enhancements.’. He adds that having completely redesigned the ad creation process based on user feedback and analysis, our users will now find an easy-to-use, unified design language carefully crafted by the Whichit Team.

“The simply and intuitively designed system takes matters of user experience into utmost consideration, allowing our users to create and distribute interactive commercial content at an even quicker pace than before by following a simpler journey.”

— Elliott Saray, Senior Developer

Thank you for reading! We hope you enjoy the new and improved ‘Whichit for Advertisers’!

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About the company:

This web-based tool makes it easy for brands and publishers to create image-based polls and surveys that help them gain user-related insights, their preferences, desires, what makes them tick, and more. With the interactive content platform - 'Whichit for Advertisers', marketers and advertisers can easily create Interactive Commercial Content in minutes and launch it across multi-channels: on the brand's web pages and blogs; social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat; native mobile and in-app; ad-networks; and publishers web pages. Once they attract their audience, Whichit’s users can reel them in with unique “Engage Cards” that deliver crisp and significant call-to-action messages based on their audiences’ answers and their goals.

Advertising and Data Gathering: Why not both at the same time?!?

Victor Martin
Business Development Intern

Thibault Bourrelly
Business Development Intern

Understanding your customers’ needs to give them what they want is the ultimate, but expensive goal. To perform on a tight budget, marketers tend to separate market research campaigns (to better understand their customers) from defining an advertising plan (to promote their new and existing products). So, you want to better understand how to target your customers through advertising and attract them without spending a huge amount of money—how can you do both at the same time?

Here’s something for you: Whichit!

Whichit is an Interactive Commercial Content tool: an efficient way to gather useful data and to promote your business at the same time. Whichit allows you to create interactive ads that can be shown on social media, onsite and programmatically. We do the heavy lifting for you, so you don’t spend hours trying to comprehend the valuable data you gather. Thanks to our fantastic Analytics Dashboard, the information collected is very easy to understand and the results of your campaigns can be monitored in real time.

How can you better understand the results of your campaign?

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard is divided into several sections that make it easy to understand how your campaign is performing, and what your audience has answered.

The campaign dashboard is divided into two sections: campaign performance and creative performance. The campaign performance shows data captured in your overall campaign—the aggregated results of all creatives within the campaign envelope. After viewing the overall campaign statistics, you can then focus on the performance of individual creatives in order to monitor and compare them individually.

The first section shows General information about the campaign: the start date, the campaign type and Call-to-Action type per creative. Also, it shows the number of people who saw the ad, clicked on the ad, and so forth.

The general information about this campaign shows how a survey accomplished excellent results. 74% of the audience that noticed the ad, voted, and was shared on social media 308 times.

Traffic Referrals presents the number of unique views per ad and website where your campaign has appeared (you can expand the widget to view more detailed information), and an Activity Graph illustrates the activity of your Whichit campaign over time – including engagement rate, completion rate, and unique impressions for comparison.

The audience that noticed the collection of ads, come from 8 different websites where 5 of them got the highest amount of views. The one with more views is 'traveldestinations.com'

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard visualises your campaign’s creative funnels in a very clear way, allowing you to understand the results with just a snapshot. You can also export the data to a spreadsheet.

The Completion Rate Funnel gives a clear overview of your creative’s results, starting from views, through content engagement to the call-to-action conversions.

The Post Engagement Funnel helps you recognise drop-offs in your posts and understand if the creative is working. If anything needs to be changed, you can edit the creatives in real time without needing to pause your campaign.

The Completion Rate and Post Engagement funnels are made available for every creative within your campaign, allowing you to compare your creatives and see which is performing best.

These funnels are showing great results. Each question was so engaging that 98% of the audience completed the survey.

See in detail the number of views on your Engage Cards and Call to Action stats, allowing you to see what commercial message is most likely to convert your potential customers into returning customers.

Here, 97% of the audience that interacted with the ad, submitted their email. 57% shared their details after getting to Engage Card #1, 39% to Engage Card #2, and 1% to Engage Card #3.

The Whichit Analytics Dashboard gives you valuable capabilities to understand your audience with a few advanced features, allowing you to conduct a small market research project with every campaign you’ve created.

If you are asking more than one question, the Whichit Analytics Dashboard shows the Common User Paths (per creative), the most popular choices among your audience, and finally their conversion rate on your chosen Call to Action.

In this example, while more users chose path #1, the conversion was higher in path #2.

Discovering connections between different products is a gold-mine for marketers. With Whichit’s ‘Votes Breakdown’ feature, you can see exactly what your audience preferred most, and how they voted from the perspective of other choices they’ve made within the collection.

For example, you can discover that most of the people who chose the brown bag also prefer the pink lip-gloss and the mascara.

This valuable information can be used in different marketing propositions such as newsletters, package promotions, remarketing campaigns and product staging. This data is made available per creative within your campaign.

Finally, the Audience section presents where your ad has been shown around the world and how well received it has been in all these places.

Our Analytics Dashboard offers you all the tools to gather actionable insights about your customers, so you can reach out to them in the best way.

Check out what our clients are saying about us and start your Whichit wonder ride.
 

Whichit's in the Fast Lane! We're featured in the The Fresh Business Thinking Shift 100 - MAdtech Edition!

Galit Gan
Creative Director & Co-Founder

We are delighted to announce that Whichit has been included within The Fresh Business Thinking Shift 100 - the MAdtech edition - in association with KPMG Small Business Accounting. We're in the Fast Lane! 

The Shift 100 has been put together to identify Madtech (Marketing and Advertising) entrepreneurs who are using technology to bring new ideas to marketing and advertising, which is fundamentally reshaping the advertising and media industry and altering how consumers “consume” content.

The Founding team: Jonathan, Yarden and Galit

Fresh Business Thinking is recognising and celebrating the entrepreneurs who are building cutting-edge solutions and bringing tech innovation to the UK’s marketing and advertising scene.

We are very happy to announce that Whichit is one of those chosen!
You can check out Whichit’s profile page here.

About Whichit:
Whichit is a platform to create and publish Interactive Commercial Content. Within minutes advertisers can create a beautiful bespoke interactive display ads. These can be embedded practically anywhere... including our network of publishers. These highly engaging ads not only drive traffic, they also provide highly useful insights about your target audience.

Our New Analytics Dashboard Has Been Released

Hi everyone,

If you’ve ever run a marketing campaign, one of the biggest pain points is understanding what you can develop next time in order to improve your communications. It all boils down to understanding your audience while communicating in a manner that relates to them.

Over the past 9 months, we have piloted Whichit with publishers, brands and media agencies, all of whom created highly engaging Whichit posts like these. Whichit is not only a visual, engaging post; when users vote on a Whichit, they are actually stating a personal preference.

One request we’ve received from our customers was to help them learn more about their audience’s preferences. This is why we are super proud to introduce our analytics dashboard:

Now you can visually see your audiences’ preferences, download the data to excel and gain consumer behaviour insights directly from your content.  
 

So, what information is available for you on our new Whichit dashboard?

• Your Activity graph: presents unique views, number of votes and your calculated engagement rate.
• Traffic referrals table: reports visits to webpages on which your Whichit Post has been embedded.
• Completion rate funnel shows the user flows from the number of unique views to the commercial Call-to-Action clicks.
• Votes geography: presents where your votes came from on a map.

If you’re already a Whichit user, check it out now - simply head over to the home page and click “View statistics” on any of your Whichit Posts.

If you don’t have a Whichit account yet, try it now: free for one month!

Until next time,
The Whichit team

Whichit Was Shortlisted To The UKBAA Angel Investment Awards

Hi Everyone,

Having been nominated for best international growth start-up, our entire founding team attended the UK Angel Investment Awards Gala Awards Dinner at The Dorchester last week.

It was a great honor to be shortlisted and a wonderful experience to be up close with the movers and shakers of our industry. There were serial entrepreneurs, angels, VCs, start-ups as well as accelerators, advisors and the rest of the support networks that make the UK such a vibrant start-up ecosystem.

We had a chance to mingle with some fellow start-ups and some investors. Most importantly, we were impressed with the calibre of the award winners and nominees. It was great to see companies that were once small start-ups, and are now massive, global companies.

We were especially happy to see that our investors, Galvanise Capital and even one of our clients, Family Traveller among the shortlisted companies.

About the awards:

“Now in its 11th year, the annual UKBAA Angel Investment Awards celebrate high growth and success in the angel and early stage investment market - recognising the fastest growing brands and acknowledging the founders, angels, crowdfund and early stage venture capital investors behind them.”

— UKBAA

That’s it for now. If you have any questions, feedback or just want to say congratulations on being shortlisted please email me at gan@getwhichit.com.

Yours,

Jonathan and the Whichit team