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.
 

Shopify or WooCommerce user?... We have the tool for you

Noémie Girault
Business Development Intern

If you use Shopify or WooCommerce - you may find yourself struggling with getting visibility or generating traffic to your site. You may even struggle with targeting the perfect client with the right products. Well, no worries!

Whichit has exactly what you need to get this very much wanted traffic and convert it into revenue. What is this miracle solution? Whichit Interactive Commercial Content.

Here's how you do it:


1. Ask a question

Ask your audience a simple question through image-based polls or quizzes to segment them and cut down the sales funnel. These rich-media ad units can be shown on social media, embedded on your site, in your Whichit display campaign through Google AdWords, and more.
 

2. Generate high level of engagement rate with Whichit Interactive Commercial Content

Once your audience has voted, the item they chose is already loaded to the basket and they can be taken straight to the check-out page.

Check out this demo.

3. It’s really simple to set up!

All you have to do is paste your basket page URL and boom! the magic is done. So, if you want to get more out of your display campaigns use Whichit to help shorten the sales funnel! 

See how to create your basket URL with Whichit:
 
If you’re a Shopify user, here is all the information you need to build your basket URL.

If you like to Woo your clients with WooCommerce, this link will tell you how to create your basket URL.

If you’re interested, would like to hear more, or need some help getting started just let us know!

I want more info

I want to learn more about Shopify and WooCommerce

Thanks for reading,

The Whichit Team

5 tips for eCommerce marketing on Valentine's Day

Alexandra Radugina
Senior Marketing Manager

Can you feel love in the air? If not, you should feel sales opportunities are!

An average of £980 million was spent on Valentine's day in the UK in 2017 (globaldata)  and according to some, Valentine's Day is considered the second-busiest holiday buying season of a year.
One of the general holiday marketing rules tells us to never, ever ignore a holiday. It would be a mistake ignoring Valentine's day just because you’re not in a flower or jewellery business… As long as you come up with a good marketing strategy, almost everything becomes ‘gift-able’.

Not sure of how to start with your marketing campaign for Valentine's Day?
We’ve prepared a few tips to help you stand out from your competitors and engage with your audience in a different way, to get your business measurable results:

1. Add a V-Day section on your website

Your first goal is to create a dedicated Valentine's section on your website, to showcase the range of products with straightforward navigation for ‘gifts for Him’ and ‘gifts for Her’, as it could simplify further product searches. The second goal is to show products in an attractive and romantic way.

In the pre-Valentine's Day shopping period the challenge is to connect with your customers by being helpful and reducing shopping stress. While telling your customers to buy your products could be considered a bit bold, you could incentivise them by including your products in a gift guide that helps them find inspiration. Also, it never fails to use extra selling points like a free next day delivery or a 10% off voucher, or even a small gift like a chocolate bar with any purchase.

2. Market early in a smart way

Don’t wait until the last minute to start your marketing! According to statistics, a month isn't too early, whereas marketing a week before could be a bit risky. Additionally, consider targeting last-minute shoppers in the week before 14th of February.

Don't forget to display delivery deadlines on orders to ensure arrival on or by the special day. Offering or proposing gift-wrapping could be a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitors as well.

3. Emails for lead generation

Email marketing is a powerful tool for engagement and customer acquisition. For Valentine's emails, you should include something creative that will spark your customer's interest: Valentine's gifts, seasonal outfits, tips on how to choose the perfect present or creative gift wrapping tutorials. Your design should be thematic. The Call-To-Action should stand out in the email so that users can find it with ease.

4. Social Native Advertising

Did you know that 71% of customers make purchase decisions based on social media referrals? Target your Valentines Day customers with Social Media Native Advertising. It's a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach customers without disrupting their browsing experience. Most of the social networks give you a full range of targeting options like "gender", "age", "relationship status", "life event" and many others, so it’s quite easy to send your message to the right audience. You can boost your sales by targeting more men than women, as they spend almost twice as much on presents.

Moreover, Valentine's Day advertising campaigns should be creative enough to break through other advertisers' messaging. Stand out from the crowd and drive not just sales but the growth of your social network in future promotions. You want users to interact with your ads so that it reaches a broader audience at lower cost. Customers will be encouraged to share content only if they enjoy it. The best type of ads that you can use to engage, interact and drive sales are Interactive Native Ads. Have you already tried it?

Another excellent way to promote your business through social media in a fun and interactive way is hosting a competition. It can increase your customer base by reaching friends of the people who share the competition, or they invite their friends to participate.

5. Find a partner

Let's say that your business is selling a correctly targeted product for Valentine's Day, but you don’t feel comfortable with dealing with your e-marketing alone. Find a partner who is and would be happy to benefit from your services! It is a win-win solution as you can split promotional costs and gain each other's customer base.  Come on, it is time to double your efforts to increase your sales this Valentine's Day!

Using a combination of these approaches and planning in advance is the way to a successful Valentine's Day marketing campaign. Also, don’t forget to track and monitor your campaign with the analytics tools.

Happy V-day,
From 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

Business Leaders Reception At 10 Downing Street

Whichit’s CEO, Jonathan Gan, was invited as a representative of the technology and startup sector for a Business Leaders Reception at 10 Downing Street, with the honour of being hosted by the UK Prime Minister Mr. David Cameron. There were representatives from different aspects of the UK private sector – from entrepreneurs to investors and CEOs as well as from the media and government.

The PM spoke about the importance of business development and the government’s support for this, and expressed his gratitude for the role those in attendance had played in this initiative.

During the event, Jonathan spoke to business leaders such as Brent Hoberman and Steven Cohen as well as the Prime Minister himself. They discussed Whichit’s move from Israel to Great Britain and Jonathan took the opportunity to personally thank the Prime Minister for the Sirius Program and all the support Whichit has received from UK Trade & Investment.

Overall it was a great evening that once again demonstrated the impact high growth companies such as Whichit, have on the UK economy. We’ve demonstrated our significant contribution to the business sector while thriving in a great ecosystem provided by the Innovation Warehouse and Accelerator Academy. It was heartwarming to view the level of attention and support the government places on strengthening the technology sector and an honour to Whichit to be part of it.