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!

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

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

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.