Elliott Saray
Senior Developer

Supercharge your CRM with Whichit’s Microsoft Dynamics365 Integration

 Whichit has enhanced their integration capabilities by establishing a direct connection between interactive commercial content served online and one of the industry’s most powerful CRMs: Microsoft’s Dynamics365.

 Using Whichit’s Dynamics365 integration, businesses can instantly streamline user information to their CRM. Data transmission is facilitated by Whichit’s naturally interactive content distributed across the web.

In this article, we will explain how a business can take five simple steps to turn a stranger engaging with their content online into a paying customer by using Whichit’s Microsoft’s Dynamics365 CRM integration.

Whichit for Enterprise

Whichit is a B2B software company providing an interactive commercial content platform that enables brands, marketers and advertisers to dramatically increase user engagement, return on marketing investment, open new revenue streams, and gain user-related insight.  The company developed an innovative technology that profiles users based on their preferences and uses machine learning to provide bespoke commercial incentives in real time.

The value of interactive commercial content

Using Whichit’s unique ad unit, businesses are able to spread their interactive content to a wide audience in the form of a fun, intuitive image-based poll or survey. Naturally interactive content allows businesses to directly gather preferences from their online audience— a one-to-one conversation occurs online between the business and their consumers.

Better yet, Whichit’s intelligent ad unit is able to perform preference-based segmentation; the ad unit offers the end user a commercial Engage Card suited to their needs and preferences. The Whichit ad unit is able to recognise a potential client and make a commercial offer in real-time.

Touchpoints on any digital channel

As you may already know, Whichit’s interactive commercial content can be distributed to any digital channel. This includes placements native onsite, on social channels like Facebook or Twitter, banners on the Google Display Network and other DSPs, email marketing campaigns and messaging services like WhatsApp.

 Regardless of the chosen traffic sources, interactive content served by Whichit is able to consolidate and immediately deliver segmented user data to Dynamics365.

From engagement to sale in five steps

1.   Preference to data point transformation

Each Whichit post circulating the web contains over 60 different data points that are used to better understand user preferences and create advanced user segmentation. Data collected by the Whichit ad unit can evolve immediately from a user preference to a real actionable data point for a business by contextualising the choices a user makes while interacting. Due to the simplicity and natural engagement of the creatives, the sky is truly the limit for what a business is able to understand about their audience by simply asking them online.

2.   Segmentation by preferences

Whichit ad units have the ability to digest end-user’s choices throughout their interactions with the ad. Each click or choice contributes to a personalised outcome right before their eyes; live segmentation allows businesses running Whichit campaigns to deliver bespoke commercial messages to their users online, based entirely on the choices they’ve made.

3.   Lead generation

Whichit provides businesses with several commercial message (Engage Card) types to choose from when building a campaign, but by far the most powerful commercial message for a business is the lead generation Engage Card.

 With Whichit, businesses are able to run fully GDPR-compliant lead generation campaigns that instantly deliver real end-user data. Once a lead is collected by the Whichit ad unit, the lead—and all the underlying data points based on their choices—can be sent directly to the business’ CRM.

4.   Processing and automation

One of the many reasons for business CRMs rising to popularity over the past five years is the value a CRM brings in terms of automation. Using a CRM such as Dynamics365, a business can setup email auto-responders and segment users within their CRM according to the campaign on which they sailed into the database.

Whichit takes the processing and automation functionalities of a typical CRM and provides them a much more valuable engine on which to segment and automate contacts: user preferences. A brand using Whichit can deliver leads into their Dynamics365 instance with precisely everything they need to know about said user, a user the business can then move onto the final stage with a rich understanding of their needs as a client.

5.   Actionable and educated sales approach

Thanks to the efficiency and the level of granular user detail provided by previous steps, this final stage could not be any simpler. The final phase of this process is to take the data your business has easily channelled into Dynamics365 and action it.

When a new lead arrives in Dynamics365 with full contact details, customer acquisition information and a full list of user choices, and is segmented correctly by the CRM’s internal sorting, the business can then continue their chosen sales process with an educated knowledge of their clients’ needs— phenomenally increasing the efficiency of the sales process by taking only a few steps beforehand.

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If you’d like to use Whichit to take control of your data and take five steps to turn your engagements into sales, get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help you! Email pro@whichit.co.

Find Whichit on Microsoft AppSource

Jonathan Gan
Founder & CEO

A tech-startup with a spectacular aura: innovative, disruptive, industry leading, successfully fund-raised, cool offices, great reputation, working with highly intelligent and creative people and as the founder you have the independence and freedom to fulfill your own dreams. They name successful start-ups after mythical creatures because the thing that makes them special is a type of magic that you can’t earn or buy.

Everyone has ideas, some good, some not. Some of the ideas are marvelous and revolutionary and yet, 97% of all the tech start-ups will fail and from the remaining 3% which can be defined as a success — only a handful will become big companies, while the rest will do a small/medium exit. Why is this? Most start-ups all have the same components, smart people, great ideas and a hunger to succeed, yet only a few go on to make a mark on the world. What sets them apart? It’s something you can’t see or quantify. Yes, there are principles that all successful start-ups incorporated on their way to success, but there is no set formula that you can use in order to succeed.

One of my favourite diagrams to describe the start-up journey is the Start-up Curve by Paul Graham.

The amazing initial enthusiasm that carry away the entrepreneurs, the diving into the trough of sorrow when the start-up is fighting constantly to find its’ way in the market, up to the golden point when the start-up hits the Product-Market-Fit and begins to scale.

But this graph is also misleading, almost a lie, as it’s totally out of scale. The reality is that the first stage, before reality sets in can take from a few days up to few weeks, no more than that. Then the time scale in the trough of sorrow, well… that can take a few years and might feel like an eternity. Like a thirsty and hungry person who is lost in the middle of the desert, without a map or compass, who can only see the horizon in the same shape and distance, every single day — the only powers that give them the strength to continue are faith and determination.

The feeling I had when I invented Whichit a few years ago was spectacular. A period full of energy, enthusiasm, creativity and pure initiative — aiming to change the way marketers interact with their audience. It’s been 4 years since I founded Whichit, relocating from Israel Startup Nation to Great Britain alongside my two Co-Founders, Yarden and Galit. A long and hard journey that taught me one main thing about tech start-ups: It’s not about the idea, but it’s all about the execution of the founding team, over a period of time.

Even today, after few years of running our start-up, with rich experience in the Trough of Sorrow, we are still holding the faith and belief of the idea. We can feel and see it in every aspect of the business — from the support and care from our investors, who joined us on this long journey, our business partners who recognize the unique and innovative value we are bringing to market, the successful commercial activities with our clients who are growing by the week and last but not least, our team: technically “employees”, but practically they are the soul of the start-up and keep on fighting even in the darkest hours; a team you want by your side when you’re building a tech start-up.

Being a Founder-CEO of a hi-tech start-up is a bitch (excuse my French). Long hours, hard work, working under constant uncertainty, great responsibility, constant concerns. As a Founder-CEO you are overloaded at every single moment, dealing with millions of tasks that cross every aspect in the business world no matter what your background is, while you have few resources. Every day is a challenge that becomes a struggle, getting “Nos” on a regular basis and still trying to continue like nothing happened. To be the Founder-CEO of a hi-tech start-up is doing the impossible every single day.

I was fortunate to have two super talented Co-Founders. Yarden, our CTO, covering all technology aspects of the business. From taking the concept and the initial definitions to full production. Even though when we began he didn’t have full knowledge and experience of several technologies and code languages, he was able to learn and perform with almost a vertical learning curve, with extraordinary talent and improvisation to achieve our product goals.

Galit, out Creative Director, is the master talent of the company. Basically, every single pixel in Whichit: it’s her design. From the creative language, the commercial campaigns, marketing and sales materials, website, blog and social channels, up to the full definition of the products, the user experience and interface. Thanks to her talent and creativity, we won the ‘Start-up of the Year’ from Facebook in 2015.

As we already know, talent is very important but not enough. The core team never stops surprising me with their dedication and hard work, sometimes with sacrifices of very late nights, working during weekends and holidays. Constantly communicating around work to execute our plans successfully. Getting into the small details and putting their care and personal touch in every corner of the product, services and piece of work, putting their soul into the tech.

The WBS Of The Founder-CEO

I had the chance to look back, reviewed all the disciplines I was involved with in the past few years of running my tech start-up. The millions of tasks spread across every domain and industry exists in the startup and business worlds. I don’t think there is a better school or degree that can teach you what can be learnt in a single year as a Founder-CEO of a hi-tech start-up.

I created this Founder-CEO WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) diagram, which contains every domain and Scope Of Work (SOW) I personally dealt with, while running my tech start-up, Whichit. There are three levels of involvement I’m defining for each scope of work:

1. Full — From definition and planning to delivery and full execution of the scope of work.

2. Partial — Taking active part in the task execution, together with colleagues or a service provider.

3. Shell — The action(s) taken was one or more of the following, while the actual task was created and delivered by someone else: planning, defining, managing, controlling, reviewing, mentoring, guiding.

As Founder-CEO of a hi-tech start-up, you will find yourself dealing with ALL of these components, while your level of involvement in each of them in the beginning of your start-up will be entirely on you, the more progress you make and the more team members you have, the level of your involvement will decrease, still everything depends on you. You may not have the professionalism, or you may not like a lot of these tasks (who likes to deal with GDPR or creating a company’s manual?!?), but like it or not, the execution of your tech start-up is dependent on each and every one of these small parts.

The T-Model In Professionalism

As you can imagine, it’s impossible to be an expert in every single discipline in the industry, nevertheless having the time to deal and manage everything together. The following model I created represents the variety of domains (horizontal) in the tech start-up world and the level of professionalism in each aspect (vertical). While the middle point is YOUR core professional domain, the more you move away from the center, the less professional YOU are in these domains.

The T-Model in professionalism is personal and will be different for each person. The goal of using it is to better understand where your strengths and weaknesses are in terms of knowledge, understanding and professionalism in each aspect of the start-up world. As an output, it will enable you to concentrate on working with your core specialties and expertise, while having others cover the specialties you are weak in.

As I mentioned before, EXECUTION is the key ability in a tech start-up. Not the idea itself, nor the tech, not the market and for sure not how much money the start-up has raised.

In its first years, until it becomes a stable company, a tech start-up IS NOT based on the traditional business models of T&M (Time and Materials) nor Bricks and Mortar, but more as an ongoing project, with a general direction and goal that is represented in a heuristic concept and with low resources to none.

Execution is defined as the ability to carry out a plan, order, or course of action. In simple words for the Founder-CEO of a hi-tech start-up, it is your ability to:

1. Understand the start-up’s current situation.

2. Measure your direction and distance to the main goal.

3. Recognize the gaps and up-coming challenges.

4. Translate gaps and challenges to tasks and prioritize.

5. Act.

6. Repeat. Every single day.

Good luck with doing the impossible possible and may the force be with you.

Jonathan

Whichit is an interactive commercial content platform that enables marketers and advertisers to increase user engagement, open new revenue streams & gain user-related insight. The company has an innovative technology that profiles users based on their preferences and uses machine learning to provide bespoke commercial incentives in real time.

The company is working with top agencies and brands and based in central London.

Written by: The Whichit Team

We are incredibly proud to announce that Whichit has been selected for the 365^x Business Accelerator, launching in Israel.

The 365x Accelerator is a business enhancer that prepares Software and IoT startup companies for exponential growth. Surrounded by talented executives and entrepreneurs, startups have the possibility to sharpen their business, product and technology, while accessing an international customer and distributors network to affirm solid traction towards scalability.

The selection process was based on three criteria, product, innovation and traction. The chosen startup had to offer a software based or IoT product with disruptive innovation or cutting-edge technology, as well as an initial traction with pilots or customers. We are pleased to say, Whichit matches all of them.

Backed by three global leaders, Microsoft, Prodware Group and Tech Data, the program will take part in the city of Kfar Saba, Israel, for six months. Whichit will be assigned an experienced coach in sales and business development that will help strengthening the company’s strategy and roadmap and structuring the product, technology and organization to work at scale and sustain exponential growth. In addition, this period will have frequent market feedback, global customer reach and tight support to reach actual business agreements with customers and partners. Generate sales, close reseller partnerships and reach the required traction to fit the criteria of “Series A Round” investment.

Since crossing the Product Market Fit threshold at the end of 2017, Whichit has seen an exponential trajectory of growth focusing on the UK and EU markets that has laid foundations for continual growth.  Delivering innovative marketing and advertising solutions to tier-1 brands and advertising agencies, enables them to better engage with their audiences, convert traffic into revenue and gain actionable insights. This program is a great opportunity to extend Whichit commercial operation and company growth.

Together with Whichit’s innovative and proprietary technology, a machine learning profiles users in real time based on their preferences, offering a more personalised approach to marketing and advertising, positioning itself at the forefront of its field and gaining a key business advantage in the market.

In July 2018 the company release a new and improved version of its flagship platform ‘Whichit for Advertisers’, a SaaS platform that caters to the SME and SMB markets. It enables advertisers to seamlessly create interactive commercial content, create and manage commercial campaigns on multiple channels including Google’s Display Network, where Whichit is part of an elite that are 3PAS certified by Google, social networks and programmatically.

In the past few years, Whichit has won several awards. In 2015, the company won The Sirius Programme by the UKTI, Pitch@Palace 4.0 People's Choice Award, and Facebook Startup of the Year EMEA 2015. In 2016, Innovate UK Smart funds TSB Project. The year after, Whichit was included in The Leap 100 2017 List and won two awards by Finances Online, Rising Star and Great User Experience.

Jonathan Gan
Founder & CEO

If the Whichit Interactive Commercial Content (ICC) is so effective, it is only due to the fact that the psychology behind it is very powerful. Understanding why the technology that Whichit utilizes has so much potential comes from looking at what happens behind the scenes and the very foundation of the concept. From the first year when we started to define and build the product, and even those days with the next generation of the Whichit for Advertisers, we used those eight science principles as a core guideline in order to achieve a powerful and useful tool for our users’ clients and their customers, while also building the technology around it.

Let us take a look at the aspects that make the Whichit Interactive Commercial Content so powerful, by analysing what is happening in a user’s head when he/she is engaging with this type of content.

1. The Power of Choice

Learning how to make your own decisions is probably the first responsibility you earn as a child. For instance, you learn to decide what color tee-shirt you prefer, what flavour of ice cream you ask your parents to buy you, or what you want for your birthday.

Choosing is in our mind forever, and our everyday life is comprised of a number of choices that we make with each passing minute. The result is that people love having choices and love making choices. As a marketer, offering choices to a customer helps to transfer the power to the customer, putting his/her personal choice first, thus creating a more democratic relationship.

Let’s take a look at an example: have you ever walked down the street and felt really annoyed by people trying to give you a flyer? This annoys you because the person is trying to impose something on you, that you did not ask for. More specifically, something that you did not choose. Now think about this situation in a different way; what if that person had offered you the choice between two different elements? Fundamentally, it would have been different, right?

Indeed, it has been proven that in a situation relative to choices, humans often turn to take an action and choose one of the options rather than be passive, even if they don’t fully know or understand all of the information related to their potential choices.

In Sheena Lyengar’s speech at TED Global 2010 about the art of choosing, she explains that our choices are often quite similar: The value of choice is created based off of the ability of someone to perceive differences between the options.

This power of choice is the first principle that Whichit applies: instead of imposing one single element to a potential buyer, Whichit is offering multiple choices to customers through polls, surveys, trivia, and other types of interactive content. In this way, the end-user can do what he or she feels is most easy to complete. Users can express their preferences by choosing from default options. In addition, users tend to feel better understood and listened to.

2. Crowd Mentality

The crowd mentality (also called the Herd mentality) describes how people can be influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors on a largely emotional, rather than rational, basis. When faced with a decision, humans often turn to the people they trust for guidance, resulting in a choice that is likely influenced by their peers or society as a whole. In simple words, the herd mentality describes a behavior in which people act the same way or adopt similar behaviors as the people around them — often ignoring their own feelings throughout the process.

The Whichit Interactive Commercial Content can be described as a psychological funnel delivered as a game. Even though the topic of the content is not necessarily in the user’s core interest, they will be attracted to engage with it in the first place for two key reasons that can be categorized under the crowd mentality:

• Joining the crowd: “Many people are already engaged, I’d like to try it as well”

• Comparison: “I want to know how I perform compared to the others.”

Based on those principles, Whichit decided to present users with the first message in a clear and appealing manner, and after their first engagement, Whichit would continue with a smooth and clean user-experience and interface to ensure high performance and conversion throughout the series of questions attached to the interactive content. Users will eventually earn the Whichit Commercial Engage Card.

3. The Wisdom of The Crowd

The collective opinion of a group of individuals is more accurate than the opinion of a single expert. This notion was most compellingly justified in James Surowiecki’s book, “The Wisdom of the crowd,” but its origin comes from Francis Galton’s observation in 1907: He observed that the average of answers to a “guess the weight of the ox” contest was extraordinarily accurate, even more accurate than the expert guesses. Lior Zoref repeated this experiment on the TED stage in 2012.

When it comes to Whichit, we gave the marketers direct access to all the answers. The preferences of the audience to the interactive content such as the polls, surveys, or quizzes provide valuable information on the accurate preferences of the users. The Whichit dashboard delivers a lot of information throughout a campaign and the corresponding creative levels, providing actionable insights and mini market research with the tip of a finger. Through this analytics, the marketers in the agencies, and the brands themselves can synthesize micro-audiences in seconds and discover their preferences. Learning, for example, that 40% of people that like the black boots also love the yellow backpack, and 78% of them are going on Ski holidays at least once a year. By analysis, there is no better way to determine the various profiles of potential customers within the audience.

4. Four is the Magic Number

Choosing is a basic instinct, inherent in our homo-sapiens brain. It is magical to see the reflex of the Human brain when asked a “Which” question rather than an “open” question. The differences are shocking every single time.

By its definition, choosing is picking the best or most appropriate of two or more alternatives. So, at the minimum, there must be 2 options. While the maximum number of options could be as much as we want, even dozens or millions, according to Sheena Liyengar’s talk, when you give people 10 or more options, they make poorer decisions.

So, what will be the optimal number for multiple-choice items?

Three options are optimal for multiple-choice items. Michael C. Rodriquez, University of Minnesota, carried out a meta-analysis of 80 years of research to synthesize these results to estimate the effect that the number of options in multiple-choice items has on test score reliability and validity.

In addition, the human brain can most effectively process up to four things at a time: When more than 4 options are given, the ability to focus is diminished. This can be explained by the “Working Memory.” Working memory relates to the information we can pay attention to and manipulate, or in other words, the temporary storage of information.

A Whichit Post contains a textual question, along with 2, 3, or 4 visual options in the form of multiple-choice questions. The images are with or without overlay text. The structure of the Whichit Post is rectangular and symmetrical, with subtle design lines. We limit the options to 4 and the images are squared.

Those design guidelines and restrictions achieved higher engagement from users in answering a Whichit Post with multiple questions consisting of polls, trivia, or quizzes. In addition, the guidelines provide a smooth user experience and interface, with added fun for the experience of the user.

5. Social Proof

Social proof is the idea that consumers will adapt their behaviour according to what other people are doing. There are 5 main types of social proof:

1. Expert

2. Celebrity

3. User

4. “Wisdom of the Crowds”

5. “Wisdom of your Friends”

Different types of social proof lead to different influences and needs to be used wisely according to the specific situation and the user’s experience.

In Whichit, we are using several types of social proof simultaneously:

• The Wisdom of The Crowds Social Proof — As an integral part of the Whichit questionnaire; includes showing the results as feedback on the user’s preferences for each post and in the end of the Whichit questionnaire as a summary of all feedback.

• The Expert / Celebrity / Wisdom of Your Friends Social Proofs — As the distribution channels; includes validation of the content when sharing and distributing the Whichit content, in addition to supporting the viral wave and the organic reach.

The Whichit content is defined as interactive from its nature and people want to engage with and inquire about their results — “How do I compare to the others?” Their instinct to tap into their digital ego by understanding the social proof is natural, and it leads to the following Whichit USPs:

• High engagement

• High completion

• Sharing the content

• High conversion on the Whichit commercial Engage Card

6. The Effectiveness of Personalization

Personalization is key for driving high performance and conversion. The more tailored the content and experience become to the individual and his/her personal preferences, the more likely they will continue to engage with the content and ultimately convert.

In Whichit, we took personalization to the next level! We appeal to the audience with attractive and interactive content, reaching to the “rainbow of people,” and leading them via a personal path. We are getting to users in the decision-making point with a bespoke commercial offer that they will likely engage with. Everyone likes to feel that they receive special treatment tailored to their needs, even when it comes to content consumption. But, by delivering personalized interactive content to our customers, Whichit makes them feel like the brand understands their unique needs and their interests.

Moreover, through the Whichit Interactive Commercial Content, while users engaging with the content, they are creating personal paths with each stage. The number of possible paths for each Whichit Post is exponential and being raised by the fourth power (n4, n=number of Whichit Posts). Those paths are translated into micro-segments, effectively colouring micro-audiences from the same traffic flow in just a few steps.

There is an even deeper level reached within Whichit — we invented an algorithm, a machine learning algorithm that profiles users in real time based on their preferences. By using the Whichit Posts as sensors to recognize user’s preferences, we changed the way marketers engage with their audience.

By recognizing and analysing user’s preferences, the Whichit Machine Learning algorithm, winner of the Innovate UK Smart TSB, allows marketers to:

• Categorise users into preference groups

• Segment users based on demographics

• Identify future trends

• Identify anomalies in trends

• Getting to users in the decision-making point

• Tailor content and commercial offers to users in real time

• Position options based on the wisdom of the crowd

7. The Principles of Consistency and Consensus

In his book “Influence”, Dr. Robert Cialdini exposed 6 famous principles of persuasion: Reciprocity, Scarcity, Authority, Consistency, Liking, and Consensus (Social Proof). In the case of Whichit, two principles are playing an important role:

• The principle of consistency

• The principle of consensus

The principle of consistency refers to the fact that people like to be consistent with the things they have previously experienced or expressed. That consistency can be activated by encouraging people to engage in small initial commitments, such as answering a survey. A study in a health centre showed that if people were asked to write the hour of their appointment down themselves, missed appointments would be reduced by 18%.

Engaging with Whichit Interactive Content requires a very small commitment by users. In addition, the interval of the engagement is quick and instant, which drives consistency within the user’s responses on their preferences. This is one of the fundamental principles that the Whichit Machine Learning algorithm is based on, in order to profile the users based on their preferences, rather than through traditional marketing methods.

The principle of consensus, similar to the “Crowd Mentality” and “Social Proof” (see previous chapters), means that people will look to the actions and behaviours of others to determine their own, especially when they are uncertain. Most likely, you have noticed the small notice in your hotel bathroom encouraging you to reuse your towel to save water. It is said that about 75% of people who check into a hotel for four nights or longer will reuse their towels at some point during their stay. A study on the principle of consensus looked at what would happen if it was included on the cards that 75% of guests reuse their towels at some time during their stay. It turns out that towel reuse rises by 26%, which had confirmed the principle of consensus.

8. The Psychology of Gamification

“People can be made to be more intrinsically motivated simply by presenting an activity as a game,” Andreas Lieberoth explains.

The Whichit Interactive Content can be compared to a game: it enables users to transform a traditionally one-sided, non-engaging experience into an exciting, personalized, and enjoyable experience. Interactive content will always seem more appealing to the brain as opposed to standard text.

Since 2011, gamification becomes a trend, and these days it’s almost a basic function in user-experience and interface development. Gamification is the process of using game-like elements when designing business and marketing strategies. The reason for this being that gamification works. It triggers real powerful human emotions such as happiness, intrigue, and excitement; these are positive user-experiences, and positive a user-experience leads to better engagement, loyalty, and higher sales.

We are using the Whichit Interactive Commercial Content to deliver information and to interact with the audience in a playful manner. This approach delivers higher results on nearly every level: engagement, completion of polls and surveys, commercial conversion, and data collection.

Whichit is an interactive commercial content platform that enables marketers and advertisers to increase user engagement, open new revenue streams, and gain user-related insight. The company utilizes innovative technology that profiles users based on their preferences and uses machine learning to provide bespoke commercial incentives in real time.

The company is working with top agencies and brands and is based in central London.

Jonathan Gan
Founder & CEO

It’s been four years since we landed in London. Three young professional Israeli entrepreneurs, with a big idea and nothing else. Four years we worked every day, fighting to survive in the startup juggle, searching in the dark to find the golden cup in the local market. Sometimes we see it, even holding it for a while, enjoying those small victories in the endless and cruel start-up journey, and then going back to work, putting our full energy in our venture, with the belief that one day we’ll enjoy the fruits of our labour. In a nutshell, this is our story.

Don’t Worry, Everything Will Be Fine

As an Israeli I can say that this is one of the most used slogans. It would be an understatement to say that it is not one of the smartest. You’ll quickly find yourself in a situation in a wise man would never dare enter. But on the other hand, from my point of view, it is one of the chromosomes that an entrepreneur must have — to dare.

We started with a bunch of guys, a lot of help and support from friends, working to develop a crazy idea I had. With a basic version that looks like… well… basic and just few months into the project we won the Sirius Programme of the UKTI. A UK government program that choose around 60 startups worldwide, offering them to relocate to the UK and develop their startup in the local market, with a small grant, a 3 months accelerator program and an office for a year. You, just need to leave your home, your family, your friends, your network and build your start-up in a new market. The rest is up to you.

Five minutes, that was the time it took to make the decision. We are moving! In just a couple of months we sold the car, the motorcycle, ended our apartment leases. We packed the whole house into boxes and stored it all in a long-term warehouse. Bought tickets on a low-cost flight and went to the airport with just a trolley and five boxes to be sent in a week’s time. Don’t Worry, everything will be fine.

The British Paradox

A business card. The basic information that represents you and your business. A small piece of paper that every business person has. It took four and a half months to get one in the UK.

In order to have a business card, you need to have a normal local phone number so people can contact you. In order to have a normal UK phone number you need to have a contract with one of the telecom suppliers. In order to have a contract with one of them, you need to have a local UK bank account. In order to have a UK bank account you MUST HAVE a local home address, with the original council tax set to your name. But in order to rent a flat in the UK you MUST HAVE a bank account. But in order to have a bank account, you must have an address… I call it the “British Paradox”.

That was one simple example, out of many, that represents the basic most simple and obvious things in life for a local resident, are a struggle for the foreign person, like us. Add that to the life of the entrepreneur and you just start to imagine the number of hurdles we needed, and sometimes still need, to overcome on a regular basis. Sometimes people, mainly in potential investor meetings, asking me why it took us a few years to get to where we are, like building a start-up and in a foreign country should be in the blink of an eye … I always hold myself from explaining all the reasons, because if you never ran a marathon with no end point in the middle of the desert and with no water, you’ll never understand the feeling of an entrepreneur.

The Team is Everything

That’s what every investor will tell you, that’s what every entrepreneur will testify. And I can say the same. Most of the start-ups that failed, the core team was the main reason. Whether it was an internal dispute, the team wasn’t strong enough or not fit to the role. The core team is the heart of the start-up’s success.

Throughout the years, many employees passed through our company. We always kept our team small, professional and highly motivated, in order to keep the company, lean, effective and efficient. But the core team was always there. Each of us have our own specialty, and our own individual personality. Together, we complemented each other and bolstered our strength.

Along the way, I noticed that we literally taught ourselves almost everything we know today in the start-up world and in our industry. Yes, each of us have rich experience and knowledge in our domains from past roles, and all of us are holding advanced degrees from top universities. Yet, just with a crazy idea on a power-point, we found ourselves dealing with new technologies, new markets, new materials, new tools, a new country, a new network, new everything. We challenge ourselves to learn on the go; planning, building, trying, testing, failing and then again… and again… and again…

A start-up is not about the idea, its all about the execution and execution is made by the team.

Small Victories Its All You Need

Building a B2B technology start-up from scratch it’s like the David and Goliath story, but this time there are a lot of them and you’re more like a baby-David. Trying to go through the massive corporate doors, proving your product in a competitive market where big tech companies dominate the market and thousands more are jumping from all over, trying to bite the cake, and then the long and clumsy sales cycle. While all this time you’re looking to survive your basic existence with investment and trying to manage hundreds of administration and operational tasks to keep the machine going on. You and just a several team members.

But it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the small victories along the way. Those are actually the most important, as they are the light-bits for the entrepreneur. The orange peel trail in a long and bumpy road. Those small victories reflect that you’re on the right path. Indicate that you’re still alive.

Whichit. Startup Introduction 2017

A year after we landed in London, we won the ‘Start-up of the Year EMEA’ by Facebook, later on the year we won the People’s Choice Award at Pitch@Palace by the Duke of York and we won the Innovate UK R&D Funding Award with a £250k grand to develop one of our algorithms.

As we were determined and consistent with the concept of the idea, playing with the product definition, testing different angles and messages to the target market, we have been able to hit the golden point of the start-up — the Product-Market-Fit. From that point the target market started to convert and became clients, the conversations became deals and revenue and the search mode turned to growth.

It was like in the Matrix movie, when Neo saw the Matrix. We then knew and saw the perfect formula. What we need to do, how and where. It’s not the end goal and no champagne will be open just yet. We still have a long ride in front of us and the odds are still against us, like any other tech start-up. But we have been able to overcome another step on the way to the cockpit, enjoying the small victories along the way.

To be continued…

Whichit is an interactive commercial content platform that enables marketers and advertisers to increase user engagement, open new revenue streams & gain user-related insight. The company has an innovative technology that profiles users based on their preferences and uses machine learning to provide bespoke commercial incentives in real time.

The company is working with top agencies and brands and based in central London.

Harper Collins Publishers is the second largest consumer book publisher in the world. In March 2018, they started a 15-day Whichit campaign to increase brand awareness and drive sales for their Letts Revision range, targeting GCSE and A Level students and their parents.

Whichit creates interactive and engaging adverts, mostly in the form of quizzes, trivia, surveys and polls. They designed two single posts to appear on Facebook, and a humorous video ad for Snapchat. All adverts ended with a Call-to-Action, and one Facebook post was aimed at single mothers aged 35-55 with 15-18 year old children, while the other two ads were aimed at 15-18 year old children.
Click below to see the video>>

The Snapchat ad saw over 1 million impressions, 42,000 swipe ups, and 30,438 unique views to the Whichit quiz which was linked in the Call-to-Action at the end of the video. The Facebook ads delivered 195,000 impressions, and the cost per engagement was 50% lower than the education industry benchmark.

The campaign increased reach and awareness amongst secondary school students and their parents, and gained insightful data about their audience’s behaviour.

Do you want similar results?

Launch your Whichit campaign on Snapchat! Captivate your audience with 5X click-through-rate.

Read more on Whichit’s case studies here: whichit.co/case-study

Yarden Jacobson
CTO & Co-Founder

Elliott Saray
Senior Developer

Today, advertisers, marketers, brands and business owners have a wealth of digital tools at their fingertips that can help to grow their audience, engage with their users and lead them to check-out in the most direct way possible.

Technologies developed by companies such as Facebook and Google provide businesses with ways to market to their customers effectively, using retargeting and remarketing processes to build audiences online—alongside traditional web analytics.

The digital methods currently employed by businesses to build their audiences are effective for placing advertisements in front of them, though they lack a certain depth in terms of the data being captured and how it will be used to interact with them in the future.

Shallow Data, Data Blindness and Unactionable Data

Information captured digitally by marketing and advertising providers can be useful; deciphering what the mass of data captured by businesses actually means for their bottom line has proven to be difficult and often debilitating.

Peter Buell Hirsch writes in Overcoming data blindness; or do shrimp chew with their mouths open? for Journal of Business Strategy: “the explosion of data sets has led to a condition not unlike snow blindness – the harder we look the less we can see.”

Data blindness and data exhaustion are two terms often used to describe an information overload. When businesses collect data, they tend to harvest absolutely everything they can about their audience, then have a difficult time processing the information into actionable insight.

Hirsch then goes on to say that “As the ability to identify, manage and extract powerful insights from larger data sets becomes an increasingly important source of competitive advantage, we need to develop more robust skills for leaders outside the lab.”

Extracting powerful insights from data sets is a sore spot for many businesses due to the technical nature of data analysis. The calculations and procedures needed to transform binary data into comparative analyses typically fall under the responsibilities of data scientists; a role most businesses aren’t sure whether they can afford or where to look in order to fill the role. Sadly, the result is often a business left with a catastrophic mound of unactionable data.

Popular techniques of information collection deliver ample amounts of data to businesses: their users’ age, their gender, their location, their interests, and so forth. This information is valuable for businesses to understand who it is they want to provide for and can be glued together into the silhouette of a real user; the problem with these profiling attributes is that they are one-dimensional—they exist in a binary and cannot truly homogenise to form the correct representation of an end-user.

Additionally, advertising campaigns planned with trivial information like age, gender, location and interests have proven to underperform due to their blanket messaging nature and vaguely defined targeting.

So, how can businesses gather valuable, accurate and actionable data from their users while still broadening their audience?

How can a business, advertiser or marketer make sense of the storm of data existing on the world wide web?

How can a business collect actionable data the right way from the get-go?

At the risk of being sentimental, the answer is to listen.

A business must ask their end-users what they want and make decisions based on their answers—not what they think they already know. Businesses and end-users can communicate directly in a digital environment: an ecosystem designed for marketers and advertisers, focused on interactive commercial content.

Interactive Commercial Content

Whichit coined the term interactive commercial content when they brought a product to market that allows brands, marketers, publishers and other businesses to increase user engagement, open new revenue streams and gain actionable insights.

The Users Have a Say

The interactive commercial content offering from Whichit empowers more than just businesses. When a business runs a digital campaign with Whichit, (onsite, via Google Ads, via social media or in-store) they are giving their end-users a chance to tell them first-hand what they want, how they want to be addressed and their genuine preferences. Whichit collects concrete, first party data from real end-users in order to educate businesses regarding their audience.

Click on the example to see how business can know their end-users preferences>>> 

Test your knowledge: What is an example of Interactive Content?

When a business runs a marketing campaign with Whichit they can pinpoint specific users based on objective data they’ve willingly shared, rather than assumed demographic data.

A Choice in the Matter

Data collected by Whichit is not restricted to the binaries of traditional analytics, it is multi-dimensional. An advertisement on social media can only deliver static information: a user “likes” or comments on a post.

Whichit collects data about an end-user’s preference; a user prefers the red shoes over the blue ones. As opposed to the flat data the business would have received via social media—a user likes the red shoes—the business can take a multi-dimensional data point and use it to construct a user profile.

Best of all, the multi-dimensional preference data collected by Whichit grows exponentially with every vote: the user prefers the red shoes over the blue and also prefers the black jeans over the khakis—the business has gathered much more than two data points.

Fuelled by the layered nature of data collected by Whichit, the company has also developed a machine learning algorithm that profiles end-users in real time based on their preferences. The machine learning algorithm can inform businesses with a digital DNA of user preferences, engagement and trend predictions, and the best message a business can use to convert end-users to paying customers.

Data-vision Goggles

Arguably the most difficult part of user profiling and data aggregation is actually assembling the information collected into something tangible and actionable. As previously mentioned, businesses are actively searching for tools that can pull them out of data blindness or data exhaustion and make sense of their numbers.

Whichit’s approach to data segmentation, analysis and reporting is to be as user-friendly and business-friendly as possible without sacrificing comprehension, granularity or detail while doing so. This outlook is clearly demonstrated in the company’s praise-garnering analytics dashboard—the numbers are clear and concise, with details readily available. The data presented is contextualised and actionable for a business.

Actionable Preference Data

Whichit’s analytics dashboard provides business users with valuable, actionable insights about their audience. The data presented to business users is digestible and comprehensive, allowing businesses to incorporate their learnings from Whichit into their offerings at a quicker and steadier pace.

Even before the event reaches Whichit’s analytics dashboard, the mechanism within every piece of interactive commercial content made within Whichit is able to deliver end-users commercial offers in real time.

The offer made to an end-user can be virtually anything, (a link, a coupon, a lead generation form, etc.) and the message delivered to the end-user is always tailored based on the choices they have made.

Commercial offers made at the precise time of engagement have proven to significantly outperform those made by retargeting & remarketing activities or pushing end-users down lengthy sales funnels.

About Whichit

Whichit is a B2B software company that develops and distributes a series of products for advertisers, brands, marketers and publishers alike. All products maintained by Whichit are built supporting the context of a question beginning with “Which” and are served via interactive commercial content platforms. Whichit’s services help businesses do at least three things:

• Increase user engagement

• Open new revenue streams

• Gain actionable insights

Interactive Commercial Content in Action

‘Get the Gloss’ is a site that unites the best in beauty and health. They work with leading makeup artists, hair stylists, nutritionists and wellness practitioners to bring their readers the expert view on news and trends in beauty and wellness, and create specialist guides to help readers be their happiest, healthiest self.

Looking to increase their brand awareness and lead generation, ‘Get The Gloss’ teamed up with Whichit and the luxury online shopping site ‘Avenue 32’. They created a brilliant contest, in which the audience would answer a 5-question Whichit Survey in the form of a native ad, on the Get The Gloss site, and enter their email for a chance to win a designer handbag of their choice filled with beauty products from the luxury fashion site.

At the end of the campaign the results were incredible. After publishing the Avenue 32 Whichit ad, Get The Gloss reached over 5,900 unique views, 75% engagement rate, and 97% completion rate.

In addition, thanks to Whichit’s integrated dashboard, ‘Get the Gloss’ gained actionable insights about their audience such as their origin, product preferences, connections between products and who’s more likely to engage!

Run an Interactive Commercial Content Campaign

Whichit helps businesses enrich their data pools with comprehensive and insightful data, ensuring their ads work harder for them and deliver the highest standard of results.

Interactive commercial content serves as an advertiser, a data miner and a salesperson all at once. Interactive ads, multi-dimensional data reporting, actionable insights combined with tailored solutions for end-users allow businesses to communicate directly with their audience and gather first-party data to then make them the perfect commercial offer.

Whichit does the heavy lifting and data analyses to serve businesses an adaptable, living market research report.

Yarden Jacobson
CTO & Co-Founder

Elliott Saray
Senior Developer

Marketing and advertising are fast-paced industries, brimming with new technologies and constantly evolving. As new mechanics and AI become more accessible to businesses, more data is available to advertisers and marketers than ever before.

The Total Misalignment of Marketers

Presently, marketers, brands and advertisers are forced to rely on external companies with blanket solutions to collect demographic data and understand how their products exist, and how they are perceived by the users in the outside world.

Data is collected by businesses from a variety of sources including the end-user’s browser, the web pages they visit, third-party tracking pixels and browser cookies. The information collected by third-parties’ methods is perceived as informative, although it lacks the depth to make the insight truly actionable.

 
Furthermore, the demographic data captured by traditional methods is not indicative of:

1.   What an end-user will purchase

2. How and when the user will make said purchase, and finally

3. How to best convert a user from a potential client to a paying customer
    

This causes businesses to believe that “An end user will engage with advertisements from Gap because they previously visited the Gap website”, or that “A female from London, aged 28 will engage with advertisements from Gap based on her gender, location and age”.

This type of information has proven to be ineffective when used to target users online. We can surely assume for example, that not all women living in London at 28 years old will want to buy the same product.

Traditional data captured by demographic-building market research tools may also contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which in turn the business cannot legally employ to address their end-users.

Not only are the dated binaries of ad targeting ineffective for profiling users, the feeble static demographic data never actually comes together to represent a real person. Perhaps the biggest let-down of the static information being fed to marketers and advertisers is that the data has a shelf life—yes, at one point the data did represent the user visiting a web page, although this data only really represents a person at the time of tracking. Further activity online could modify or even overwrite the existing static data captured about the user—the datasets never evolve into a realistic depiction of a human being.

Whichit - A Ringer in the Ads and Marketing Industry

Whichit’s mission statement as a company involves transforming data captured within interactive content into actionable insight—insight a brand, an advertiser or a marketer can use to effectively distribute their offerings online.

The company solves problems advertisers and marketing face while trying to communicate to their customers online effectively. Rather than relying on demographic data alone, Whichit establishes a specific type of behavioural data based on the preferences of an end-user: Interactive Commercial Content.

The result is that end-users are served advertisements in a personalised and unobtrusive manner, while businesses are able to effectively target exactly who they need to online, all with a message carefully tailored to that specific user.

About Whichit

Whichit is a B2B software company that develops and distributes a series of products for advertisers, brands, marketers and publishers alike. All products maintained by Whichit are built supporting the context of a question beginning with “Which” and are served via Interactive Commercial Content platforms. Whichit’s services are intended to supply businesses with at least three added benefits:

• Increase user engagement

• Open new revenue streams

• Gain actionable insights

Whichit’s Machine Learning Technology

In order to effectively classify users and the content with which they interact, Whichit has developed an innovative machine learning algorithm that allows advertisers, brands and marketers to profile users in real-time based on their preferences. 

Whichit’s interactive commercial content captures the user’s choice. The content is displayed to the user via an image-based poll and the choice a user makes becomes a multi-dimensional data-point. For example: “The user chose coffee over other options. This user not only likes coffee, but actually prefers coffee over tea, cola and soda water”.

Preference data, classified users and the classified content they view, interact with and convert on is processed through a sophisticated and precise machine learning algorithm developed by Whichit. Eventually, what Whichit maintains for a user is a digital DNA of preferences.

Following our previous example, a business would not need to target the 28-year-old woman living in London based only on her age, gender and location—the business can use the multi-dimensional data-points driven by the user’s choices to target them much more effectively. Our example transforms into: “The user who preferred the Straight Jeans and the Vintage Crewneck Shirt is more likely to convert on ads for similar products because they made the business aware of their preferences”.

The content provided by Whichit is tailored to the end-user based on what information they’ve provided to educate the system. A business can now effectively target a group of people with the same preferences—rather than their demographic data alone—with much better performance and conversion.

Operating the full power of Whichit’s machine learning, the business is now aware of:

1. What their users are looking for

2. How the user plans to make that purchase, and

3. What content will lead the highest conversion for a specific user
   

Due to the activity information captured by Whichit being anonymous and behavioural, there are no implications regarding data protection or PII restrictions; there are commercial message options containing lead-generation forms and those processes are fully GDPR compliant.

Finally, the data collected and fed through Whichit’s machine learning is virtually infinite in size: every additional data point captured by Whichit enhances the existing dataset exponentially. The end result of this ever-flowing data pool is the way for a business to identify their users online without ever knowing trivial demographic information concerning them.

The Building Blocks of Whichit’s Machine Learning

The overview Whichit’s machine learning technology can be divided into two main elements: Components, and Flow & Processing.

Components

The user. Whichit allocates all activities involving the placement of their interactive commercial content to the specific user that took the action—what they see, what they interact with, what makes them convert. The company is able to deliver predictive analytics to a business by comparing the actions of a user against those of the 151 Million users in the Whichit database.

The content. Whichit is able to classify content a user sees and interacts with online. Classifications and analytics for web pages are compared against a database of 680,000 other webpages. The content within a Whichit post appearing on a website is also classified and compared.

Data and events. Whichit holds more than 450GB of behavioural, analytic and classification data pertaining to the flow of interactive commercial content; the company has captured more than 1.26 Billion events, and the company’s dataset is growing month-to-month.

Flow & Processing

User classification. Whichit’s end-users are classified using the following:

1. Their location

2. Their preferences

3. The content they view

4. The content they engage with

Content classification. Content—web pages and interactive commercial content created with Whichit— is classified in three main stages:

1. Natural language analysis

   • Webpages are classified based on their content

   • Whichit posts are classified based on their text content

   • Relevant information is extracted from web pages

2. Image analysis

   • Computer vision understands image contents

   • Whichit posts are classified according to their image contents

3. User Behaviour

   • Users are clustered into groups represented by their preferences

   • Users are categorised based on their preferences

   • User preferences are discovered and predicted via content matching

   • Trends are discovered based on activity and engagement
     

Whichit’s Machine Learning in Action

Businesses are able to employ Whichit’s rich data analysis and insight delivery to inform their advertising campaigns and target their audience more effectively. The data Whichit collects for businesses is rich and multi-dimensional. Advertisers, brands and marketers use Whichit to run precise, detailed and informative market research at a much lower cost compared to contemporary market research reports.

Whichit is also able to provide businesses with content engagement predictions, based on the classification of the content they’ve published and the existing data-points the company has captured.

Whichit’s data escapes the binary restrictions of a user simply “liking” or engaging with content. Every data point sent via Whichit carries a choice: the user prefers one selection over another, and that user should be analysed with their preference in mind.

Thanks to the company’s machine learning algorithm, business users gain more actionable insights about their audience and are therefore able to cater their marketing efforts to users who are ready and willing to engage, learn and convert. Gone are the days of building an audience using archaic, stale demographic data like age, location and gender—Whichit helps you pinpoint your users based on what they really want!

Winners of the Innovate UK TSB Smart grant

Whichit developed the machine learning system and algorithms over the course of 18 months, a feat they were able to achieve by winning a TSB Smart grant from Innovate UK.

Innovate UK (source) (IUK) previously the Technology Strategy Board, is the main source of support for UK R&D and innovation. It is not only a grant-offering body but is responsible, as the name suggests, for UK innovation strategy in many of its variations.

Having freedom of choice doesn’t always result in people choosing one thing OR the other. Often, people like to use several services or products to satisfy all of their needs. For example, somebody might have Sky, Netflix and Amazon Prime subscriptions as they all have different popular shows and films to offer.

Whichit is an enabler brand. Our interactive ad units are compatible with, well, pretty much every online network! You can share your Whichits to your website or blog, and your social media platforms.

Whichit can be used as the sole, all-in-one solution for your digital marketing needs. Or, it can be used alongside other advertising solutions. Advertisers can share the Whichit units to just their website landing pages, or they can share them across several different platforms.

Our users have the power of choice. Whichit is not just an enabler brand, we are whatever you need us to be.

Find out more about Whichit for Advertisers:

https://whichit.co/whichit-for-advertisers/

Galit Gan
Creative Director & Co-founder

Spoiler alert! You can download a free ‘Festive Campaigns Guide’ to inspire your marketing strategy.

The holiday season is fast approaching and it is the biggest chance for businesses to boost their revenue. Consumers are expected to spend about a trillion dollars between November and January, so if you haven't incorporated a proper marketing strategy to boost your sales for it, you're already falling behind.

If you have not done so yet, there is no better time than now to start thinking about your marketing campaigns. Let’s help you get started...

Choosing the right strategy

1. Be there

Make sure you have a campaign strategy for both your online advertising and email marketing, as they are both essential channels to increasing sales over the period. Social activities are a must! Get in front of your audience where they already spend the majority of their time, and engage with them with beautifully ads that they can’t miss.

2. Be creative

While creativity is key in order to win hearts,
your commercial offer shouldn’t be left behind.

Interactive commercial content is the answer to your business’s success this year. It is bold, fun to interact with, and creates a memorable experience that positions your brand as innovative. All that without compromising on your true objective – increasing revenue.

3. Be cost-effective

Making assumptions about how your audiences feel and what they want or need, can result in expensive and even damaging campaigns that squander opportunities to foster brand loyalty and boost sales. Using Interactive Commercial Content you can ask your target audiences questions through image-based quizzes, with bespoke Call-To-Actions. This allows you to gather 1st party data, actual user preferences and behaviours without compromising revenue goals.

The following holiday marketing ideas will amplify and add significant value to your efforts to ramp up sales during the most profitable time of the year:

Win your Halloween!

A ‘COSTUME BUILDER’ for the scariest night of the year to sell more costumes

Did you know... During October 2016, the amount spent on all Halloween goods across the retail industry was £30.8 billion, a 6% increase on the previous year. Brits spent an estimated £277 million on Halloween treats alone in 2017!

The COSTUME BUILDER brings a unique brand interaction delivering a memorable experience.
With Phenomenal engagement rates, audience segmentation by product/preference and outstanding conversion rates.

Be the buzz this Black Friday & Cyber Monday

The perfect ‘DEAL FINDER’ for this exciting weekend of sales

Did you know... A whopping £1.4bn was spent on online sales in the UK on Black Friday - up some 11.7% on last year, according to online retailers trade body IMRG.

The DEAL FINDER delivers Black Friday deals across the internet in an interactive ad unit with phenomenal performance stats.

• Up to 16 products from 4 categories in 1 interactive creative

• Actionable insights that can be optimised to in real time

• 1st party data and high performing audience segments

• Integration with client e-commerce engines to auto-fill baskets directly from the ad unit

• New customer acquisition and incremental product sales

Light up your sales tree this Christmas

An ‘INTERACTIVE MUSICAL EXPERIENCE’ and a ‘GIFT WIZARD’ for the most wonderful time of the year

Did you know... Retail sales for Christmas 2017 grew 1.4% against 2016 to a whopping £78.69 Billion (mid Nov – end Dec).

The GIFT WIZARD and MUSICAL EXPERIENCE deliver a unique and memorable brand interaction.

Get actionable insights about your audience in real time and high performing audience segments. The interactive content can easily integrate with client e-commerce engines to auto-fill baskets directly from the ad unit! No additional steps or landing pages needed.

Out-of-the-box Boxing Day strategy

Get consumers to interact with and select your sale items with a ‘BOXING DAY BARGAIN FINDER’

Did you know... 2017 Boxing Day bargain hunters spent a record £4.5billion! Web sales hit £1.03billion, topping £1billion for the first time and up 7.9 percent on the £954million spent in 2016, according to Centre for Retail Research.

The BOXING DAY BARGAIN FINDER delivers your boxing day bargains direct to consumers even before the event. It presents a unique opportunity for consumers to select multiple sale items they want from 1 interactive ad unit. Gather actual consumer preferences and behaviour that can be used to build new audience segments.

Enjoy this new customer acquisition and increase sales this season.
Download our free download a free ‘Festive Campaigns Guide’ to inspire your marketing strategy:

Brilliant creatives and personalized offers to your customers make a huge impact, and can strengthen the consumer-brand relationship, turning a happy customer into a brand ambassador.

Now, make all of your holiday marketing dreams come true!

Merry Christmas! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more inspiration and marketing tips.

We are very proud to announce that Whichit has been shortlisted for the ‘Media & Advertising’ category at SLINGSHOT@SWITCH Startup Challenge 2018, in Singapore.

This competition gives promising startups a platform to showcase their technology and business ideas, gain early exposure to investors, corporates, industry leaders, mentors, media, and tech-savvy early adopters. It takes place during Singapore Week of Innovation & Technology (SWITCH) and is powered by Startup SG, an initiative by government agency Enterprise Singapore, who are also the national standards and accreditation body.

The application process started in July 2018, where all 1,300 applicants went through a rigorous selection process that reduces the participants to 60. This resulted in Whichit being selected to proceed to the next stage.

The event starts on 14th September 2018 with a 3-day workshop before the next round of the competition starts on the 17th for 2 days.  This climaxes with the grand final that takes place on 19th September 2018. Prizes include investment grants of up to SGD 200,000, free office space, and fast track entry on to growth and access programs.

Since crossing the Product Market Fit threshold at the end of 2017, Whichit has seen an exponential trajectory of growth focusing on the UK and EU markets that has laid foundations for continual growth.  Delivering innovative marketing and advertising solutions to tier-1 brands and advertising agencies, enables them to better engage with their audiences, convert traffic into revenue and gain actionable insights. This competition is a great opportunity to extend Whichit commercial operation into the APAC region, which is a high growth market for the digital eco-system.

In the past few years, Whichit has won several awards. In 2015, the company won The Sirius Programme by the UKTI, Pitch@Palace 4.0 People's Choice Award, and Facebook Startup of the Year EMEA 2015. In 2016, Innovate UK Smart funds TSB Project. The year after, Whichit was included in The Leap 100 2017 List and won two awards by Finances Online, Rising Star and Great User Experience.

In July 2018 the company released a new and improved version of its flagship platform ‘Whichit for Advertisers’, a SaaS platform that caters to the SME and SMB markets. It enables them to seamlessly create interactive commercial content, create and manage commercial campaigns on multiple channels including Google’s Display Network, where Whichit is part of an elite that are 3PAS certified by Google, social networks and programmatically.

Together with Whichit’s innovative and proprietary technology, a machine learning profiles users in real time based on their preferences, offering a more personalised approach to marketing and advertising, positioning itself at the forefront of its field and gaining a key business advantage in the market.

Contact Whichit for more information:
Name: Jonathan Gan
Tel: (UK) +44 7939 84 7711 , (IL) +972 3911 9909 [#1]
Email: gan@whichit.co
Website: https://whichit.co/

Noémie Girault
Business Development Intern

Emma Lombardini
Business Development Intern

There are so many stories about what it’s like to be a woman in a man’s world. Well guess what, it’s even harder in the tech world! While the tech industry tends to take pride in changing the world of work, and often, with a bit of hubris the world as a whole, the technology sector is actually far away from achieving gender equality. Studies have shown that the female employees make up between 26 percent (Microsoft) and 43 percent (Netflix) of the workforce at major tech companies, with the percentage dropping much lower when it comes to actual tech jobs.

“…female employees make up between 26 percent (Microsoft) and 43 percent (Netflix) of the workforce at major tech companies, with the percentage dropping much lower when it comes to actual tech jobs.”

It’s no understatement to say that quite early in their careers, women are indirectly pushed to choose a job that does not require technology orientated skills, or at least of a high level, because it is commonly a path chosen by men. In other words, it is a cultural influence and it needs to change.

Moreover, the lack of gender diversity led to a shortage of female role-models in Tech and Science sectors. This naturally, is not making it easier for women working in tech to feel at home. However, powerful women like Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg, YouTube's CEO, Susan Wojcicki, Ginni Rometty, IBM's CEO, and few others, are an example that it is still possible to turn things around in the tech world.

An interesting story about this topic is the story of Galit Gan, the Creative Director and a Co-Founder at Whichit. As said in the Story of Whichit, Galit took part in this adventure when she saw the potential of Interactive Content in advertising, but also for her own personal accomplishment. Indeed, entering this sector, as a woman in tech, could potentially enhance her skills, and she felt like it was a good opportunity to gain visibility, entrepreneurial-wise.

The first steps in entrepreneurship

When living in Tel-Aviv, Galit was an architect with a deep lust for design and creation. After graduating from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, with MRE (Master of Real Estate), she started her own Real Estate company and then became more attracted to the entrepreneurial and management side of business.

At that time, she already knew she had to empower herself to get recognition and be a part of something bigger than her, to contribute and inspire. This personal aspiration is exactly what women wanting to build a career in tech should develop and follow.

She advises that women should take advantage of their uniqueness to rise up the ladder of the very male dominated sector: “prioritising gender diversity in your team not only provides enhanced problem-solving and increased innovation, it also empowers tech-based rolls with ‘feminine’ qualities, as women tend to be better in multitasking, giving attention to details and great team players.”

When Galit was introduced to Whichit by the founder, Jonathan, she quickly saw the opportunity to enhance her creative and management skills, especially in the tech sector. As the start-up won the Sirius Programme by the UK Government, she decided to move as part of the founding team to London, and leave her home in Israel to pursue her career, obviously taking a risk, but also a lot of courage and ambition.

As the Creative Director, Galit had the exciting opportunity to design the SaaS (Software as a service) platform from scratch, taking the initial idea from its concept stage to a complete design with advance user experience and interface, all in three different platforms and interfaces. This challenge requires techy skills and wasn’t something common for a former architect. Therefore, this challenge a pushed her to give the best of her and overcome the apprehension of stepping up.

Using her creative skills, together with her unique personal touch, Galit designed and created the Whichit App for Android, iOS and Web App, that won the ‘App Of The Year EMEA by Facebook’ in 2015 just a few months after its release. The desktop platform, ‘Whichit for Advertisers’ won a ‘Great User Experience’ award in 2017, that helped positioning the company and reassure to Galit, that she’s leading the product to the right direction.

Jumping off the cliff

It is a fact that women are outnumbered in the tech industry, but this doesn’t mean they should feel discouraged or disheartened. On the contrary; it gives the opportunity to break society’s stereotypes of the tech industry and, most importantly, stand out from the crowd. Indeed, many of the tech companies driven by women achieve great success and prove that women deserve a place in tech as much as men do. They should play to their advantage of being ‘different’ and bring themselves as equal within the industry.

Moreover, scientific research shows women in general tend to think differently to men. Gathering as many men and women to work together would consequently prove to be more efficient and productive, thanks to diversity. Galit’s advice is to team up with encouraging and supporting men who believe in gender diversity and equality. Effectively, combining both sets of skills will lead to a great team spirit, and so a great company.

“Women sadly often lack self-confidence. Galit thinks women shouldn’t feel like they are not as good as men, and therefore must not apply for ‘easy jobs’ while knowing deep down they could occupy a higher and more interesting position”.

Women sadly often lack self-confidence. Galit thinks women shouldn’t feel like they are not as good as men, and therefore must not apply for ‘easy jobs’ while knowing deep down they could occupy a higher and more interesting position. As a matter of fact, it is also significantly efficient for a company to have female managers or highly placed women with internal influence in the company, because externally, it helps consumers feel related. It is more representative of their target market. Indeed, you will have a harder time trying to sell products for women with a team formed only of men!

Finally, women often feel like they need to fit in because they’ve learned that the well-known successful women are glamourous and fashionable, and it doesn’t really match the tech world stereotype. Well, believe it or not, the ad-tech company Whichit was first about fashion, but the main message here, is that society needs to increase the awareness about the role model problem. Galit thinks that teaching kids the fundamentals of coding very early in their life and before gender stereotypes, can help to prepare both girls and boys for the jobs of the future.

By allowing women to stand out for themselves, to not be afraid of speaking out and making a difference in the tech world, more of them will be drawn in. The next generation of tech women will be inspired, and things will hopefully evolve.

What do you think? Should more women be encouraged to enter the tech world?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Digital advertising is a very competitive market, and both brands and advertisers face many challenges when developing their marketing strategies. Creative thinking and grand ideas are not enough to succeed in the digital advertising industry, but Whichit may just be the solution advertisers need to overcome the barriers they face each day.

1. Desensitisation

Display ads have been around for years, but they still follow the same formats and haven’t advanced alongside technology to keep users interested. As a result, internet users have become desensitised and the ads fade into background noise that they’re able to simply ignore.

Whichit’s ads are image-rich, fun and engaging. They gamify the display ad experience, adding interaction where the user least expects it. They appear as addictive and entertaining content in the form of quizzes, surveys and polls. Users find the style of these ads so appealing that they see a click-through rate 40 times higher than that of traditional banner ads.

2. Ad blockers

In 2017, 615 million devices were using ad blockers, and this is a figure that’s constantly on the rise. In 2015, the high ad block download rates caused a staggering £22 billion worth of damage to advertisers, and publisher revenues also suffered.

Whichit’s interactive ad units can be shared or posted anywhere on the web, and they are not targeted by ad blockers. This means that brands and advertisers can reach a huge audience they would otherwise miss when using traditional display ads.
 

3. Data Overload

Brands and publishers are sometimes left drowning in meta-data and it can be an exhausting task to flesh out the relevant data from the irrelevant. As a result, they are unable to target their users effectively.

Whichit’s interactive ad units gain actionable insights and provide a unique way of targeting users by their preferences. The system can be easily integrated into any 3rd party CRM or Data Management Platform, streaming all data points to improve clients’ performance and targeting capabilities, and is completely GDPR compliant.

More About Whichit
 

Whichit combines the brightest minds and most sophisticated technologies to create ad and marketing solutions that recapture the users' attention in an unobtrusive manner, making them WANT to engage with YOU. Founded by three professional Israeli entrepreneurs, Whichit relocated to London after winning the UKTI's Sirius Programme in 2014. In 2015, Whichit then went on to win 'Start-up of the Year EMEA' by Facebook, the Innovate UK R&D funding award, and the People's Choice Award at Pitch@Palace by the Duke of York.

Whichit has seen great success in its ad campaigns, and the figures really speak for themselves:

Birchbox is the UK's number 1 beauty subscription service. They launched a Whichit campaign on their website in 2016 to increase brand awareness and drive sales. Their Whichit quiz saw over 24,000 unique views, 113 social shares, and an 89% engagement rate, with 97% completing the quiz and a 31% Call-to-Action rate. Birchbox's audience loved the interaction and it was so successful that Birchbox have created 8 Whichit campaigns to date.

Earlier this year, 2018, Leumi Bank teamed up with McCann to increase awareness of their new app for teenagers. With an 11-day Whichit campaign, they obtained over 14,000 unique impressions with an impressive 98% engagement rate.

Infirst Healthcare used an 8-question Whichit quiz to promote a new pharmaceutical product, Flarin, to relieve rheumatic or muscular pain and mild arthritic conditions. The quiz was advertised on Facebook and shared on the ‘Joint Flare-up Network’, a community forum page on Facebook. The campaign ran for 28 days and saw 15,335 unique views with a 73% engagement rate, 28.5% Call-to-Action rate, and they collected over 2,300 email addresses. Considering the mature age of their target audience, these figures are very impressive.
 

Whichit has seen success across all different verticals, including automotive, travel, entertainment, insurance, gambling, retail and fashion.

Don’t just leave the success to them. Take your marketing strategy up a notch by implementing a Whichit creative for your next campaign.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
 

Galit Gan
Creative Director
& Co-Founder

Juliana Soto von Arnim
Junior Digital
Creative

You may have noticed that the impact of online ads is dropping because of how intrusive they have become. While ad blocker downloads increase as people prefer not to see advertising while browsing, brands have started to look for less intrusive and more engaging ways to attract their audience with digital advertising.

Finding the perfect strategy to achieve great results in your marketing campaigns can be a long and difficult process, but it is feasible and very much lies in the creatives.

The Creative Team of Whichit is here to give some tips that can help you make the most of your advertising. Facing the constant challenge of coming up with ideas for creative and engaging ads for Whichit’s diverse client portfolio, they have accomplished extraordinary results with them in past campaigns. See some case studies here.   

Today, Whichit’s Creative Team shares with you 6 easy ways for making an ad stand out from the crowd:

1.   Appealing copywriting

People come across dozens of ads every day, therefore, you need to make sure that your advertisement captures your audience’s attention in seconds. You can get there by creating a headline your audience is interested in and is written in a way that will make them curious enough to continue reading. People pay attention to a header that is teaching them ‘how to do’ something, stating an interesting fact, asking them a question, or giving them a direct offer. When creating a powerful headline, also include the most important benefit of your product or service. Once you have it, test it and rewrite it when you see that it is not getting the expected results anymore.

For example, if your audience likes travelling, you could write an attention-grabbing headline such as ‘How to travel for free,’ or you could invite them to answer a question like ‘What’s your dream holiday destination?’. 

2.   Tell them something they don’t know

Be creative and choose to provide content that will lead your audience to engage with your ad. Start by mentioning a trending topic or a seasonal event coming up. Including numbers or statistics to support your idea is encouraged, since this will not only show credibility but also prove how helpful your product or service has been for your clients. 

Also, consider engaging your audience with a personality quiz in which the outcome is based on their preferences, for example, ‘Discover what type of traveller you are’. This type of content is always popular because the audience enjoys discovering and sharing the result they get in the end. A meaningful interaction like this will result in a loyal customer for years.

3.  Use striking images

90% of the information our brain processes is visual. People love visuals, and advertisers know it. Captivate your audience by including exciting graphics in your digital ads. Always consider the colours you’re going to use. Try not to choose a background that is too flashy, bright, or one in which your product is lost. Also, if you’re using text in the images, make sure it is readable and is not getting lost in the details of the image. Never neglect your branding and be consistent with what you include in your ads so that your audience can easily identify you.

It is not about making the elements in your ad compete with each other, but highlighting the most important message. Read more tips on how to make your ad awesome.

4.   Make your ad interactive

Bringing the audience to interact with your ad will draw more meaning out of it and can result in a win-win situation for the brand-consumer relationship.

Interactive ads create a richer experience for your audience, and making them more involved will generate greater interest in the brand. But, ‘Interactive ad’ - What does that mean? Interactive ads are defined as involving mutual action between consumers and producers without having the consumer click through. Asking the user to play a little game or take part in a quiz will be a great way to increase the click-through rate of your ad, as interactive content generates 2x more conversions than passive content (source: Kapost).

Click the example to see a great idea for an interactive ad>>> 

5.   Personalisation makes the difference

McKinsey’s study found that companies using “data-driven personalisation as the core factor for marketing and sales decisions can improve marketing ROI by 15% to 20%”. Data is the key here. The clever use of data and real-time information will allow marketers to create online ads that are relevant and personalised, engaging the right people with the right information.

How can you actually do that? Walk the extra mile and split your target audience into smaller groups (by interests, ages, etc). Tailoring your message to individuals using different creative and copy will increase the chances that your ad can actually make an impact.

Retargeting is not only for advanced marketers! Ad targeting based on individual online behaviour can be easily achieved by placing a Facebook/Google pixel into your campaign. A retargeting campaign is not limited only to online advertising. A good tip is to place a Facebook pixel in emails and then retarget the receivers who open with a personalized paid ad (check how you can do that using MailChimp).

Whichit’s Creative team embraces personalisation whilst using a bespoke Call-to-Action. “While creating an interactive ad unit, we are tailoring different commercial offers, based on the users’ outcomes or interactions. This way we significantly increase the chances of the user to interact with a commercial offer that is relevant for him”, says Galit Gan, Co-founder & Creative Director of Whichit.

6.   Pick the right ad size

Effective digital ads are designed to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website. The size of the elements you include in your ad, like logo, headline and copywriting, will determine which size is best for you. Also, a tip that will help you collect more clicks is using the most effective size ads recommended by Google.

If you’re including text over an image, use a size that will help your audience read it easily like ‘Medium Page’ (MPU) or ‘half page’ (Double MPU). If your headline and copywriting are both short, use the ‘Leaderboard’ size so they don’t have trouble reading your message, but take into consideration that in this case, your image will be minimal. Check below some ads from Ebay:

That’s it for now.

Are you ready to start creating your ad?
Try Whichit and get the process started!

Whichit is an online platform that allows you to easily create your own interactive ads and run it on multiple channels. The ads are fun, innovative and undisruptive, enabling you to gain actionable insights about your audience while they interact with them, all in real time. Additionally, Whichit contains an interactive analytics dashboard that summarises the data collected from your campaign in a way that’s very easy to comprehend so you don’t have to spend hours on it.

References:
Seiter, C (2016, June 1) 8 Winning Headline Strategies and the Psychology Behind Them

Juliana Soto von Arnim
Junior Digital Creative

“So, what do I do now?”...That’s the question that you as a marketer might be asking yourself after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force across Europe and the UK in May. The law that aims to give citizens more control over their data and to create a uniformity of rules to enforce across the continent, is set to cause a huge storm in the future: post-GDPR campaigns aren’t going to collect as much data as before, or it might be better to stop running lead generation campaigns because no one is going to submit their email after needing to agree with all those required policies.

But there’s no need to panic, this regulation isn’t as severe as it sounds.

Marketers need to only worry about data permission, data access and data focus on their campaigns:
 

1.   Data Permission

With GDPR you need to make sure that your audience wants to stay in contact with you. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that by filling out a form that says, “By signing up, you agree to our Terms and have read our privacy policy”, they want to stay connected. Ask them to specifically opt-in using easy-to-understand text, to your newsletters and emails by ticking the boxes. Check the examples below:

2.   Data Access

Part of the control of this new law is allowing individuals to access or remove their personal data collected by companies. As a marketer, you need to make sure that your users can easily access and request copies of their personal information, as well as an opt-out for its use.
 

3.   Data Focus

This is where you, as a marketer, need to ask yourself, “What data do I really need?”. GDPR requires you to legally justify what data you are storing on your users and why, as well as how you are using it. So, if you want to avoid unnecessary justifications, focus only on the data that you really need.
 

Without a doubt, GDPR will impact B2C marketing strategies. The good news is that this legislation is a great opportunity to build stronger relationships with the people engaging with your brand.

Gain insights about your audience

When creating lead generation strategies, instead of implementing a simple yes or no tick box, you can provide a range of options to find out what your audience is interested in. Through consent, you can collect insights that not only help you share information with them about topics that really interest them, but also segment your audience into focused communication groups.

Here's an example from Waitrose, part of the John Lewis Partnership, when registering for an account. While the user consents to receive updates from Waitrose, John Lewis or John Lewis Financial Services, the company identifies what their audience is interested in receiving.

More effective email marketing

The unsubscribe link within an email allows your audience to manage their email preferences. Giving them the freedom to turn communications on or off, helps you keep what’s relevant to them up to date, and allows you to target them with more specific or relevant campaigns.

In this case, Amazon notifies their audience about purchases, shipments, and delivery delays by email, text message, or the app.

Build brand loyalty and trust

GDPR no longer allows you to contact your audience for marketing purposes unless you have their permission to do so. Be open, honest and transparent. Give them a reason to share their personal information with you. Building brand loyalty and trust comes through projecting transparency about who you are and what you’re doing with their data.

How can Whichit help build a loyal customer base?
 

Whichit gives you the perfect tool to create a successful marketing campaign that appeals to your customers while protecting their data. At the same time, you as a marketer, get to build a strong loyal customer base.

Whichit interactive ad units help you generate new customers and strengthen existing relationships by analysing actual user behaviour and intent, as well as perception and attitude towards your brand, to inform your current and future marketing strategies:

Collect valuable information, not personal information

Whichit collects user preferences and behaviour without asking for Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Transparency and Clarity

Whichit captures only the PII the user has agreed to share after opting into required consent forms, such as email addresses.
 

Give the power to the user

All users can request copies of the data stored within the Whichit for Advertisers platform and have the right to be forgotten i.e. remove all data entries upon request, which will increase trust and create more valuable connections with the brand.

References

MacDonald, S (2018, June 4).  GDPR for Marketing: The Definitive Guide for 2018

Gravicus (2018, March 2). A Marketers Guide for GDPR

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.

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!

Thanks for reading,

The Whichit Team

Alexandra Radugina
Senior Marketing Manager

Multi-channel Marketing is a tendency for e-commerce businesses. According to Gartner research, marketing campaigns that integrate four or more digital channels will outperform single or dual-channel programs by 300%. However, 90% of marketers still struggle to seamlessly connect more than three channels at a time, making consistent messaging and coordination a major challenge.

Nowadays, direct marketing (email marketing, webinars, catalogues) and indirect marketing (inbound marketing) channels should work together as a single ecosystem. Every day people browse the web, check emails, use social networks, and look for relevant information and services/products. Therefore, the foremost thing digital marketers should consider is to make sure that customers are able to see information about their business effortlessly; this determines the success of the business. Multi-Channel Marketing is indeed a one-stop solution for all the marketers out there.

Before you head out, you should make a list of all the different methods available for multi-channel distribution. This will help you pursue a couple of distribution channels on the top of the list and can even help you consider the best mixture of channels for your future campaigns. As you move ahead, you may even find that some methods are synergistic to each other and can be linked together.

1. Multiple sales channels

Using multi-channels allows e-commerce marketers to list their inventory on different channels like eBay, Shopify, Amazon, Facebook, etc. The tracking information and other needs are communicated from sales channels to the ultimate buyer.

Other features like using QR codes for products your customer might search for can also help you out considerably when selling your products. You must be able to use the right promotional tools to enhance the quality of the marketing campaigns for your business. This is the main aspect of multi-channel e-commerce.

2. Planning Ahead

When you want to plan a holiday special and offer great discounts, you should promote them across different direct and indirect channels. Then the execution should be in a disciplined manner. Plan and make sure that your business makes a great impact on people’s minds.

3. Paid Advertisement

You can ramp up sales by customising your product catalogues and advertising your products to potential buyers via AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.  Your product’s nature plays a very important role in the market determining what kind of platform will be suitable for it and whether the platform gives you the opportunity to target your audience based on their behaviour online, interests, or demographics. You can increase sales by listing your products on high-demand blogs and in magazines. Today you can advertise your products on famous sites like Cosmopolitan, GQ, Instagram and many others. Consider building white lists of publishers that are related to your e-commerce business. This will help to reach more customers due to popularity and a positive inclination in the sales growth.

4. Email list

You can easily carry out a market campaign through email marketing. Spreading the word is much easier when you have the required email addresses with you. This is the most powerful tool in marketing campaigns and provides a direct way to reach the customer. This tip can improve your Multi-channel e-commerce progress and can be very useful for your bricks and mortar business. Today, some of the email marketing platforms, like MailChimp, allow you to also run a retargeting campaign on your website, to increase results for your email campaign.

5. Social Media

Being present on social media and being interactive with your clients helps you maintain a strong relationship with them. You can post promotional content, discount offers, and more on social media to attract your consumers to your stores and the website. Social media is the most powerful tool used in all multi-channel e-commerce strategies. It helps to develop a positive brand image for your consumers.

6. Influencer marketing

With the rise of microblogging, social media – influencer marketing becomes a new tool to reach your target audience. There are many marketing platforms that can help you shout out your special offer or product release to millions of customers via industry influencers. You can reach influencers directly or via influencers marketing platforms such as Famebit, Grapevine and others.

7. Content Marketing

Blogs, eBooks, reports, video and interactive commercial content assist customers who are trying to understand more about your e-commerce business. Also, content marketing can help generate new leads and understand prospects’ intent, while also helping you generate coverage within your niche and improve your SEO.

Click the example to see how great Interactive Commercial Content really is! >>>

Test your knowledge: What is an example of Interactive Content?

8. Native Advertising

Native advertising is a type of paid media that doesn’t destroy users experience. It appears to be part of a website’s content, much like a magazine advertorial. According to figures from NewBayMedia, native ads are viewed 53% more than banner ads, the purchase intent is 53% higher, and they generate 82% more brand lift.

In a perfectly built marketing promotion, a multichannel campaign would reach the target audience across all the possible touch points. You can run your campaigns in parallel, or one followed by another to move your customers down the sales funnel. Therefore, it can be fairly concluded that Multi-channel marketing is certainly a big deal for an e-commerce business as it helps them benefit from utilising the virtual space available to them.