FDBusiness.com

Whisk.com, a leading digital shopping technology company, has announced release of its new WhiskConnect platform – facilitating smoother conversion of brand awareness to brand purchase.

WhiskConnect gives FMCG brands the much sought-after ability to link all marketing activity — including advertising, video content, social media campaigns, dedicated web content, offline print ads and packaging — through to their site and onto a brand purchase.

WhiskConnect presents a significant opportunity for brands to engage with prospective shoppers throughout their journey and ultimately, enable them to add products to their shopping list or online shopping basket without leaving a brand’s website.

Leveraging the integration of brand content with supermarket retailers, the new WhiskConnect platform enables brands to channel shoppers down the path to purchase using their existing sites where brands can closely control the user experience. Through data analytics and measurement, Whisk reveals and re-targets best performing marketing campaigns and channels that lead to a brand purchase.

Using a special WhiskConnect URL, shoppers are immediately presented an embedded shopping list for the recipe or product page they visit. The shopping lists are both retail and channel agnostic; users can purchase lists offline or online, with connections to a wide range of retailers at which they might like to shop.

Nick Holzherr, CEO and founder of Whisk.com, says: “Retailer- and channel-agnostic purchase opportunities are essential but often overlooked. Brand owners want an online path to purchase connection because it’s incredibly useful to online shoppers and it’s a strategically important for competitive, fast growth markets. But 80% of customers are not buying groceries online, so ignoring the offline path to purchase is ludicrous, if you think about it. With WhiskConnect, FMCG / CPG brands no longer have to segment their market down to a single retailer in a single channel, which was previously alienating potential customers interacting with their brand.”

As an example, for many food brands, YouTube is a key platform for presenting recipes, cooking instruction and additional marketing content. These video campaigns may garner traffic, but sometimes fail to seize on purchase opportunities. WhiskConnect changes all this – using the free “YouTube Annotations” functionality FMCG brands can now seamlessly connect videos to a purchase without detracting users from visiting their brand websites.

“We’ve built WhiskConnect in partnership with FMCG brands to solve the issue of how to monetise brand awareness content across multiple channels. Simply put, WhiskConnect will give consumers simple ways to act upon calls to purchase,” says Nick Holzherr.

Ian Clifford, EMEA Ecommerce Director of McCormick UK Ltd, the world’s leading spice brand, says: “At McCormick, we wanted to find a way of making sure every interaction with our brand offered consumers the opportunity to connect to our website, so they could find out more about our products and be inspired by recipes we know they’d love. We also wanted to give prospective shoppers the ability to add our products to their basket or list easily without leaving our website. It was important that we found a cost-effective way to do this and with little outside assistance, as our media, video and social content is updated so often. Finally, it was critical that we test and learn quickly – so understanding which links were working best in real-time was a must. WhiskConnect is now helping us do all of this.”

The launch of WhiskConnect marks the company’s continued focus on serving the FMCG market. In 2014 Whisk launched the WhiskAds’ platform, which allows brands to intelligently insert relevant ads within recipe content and shopping lists. Ads persist along a consumer’s path to purchase, appearing on recipe pages, in their shopping list and at the point of offline or online purchase. With one click, Whisk shopping lists are transferred into online supermarket carts with leading UK online retailers Ocado, Tesco, ASDA and Waitrose.

Whisk’s “Create a Shopping List” button is embedded into hundreds of thousands of recipes across leading publishers such as Food Network, Woman & Home and Allrecipes — the world’s largest digital food brand, which receives more than 1 billion annual visits to their 19 local recipe sites serving 24 countries in 12 languages.

For shoppers, Whisk offers a free, smart app that turns recipes into handy digital shopping lists that can be accessed anywhere, anytime. Whisk’s shopping list is available at Whisk.com, a free iPhone shopping app and Android shopping app, as well as via a browser extension.