Whistle + UserTesting
About Whistle
Pet tech brand Whistle—a division of Mars Petcare—is enabling a new era of preventative care with wearables that track pet’s health, location, fitness, and more.
Whistle achieved
Challenge
It was a huge leap when Whistle evolved from a pet GPS company to a pet health company with no data to back up its hunch. To support the pivot in strategy with confident go-to-market decisions, the Marketing team first needed to address stagnant website conversions.
“I don’t have the time or resources to waste on A/B testing. Sacrificing traffic and potential sales to observe marginal performance differences doesn’t make sense. I need to know what visitors think and why.” Caroline Jensen, VP of Marketing, Whistle
Solution
Vice President of Marketing Caroline Jensen and the team determined the most efficient approach would be research that paired visitors’ attitudes about their experience with their behavior on the site—UX research.
With a limited research budget and no internal user experience (UX) research expertise, they found UserZoom. This UX insights system brings together a multi-method research platform, participant recruiting capabilities, and a team of seasoned UX research experts who could provide strategic guidance and conduct studies on their behalf.
The UserZoom research team quickly revealed friction throughout the site, but the Whistle team needed deeper insights to make meaningful changes. Using a combination of surveys and video interviews with their target audience to get unfiltered reactions to the messaging and customer journey, they validated that health monitoring was the most valuable product feature for prospective customers. A pricing study uncovered that consumers were willing to pay more for health-based plans.
“Of course when we surveyed customers who bought a GPS tracker they said that was the most important feature to them. But with UserZoom, we engaged the universe of dog owners instead, and for the first time in the company, we had data about where the market was heading - pet health.” Caroline Jensen, VP of Marketing, Whistle
After pinpointing what needed fixing across the website functionality and messaging, the UserZoom research experts conducted a content audit and benchmarking study to establish a baseline for the most impactful conversion points in the customer journey. Armed with a reliable metric - UserZoom’s QXscore - Whistle could repeat this process to measure performance over time as they made changes based on research insights.
Outcome
In less than a year after choosing UserZoom, the Whistle team applied their UX research insights to increase site conversion by an astounding 4,700%.
But conversions are only the tip of the iceberg. The digital experience insights from the research helped the marketing team understand the interplay of visitor attitudes and behaviors. Which ultimately helped them overhaul the go-to-market strategy to position Whistle as a pet health company in an increasingly crowded market of GPS pet trackers.
In addition to the tremendous business gains, UserZoom makes Caroline and her team’s working lives easier by enabling them to challenge assumptions and apply data-driven decision-making to their work. As Caroline says, “The QXscore makes my life so much easier because nobody can argue with data''.
Highlights
In less than a year after choosing UserZoom, the Whistle team applied UX research insights to increase site conversion by an astounding 4,700% and...
- Uncovered the deeper why behind conversion trends
- Validated a costly strategic investment in repositioning
- Adopted a reliable metric for understanding the digital experience
- Applied data-driven decision-making across the shopper journey
Caroline JensenVP of Marketing"Anyone with an ecommerce website should be doing UX research. As part of a data-driven company, I don’t know what we would do without UserZoom and the confidence my team gets from UX insights."
