Omaze

Designing and launching a trust-building UK site for fundraising company Omaze

Sales Increase

+4M

Monthly visits

+10K

Services

Internationalisation

UX

Design

Development

SEO

Technology

Shopify Plus

Klaviyo

Optimizely

Trustpilot

AWS

Terraform

Challenge

After achieving success in the US with their unmissable prize draws, Omaze approached us to take the UK by storm. Challenge one was building trust and credibility around the brand in a new market, ensuring users understood their charitable efforts by embedding crucial trust cues.


Challenge two was making those trust cues work alongside an avant garde site build; one that breaks the rules of traditional ecommerce, both in terms of the UX and the development. Customers aren’t buying new shoes or headphones; they’re buying a ticket and donating to charity. This becomes trickier still when multiple tickets, free entry promotions and gamification elements come into play. 

 

And that brings us to challenge three: securely passing ticket purchase data to a prize-drawing system. This technology had to be automated and air-tight to meet legal requirements.

Solution

After working closely with the Omaze team to align with their brand values, we designed and built their super-fast new website, including a secure, lawfully-compliant database infrastructure and prize-drawing system. 


With site speed a key goal, we put measures in place to ensure the site would load at a faster pace, even with significant volumes of traffic. We also enriched the site with trust-building landing pages and dynamic checkout links to build credibility in the new market and maximise conversions.


Omaze’s new website, backed by a multi-channel digital marketing strategy, enabled them to launch powerfully into the UK market, achieving 10 million hits within the first 2 weeks. The robust backend framework successfully managed high traffic volumes, including one campaign that led to over 10 million entries in just two days, and we exceeded conversion targets and KPIs. Today, Omaze is a household name across the United Kingdom.


Story

Omaze is the idea you wish you’d had, and the competition you’re desperate to win. Since 2012, they’ve been making headlines for their ground-breaking, philanthropic business. So, what’s the deal? Quite simply, you buy a ticket for their prize draw, a portion of the money goes to charity, and you could end up the lucky owner of a million pound house (or a Range Rover, or £10,000 in cash). But it’s not just the concept that makes Omaze unique; it’s their website set-up too. 

For this exciting and complex project, we pushed the boundaries of Shopify Plus, integrating intricate draw mechanics and a dynamic queuing system to ensure orders/entries were handled seamlessly. With best practice UX design at the heart of the project, we tackled different stumbling blocks in the user journey to make the path to purchase feel quick, clear and concise, while also encouraging a higher average order value (AOV). 


Email marketing played a pivotal role in the Omaze user journey. We iterated, tested and optimised the automated flows built out in Klaviyo, with one of the most effective features being the addition of custom dynamic checkout links. These links would take the user straight to checkout, where they could amend their cart and add voucher codes to their order.


We also introduced Omaze to Yotpo SMSBump so they could reach out to their customers with personalised, results-driven text messaging. We implemented an SMS sign-up form on their thank you page (to avoid impacting the conversion at checkout) which allowed Omaze to deliver nurturing, post-purchase messages to their customers. SMS proved to be a low cost, high return marketing channel.


The harmonious working relationship between Underwaterpistol and Omaze has led to some game-changing results that have helped to bolster fundraising for The Teenage Cancer Trust and The British Heart Foundation, and more.

‘’What I like about the UWP team is how collaborative and results focused they are”

James Oakes, Chief International Officer at Omaze