Product news

Visual Editor has just shipped. It's a brand new feature for Made With Intent.

Yes, we know this isn't something groundbreaking, and you've used something like Visual Editor before, with your favourite tools, but this is one of the most requested features from our customers.

It lets you create and preview on-site changes against your own live website. You'll have more flexibility and control over the kinds of experiences you'd like our tool to test and deliver to your customers.

It'll reduce the need for developers to get involved, and give you a familiar, visual way of editing experiences, directly within Made With Intent, that you can ship on your own.

So, that's the short version. Here's a bit more background on what it does, why we built it and a sneak preview of what's coming next.

What Visual Editor does

Visual Editor lets you create and preview on-site changes against your own live website, without developer support and without guessing how something will look once it's live.

It solves a familiar problem. The person responsible for the site experience is rarely the person who can build it. As Ryan Jordan, our CPO, puts it:

"The people that are using our product are generally those who are responsible for the site experience but not necessarily technically able to always build for the site experience."

Here's a list of of some of things you'll be able to do with this new feature:

• Change a banner
• Update, restyle, hide or show a specific element on a page
• Fully customisable overlays, built to cater for every moment 
• Build and preview components on your live site before they go anywhere near a visitor.

You'll have, no doubt, used lots and lots of WYSIWYG tools before in your favourite A/B testing, experience and ecommerce tools. We've deliberately designed Visual Editor to be familiar, and work similar to the products you know and love, so you'll find it intuitive to use.

We built Visual Editor because it is the feature that was most requested by our customers. We feel it's a natural evolution of our well-loved template library. With the ability to essentially edit your site by clicking and typing, we think it'll be flexible enough for non-technical people to pick it up and build something quick and dirty.

But this new feature will also let you see the context of what you've built in-situ, perfect for your site and your context, instead of leaving it to imagination.

But Ryan reckons you'll go further: "Previously, campaigns delivered with Made With Intent were generally thought about from a \"template\" first approach, but the Visual Editor now allows you to think about how real-time moments of intent can change the page and its content"

Moving towards a goal-orientated mindset

We reckon our Visual Editor will help you change your mindset. Most experience delivery tools tell you to pick a format first. You decide you want a pop-up, then you go and fill it with content. You decide you want a sticky banner, then you fill that with content. The format leads, and the goal follows.

But that's backwards for a lot of what teams are trying to do.

Let's take basket abandonment. One brand might come in knowing they want a pop-up. Fine, build the pop-up, fill it with content. But another brand comes in knowing only that they want to offer a 20% discount when someone's about to leave. They've got the goal. Why should we dictate how you deliver that discount?

So we've built Visual Editor to work from either end. Start with a format and add your content. Or start with your content: the discount, the message, the countdown timer. Then see how it looks as a sticky banner, a pop-up, a slide-in, or an in-page element.

"Most of the market always just goes format-into-content," Ryan explained. "What we're doing by flipping it and being able to go content-into-format is giving people the ability to play around."

On paper this might seem like a small thing. But we think this will give you different options to explore different solutions to the same problems you've been optimising and experimenting with for years. You'll be inspired to create different solutions to the same problems you've been having for years.

A quick note on CSP

Some sites run Content Security Policy (CSP) rules that can stop a visual editor from working on the page. To help with that, we're rolling out a Chrome extension called Intent Studio that unblocks it.

If your site's CSP rules mean you can't use the editor on the page yet, nothing else changes, everything you could do yesterday, you can still do today. For sites that don't have CSP rules, you should be fine without Intent Studio.

So, what's coming next?

We'll be adding more templates. We've built Visual Editor to be flexible deliberately, so people get used to it and start asking "can it do this, can it do that," we'll keep adding to what's there.

Longer term, this is where things get a bit interesting. We're finding with tools like Claude Design, many, many people are designing experiences using prompts, instead of fiddling around manually.

Ryan says: "It's now no longer click on an element and change the background colour to blue. It's tell an AI, make this background blue, and it kind of just does it for you."

The widgets behind Visual Editor have been built so that AI can understand them and make changes to them. This is the groundwork for letting you describe the change you want and have it built for you.

There's no hard date on when this is coming, but Ryan said it's a matter of weeks, not quarters.

Made With Intent has always been about one thing: enabling you to respond to real-time intent on your ecommerce site. Everything we do is in service of making that easier and more effective.

For a long time, acting on intent meant working within the formats we gave you or dev resource. Visual Editor changes that. It lowers the barrier between knowing what you want a visitor to experience and actually building it — without waiting on someone else to do it for you.

The gap between who owns the site experience and who can build it just got a lot smaller.

And the next step, simply describing the change instead of building it manually, is next.

Login to Made With Intent to see Visual Editor in action. If you're not a customer yet, and are curious, why don't you book a demo?

MANCHESTER, 02/05/24 - Made With Intent have raised £1.5m to bring their segmentation platform and their vision for more appropriate eCommerce to market. Led by Mercuri, with Portfolio Ventures and previous investors Haatch following, the seed funding will support the fully remote team of 15 with their product, marketing and partnership efforts.

The idea came after the founder, David Mannheim, recognised a fundamental flaw in online retail strategies. After 15 years of optimising conversion rates in eCommerce, he realised the industry’s fixation on conversion metrics was the very thing holding it back.

“The current measures of success are the problem. Metrics like conversion rate, and therefore the actions retailers take to improve them, are short-term, retrospective and aggregated,” David explains. “This creates a race to the bottom. A numbers game that forgets how people really buy.”

Made With Intent looks to change this by giving retailers two things—a more human, segmented perspective of their website performance and a predictive targeting mechanism that lets other marketing tech respond to customer needs in real time. The company reports this new intent-based approach creates a 9.4% average revenue uplift compared to generic optimisation.

“eCommerce is often guilty of trying to convert all customers at all times,” David states. “It focuses on the minority who are ready to buy, at the expense of those who are not. Our product helps retailers be appropriate for every customer. To progress both in-market and future buyers.”

The Beta launched in September has already helped customers like Ernest Jones, Bensons for Beds and Rapha align how they sell with actual buying behaviours. Nik Fletcher, Head of Digital Experience at Rapha, describes the product as “the closest we can get to understanding subconscious visitor signals, like we can in a physical store.”

The platform works by collecting data through an easy to implement script, modelling 250+ signals from online shoppers and returning predictive intent metrics in real time. Visitors are then automatically segmented based on their journey, momentum and how likely they are to buy, exit or return in the future.

This data and the targeting of segments are handled in platform, but the tool is designed to be complementary. With integrations to 40+ marketing tools, from ad networks to experience tools and CRMs, eCommerce teams can use Made With Intent to deliver more appropriate shopping experiences or reengagement tactics with the tools they already use.

“Made With Intent has embraced first-principle thinking and a decade of insights to shake up the vast eCommerce market,” comments Alan Hudson, Founding General Partner at Mercuri. “It empowers online commerce, making it more personal and focused on the quality of prospective customers. The product roadmap excites us and, importantly, those using it.”

“As a VC investor we look at a vast number of potential investments each year, however we only invest in less than a dozen. Made With Intent's strategy is similar for its customers - to focus on the quality of the prospect, not the number of prospects."

With an existing user base in the UK, Denmark, Germany and the USA, the company aims to reach 100 global customers within two years. David Mannheim adds, "Made With Intent is about more than a platform. It's about a movement to create a more personal, human eCommerce. This investment brings us closer to fulfilling our mission."

For media or product enquiries please contact Daniel Gripton, VP Marketing, on LinkedIn.