Product selection or customer engagement quizzes are one of the most powerful, bang-for-the-buck tools you can implement in your e-commerce store. Learn why, and how to do it.
Every online e-commerce store has three main goals:
- Reaching new customers/gaining traffic.
- Conversions and increasing sales.
- Engaging customers and keeping them coming back.
While there are many strategies and marketing tactics that can be used to achieve these goals, there is one tool that has the power to do all three, in an interactive format that’s fun for the customer, and can be implemented fairly easily without a huge investment. It also returns an extremely valuable set of first-party data about the customer — a true gold mine for any business.
What is that tool? A customer quiz.
An e-commerce quiz can do so many things for your brand. There are different types of quizzes you can implement — let’s take a look at the two main types of quiz, and what each does best.
The Product Selection Quiz
This is a quiz that leads your website visitor through a selection of questions designed to help them decide what products to buy. A product selection quiz works really well for the following types of e-commerce stores:
- A store with a lot of products.
- Stores that sell personal care products, such as skin care, cosmetics, beauty items — things that are very personal to the customer in terms of skin or hair type, colors, preferences, and that generally have many options.
- Stores that offer customizable products.
- Brands that have a lot of customers asking product questions.
- Brands that have a high abandoned cart rate.
If your abandoned cart rate is high, one possible reason is that customers are getting too overwhelmed with the selection of products and they don’t know what to buy, or they need some personal assistance to help them determine what product is right for them.
For example, a skin care brand might sell tinted moisturizer in different formulas (sensitive skin, dry skin, oily skin, aging skin, for instance) and it might come in many different shades. As the customer, I may be unsure which formula or shade is right for me. So I look at the product, I like it — but ultimately, I leave the site without buying because I don’t know what to buy.
If you get a lot of product questions from your website visitors, that’s an indication that either your product descriptions aren’t accurate or detailed enough, your products are possibly confusing, there are too many choices, or people are unsure what size/quantity/type, etc. to buy.
Product selection quizzes guide your visitor through the process in a fun, personalized way that puts the focus on them — something almost every loves, talking about themselves. They can be serious or whimsical, all business or all frivolous, depending on your products and the tone/style of your brand.
In the end of the quiz journey, your customer is presented with a personalized recommendation list of a few of your products. Combining this “end result” landing page with helpful tips, information, and some of your own content gives it even more power, and more reason for your customer to stay.
The Customer Engagement Quiz
This type of quiz, rather than acting as a guide for the customer to discover what products work for them, is meant to just be fun and engaging. Again, it puts the focus on the customer and gets them talking about themselves.
This is where you, and your website visitors, get to have a bit of fun. Get creative, brainstorm about your brand and your typical — or ideal — customer.
For example, let’s take an e-commerce store that sells fitness gear and clothing. It might have a “What Kind of Athlete are You?” quiz.
A shop that sells food or beverages, or a cooking/recipe site, might have some sort of foodie quiz that asks the customer about their eating and food preference styles.
A home furniture or design store might offer a “What’s Your Design Style?” quiz.
You get the picture: a customer engagement quiz should reflect and involve your brand and what you sell, as well as be something discoverable and fun for the customer. At the end of this type of quiz journey, the answer as to “What type of….” is presented to the quiz taker — and you can also offer product recommendations as well, based on their results, along with some of your content and perhaps some educational/useful/informative content.
Finder & Educational Quizzes
There are many types of quizzes that you can offer, a lot of them different iterations on the two main types above. Some of the other ways you can use a customer quiz are to help your customers find things. You can use a quiz as a:
- Gift finder
- Size finder
- Style finder
- Routine finder
- Recipe finder
Educational quizzes are also popular. These are generally used to help inform your customers about what your brand sells or does. This can be particularly useful if your product is something new to the market, relatively unknown, or is complicated. Educational quizzes are often used by companies that sell health or medical type products, or revolutionary unheard-of products. An electronic toothbrush company might educate its visitors on the benefits of using such an instrument for dental health through a quiz, for example.
Now let’s look in more detail at the huge benefits that customer quizzes offer an e-commerce brand.
It increases engagement, interaction, and time spent on your site
These things are invaluable for any website. The more you can get a visitor to engage with your site, particularly in a very interactive way, the more you are both increasing their time spent with you, as well as increasing their familiarity with your brand and deepening that relationship you want to build.
These things lead to increased brand loyalty and retention. When the customer gets your next email, they might be more inclined to open it and see what new fun or informative things you might be offering. It also optimizes those customers to become repeat buyers, and to tell others about your brand.
Increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%. Think about that for a minute. Loyalty and retention are huge factors!
You collect valuable data about your customers and their behavior
As I said before, customer information is the goldmine for any business. And with Google Chrome and other browsers doing away with third-party cookies, and increased concerns over privacy, volunteered first-party data is the Holy Grail.
Think about all of the data points you are getting from your website visitors and customers when they take a quiz on your site. You’re collecting information about their personal preferences, their likes and dislikes, their lifestyle, their behavior and patterns … things that companies pay hefty amounts of money to obtain.
For the most part, in order to see quiz results or have the results emailed to the customer, they need to provide their email address at the end of the quiz, or at some point within it. This can help you build your mailing list (with opt-in and user privacy in place, of course) — but not just with an email address and perhaps a name, but also a wealth of information about your customer and what he or she wants. Talk about a golden opportunity for follow-up marketing to them! Not to mention long-term data to help inform your brand to ensure you continue to offer what your potential customers really want.
You’re Giving Visitors a Personalized User Experience
We’ve all heard mountains about personalization in the last decade. It’s become one of the most important things for any online business to focus on.
Personalization makes the user experience much richer, more rewarding, and more fun. Particularly with online shopping, where the customer is not getting personal service in a bricks-and-mortar, physical store with in-person interaction. E-commerce personalization is the bridge between that in-store experience and the online experience. A customer quiz is one of the best ways to achieve that.
According to Accenture, 91% of consumers prefer to shop with brands that provide a personalized experience. What’s more, 83% are willing to provide their personal information to get that kind of experience.
Quiz Best Practices
Now that you know how powerful a customer quiz can be for your brand, let’s look at some of the things you should know about building, implementing, and promoting your quiz.
- Make your quiz fun and engaging. This is the place to get creative and be conversational and interactive with your customers.
- Don’t make the quiz too long or complex. Generally, about 3-6 questions are best, and short questions and answers work better.
- Make sure your quiz embraces your brand, and its style and tone. It should be an extension of the personality of your business.
- You might consider offering an incentive to your customers who take the quiz. Perhaps that’s a “gift with purchase” or a coupon for a discount or free shipping.
- Be sure to offer product recommendations at the end of every quiz. Adding some of your own unique content from your site or blog, and perhaps some additional informative or educational material.
- Make your quiz very visible throughout your site — make sure that customers see it very quickly and on various pages, not just the home page.
- Promote your quiz in marketing and advertising strategies, and through social media. Because the quiz is by nature interactive — just like social media — that’s the perfect platform to really promote it.
- Share your quiz in email marketing and newsletters.
- Use the customer email provided during the quiz as the starting point for an email marketing series. Be sure that this is opt-in, with visible unsubscribe options, and that the email sequence follows up on the quiz topic, offering the customer more information, recommendations, and incentives to come back and buy.
Before closing, I’ll share this article that gives some examples of e-commerce quizzes that work very well.
If you’re interested in building a quiz for your brand, check out some case studies of clients we have helped, and contact us for more information, and a quote if you’d like. You would be surprised how small of an investment a quiz can be, with the payoff in conversions, sales, data, engagement, and loyalty a huge ROI.
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