As the end of 2020 approaches, businesses are faced with the challenge of preparing for 2021. What can you do to stand out? What are the trends leading into 2021? What should you be prioritizing to make more sales?
With all these questions floating around, we have to ask: how far up on your priority list is optimizing the customer experience?
The customer experience is your buyer’s perception of how your brand treats them, and this perception impacts the way they interact with you. From buying behaviors to loyalty and retention, it’s important to ensure a positive experience to keep every customer engaged beyond the first purchase.
Knowing this, optimizing your customer’s experiences should be the main focus for every eCommerce business, especially as more and more people start shopping online.
The key to offering an excellent customer experience is with personalization, and advanced personalization starts with learning who your customers are and what they need from you. To get started, you need the right tools to collect more data about your customers ethically, so we’d like to introduce you to the power of an eCommerce quiz.
Ecommerce quizzes are the ultimate data-collection and personalization tool
An eCommerce quiz is for online brands to ask customers questions to match them to the right products, recommendations, or content. There are a variety of quiz and survey types, such as gift finders, size finders, and product matching. Any eCommerce business, no matter the industry, can benefit from an online quiz.
Personalization matters to your customers, and eCommerce personalization is the bridge between an in-store experience and an online experience. In fact, 87% of U.S. customers are willing to have various details of their activity tracked in exchange for more personalized rewards. A quiz can capture that data for you, including demographic data, behavior data, intent data, interests, preferences, and more.
Considering 73% of marketers say combining traditional content marketing tactics with interactive content enhances the retention of their organization’s message, building an eCommerce quiz is a great way to engage visitors, drive them to make purchases, and retain them.
There is an infinite number of quiz types you can create
Before you decide an eCommerce quiz won’t work for your brand, know that there are so many possibilities when it comes to quiz creation. You can get super creative with what you build, and we’ve seen businesses from luxury, apparel, health, food and beverage, and more benefit from a quiz. Let’s look at a few examples below.
Gift finder
Gift shopping can be difficult, but you can make the search easier for customers with a gift finder like Couple Desires did.
In their quiz, they ask customers who they’re shopping for, if they have a specific gift in mind, and offer a 10% discount if the customer shares their email. Once the customer completes the questions, Couple Desires recommends a few of their products that would make excellent gift options.
Product recommender
Using a quiz as a product recommender is one of the most common types you’ll see from eCommerce brands. For businesses that have large product catalogs, a product recommender is a great way to introduce customers to a select number of products they would actually benefit from.
Glamnetic uses a product recommender to help customers find their perfect magnetic eyelash set. With the quiz, they ask customers for their age, what eye shape they have, where they plan to wear lashes if they want long or short lashes, and what experience level they have. At the end, Glamnetic recommends a few eyelash sets that fit the customer’s profile.
Size finder
A common pain point when shopping online is choosing the right size. You likely find yourself looking at reviews to see if the sizing is accurate. To avoid this, brands can build size finder quizzes. Not only does this give customers more confidence to make a purchase, but it can lead to fewer returns too.
To see an example of a size finder quiz, you can check out Buckle Me Baby Coats. In the quiz, customers are asked who they’re shopping for and their preferred style. It also tells customers how to properly take measurements to find the child’s correct size. Once customers take the measurements and answer the questions, Buckle Me Baby Coats recommends the best products in that size.
Style Finder
Apparel brands tend to have a lot of products and styles. This isn’t a bad thing, but it can be difficult for customers to sort through to find their preferred style. To make sorting easier, offer a style finder quiz.
To see an example of a style finder quiz, check out Sebastian Cruz Couture. By asking customers why they’re shopping and what they’re shopping for, Sebastian Cruz Couture can narrow down their clothing selections. After asking customers to select the image that is closest to their preferred style, the brand shows products that match.
Educational
Although quizzes are a great way to promote your products, it’s also an opportunity to educate your customers about what your brand does or sells. This is how Mush uses its eCommerce quiz.
Mush asks customers if they’ve heard of overnight oats before, diving into the benefits of their product. Customers can choose to try overnight oats, or they can click to continue learning more about the benefits. At the end of the quiz, Mush gives customers $10 off to get started—a great tactic to drive more sales while educating customers.
Routine finder
Because beauty products react differently with every skin type, it makes it difficult to shop for them online, especially when you can’t easily talk to a sales associate about your skin concerns. Some brands, like BeautyBio, use quizzes to fill this gap.
With an online virtual consultation, BeautyBio matches customers to a skincare routine. The quiz collects data about a customer’s age, skin concern, and desired treatment outcome. On the results page, customers are provided with an AM or PM routine (or both). With the click of a single button, the customer can add the entire routine to their shopping cart.
Beauty shade finder
Speaking of beauty products, another common pain point for customers is matching their skin tone. Luckily, some beauty brands use an eCommerce quiz to match customers to the right shade of concealer and foundation, like Uoma Beauty.
With just a three-step process of clicking images that are close to your skin color, Uoma Beauty is able to recommend an entire beauty routine with concealer, foundation, and contour. The customer can choose to add individual products or the entire set to their cart from the quiz results page.
Recipe finder
A recipe finder is a unique use-case for food and beverage brands. Although a product recommender would work great, to try something different you can share recipes made with your products through a quiz instead—like Skinny Mixes does.
By asking customers what kind of recipe they’re interested in and what flavors they prefer, Skinny Mixes shares recipes for coffee, tea, cocktails, smoothies, and more. Each recipe is made using one of their products, so customers can choose to purchase if they want to try the recommended recipe.
How to optimize your quiz for increased engagement
You can’t just create a quiz and expect results; part of the process of optimizing your quiz is learning how to properly promote it. Let’s explore a few ways you can get more website visitors to engage with it.
Make your quiz visible across your website
Your homepage is where your quiz will be most visible to new and returning customers. Promoting your quiz here will give you a better sample of buyer profiles since you’ll get a broad range of people engaging with it. Add a call-out and link in your navigation and footer menu to allow more customers to discover it, as well.
When customers browse your store, they’ll often click on specific products to read the details and reviews. Adding a quiz call-to-action on your product pages is perfect for customers who aren’t yet confident enough to purchase. This is an especially useful tactic for stores that have a large product catalog.
Finally, use pop-ups because they have high visibility. Welcome new visitors and offer the quiz as a way to get onboarded with your brand, or use an exit-intent to stop customers that were about to leave your store.
Share your quiz on your social media platforms and ads
To discover completely new customers, you can promote your quiz using paid ads. This will help grow your marketing list with customers that fit your target audience. Since these visitors are directed to your quiz, it’s a great way to use your quiz to onboard them by introducing your brand and products.
Don’t forget to share your quiz organically, as well. Announce it on Instagram stories, on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media channel you use to engage with customers regularly.
Promote your quiz in an email or Facebook Messenger campaign
Creating a Facebook Messenger or email campaign can engage two types of customers: those who are already loyal to your brand, and customers who are opted-in to your marketing lists but haven’t actually purchased anything yet. In either bucket, your email and Messenger subscribers will engage with your quiz to learn more about your products.
Ecommerce quiz best practices
Keep in mind that just because you’re promoting your quiz well doesn’t mean the work ends there. You also want to ensure customers are interested from the first question to the results page. Let us share a few tips for getting the best results with your quiz.
- Make your quiz fun and engaging. Use images, GIFS, explainer screens, and fun language.
- Don’t make your quiz too long or complex. You only have moments to capture a customer’s attention and engage with them.
- Make your email, SMS, and Facebook Messenger opt-in optional to prevent people from dropping off.
- Offer an incentive in exchange for a customer to decide to share their contact information with you.
- Including a recommended products section below the quiz results is always a win to upsell more.
- Personalize your quiz as much as you can. Make sure all the buttons, text, and images are on-brand.
If you use these best practices and promote your quiz well, you’ll see a significant increase in customer engagement. Not only will more visitors be interacting on your website, but you’ll drive more email, Messenger and SMS opt-ins. In fact, Bariatric Fusion collected 16X more emails with their quiz than their pop-ups.
The other benefit is how much data you’ll start collecting from website visitors and customers. Let’s talk about how to leverage that data next.
How to leverage your quiz data for personalized experiences
Knowing your customers well is a great way to stand out from the crowd. Good customer experience (CX) matters, which is specified in this research on CX: good customer experience leads to 3.5X more sales and positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Thus, it’s important to learn more about your potential customers.
With an eCommerce quiz, you’ll start collecting buyer profile data, which is information about a customer’s likes, dislikes, preferences, needs, and more. This gives you a full profile about who that customer is based on actual known data they’ve shared with you.
Once you’ve collected your buyer profile data and segmented customers into like-minded groups, the next step is to actually use that data in your marketing strategy. This is the most important step—personalization is key for increasing your engagement rates.
Here are a few ways you can leverage your new data for personalization:
Retarget your campaigns: Retarget campaigns and build lookalike audiences to target similar buyer personas. Include opt-ins during the quiz to pair buyer profile data to identifying information like an email, SMS or Facebook Messenger opt-in to target your marketing.
Tailor your website to individuals: You can create a “recommended products” section on your homepage that shows products you know are relevant to each visitor. Or, create unique pop-ups for different website pages that offer exclusive opt-in content (like targeted discounts).
Educate customers with relevant, value-added content: As an example, If you learn you have a group of customers with oily skin, create content to educate them about treating oily skin and the products to help. This includes blog posts, videos, and infographics.
Onboard customers based on their needs: Send new customers a personalized welcome series on Facebook Messenger or email. Make sure the messages are tailored based on buyer profile data. The first message should be to introduce yourself and your brand, letting customers know what they can expect from you. In the following messages, share relevant content or product offerings.
Boost your customer engagement with an eCommerce quiz today!
We know—that was a lot of information, so let’s summarize it with the key takeaways.
- Ecommerce quizzes are the ultimate data-collection and engagement tool.
- There are a variety of quizzes you can create, and brands in any industry can benefit from them.
- Optimize your quiz for increased engagement by properly promoting it across various channels.
- Ensure you’re following quiz best practices so customers start and complete your quiz (and maybe share their contact information).
- Leverage the data you collect from your quiz to personalize your customers’ experiences. This is how you’ll increase engagement.
Do you see how an eCommerce quiz can unlock a world of opportunities for your brand? If you’re interested in getting a tool like this for your brand, reach out to your account manager at Hawke Media or start a free trial with Octane AI!