How exciting is it when you discover a new quiz that tells you what character you’re most like from your favorite TV show? There’s no doubt about it--online quizzes are engaging. However, aside from character identification quizzes, ecommerce stores have an opportunity to be able to engage with customers through interactive quizzes as well.
An ecommerce quiz brings the in-store retail experience to your online store and gives your customers the confidence they need to purchase your products. By asking questions about a customer’s preferences, challenges, desires and more, a quiz matches each customer with a buyer profile and its corresponding product recommendations.
The beauty of quizzes is that 77% of marketers say this type of interactive content provides value with a high amount of engagements that result in repeat visitors. Aside from higher engagement, when you have buyer profile data about your customers, you can personalize every experience and touchpoint they have with your brand. Personalized experiences lead to better customer nurturing cycles, which in turn increases your customer retention.
We’ll explore some of the top ways ecommerce businesses can use an interactive quiz tool to drive sales in this article.
Why invest in a quiz software for your ecommerce store
Every quiz software is different. For Shopify and Shopify Plus brands, it’s important to find one that offers a drag-and-drop interface that’s embeddable on-site. This ensures a code-free quiz building solution, so your business can easily design an on-brand quiz to work anywhere on your website.
Another important feature is to be able to collect buyer profile data based on customers’ quiz answers to use for personalized messaging and retargeting. For example, with Octane AI’s quiz software, data is collected from every quiz question and results page. That data gets segmented into buyer profiles, which then can be used for more personalized messaging across all your marketing channels and paid advertising campaigns.
Considering 75% of marketers say non-gated interactive content can result in a higher degree of lead nurturing, quizzes have become an excellent tool to collect more email, SMS, and Facebook Messenger opt-ins. By offering an incentive for opting in at any point during the quiz, businesses like Bariatric Fusion have been able to increase email opt-ins at an incredible rate.
6 Types of quizzes you can build to engage with your audience
You may already have a ton of ideas in mind for how you can use a quiz with your ecommerce store. The opportunities are endless! From helping customers choose outfits, find gifts, educate or entertain them, you can get really creative with the type of interactive content you build through a quiz. In fact, 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them. This is why it’s important to use a quiz tool to understand more personalized data from your customers and offer accurate recommendations.
It doesn’t matter what industry your ecommerce store is in. Whether you sell food, beverages, nutritional supplements, cosmetics, fashion, art supplies, or anything else, you can use a quiz. These are some of the top ways we’ve seen Shopify stores use our quiz creator to increase their sales:
Product finder
A product finder quiz is the most popular use of the Shoppable Quiz. Simply ask customers a series of questions about their likes and dislikes, challenges, preferences and desired solutions to recommend accurate products from your Shopify catalog. A product finder quiz brings the in-store retail experience online by resembling a personal shopper that asks you questions to help you narrow down the right product.
Post-purchase survey
Surveys are a great way to gather customer feedback and make improvements to your store. After customers have made a purchase, you can invite them to fill out a quiz about their experience shopping at your store and your products for detailed feedback. You can send the link to your online post-purchase survey quiz to customers through email or Messenger. Not only does this improve your customer experience by showing customers you care about their feedback, but it gives you an opportunity to understand more about your customers.
Customer onboarding
How unique would it be to onboard new customers to your store with an interactive quiz? This is the perfect way to get to know everything about who your potential buyers are to build detailed buyer profiles. These types of questions will let you know who your shoppers are and how to engage with them. Based on the responses, you can ensure you’re personalizing that customer’s experience by showing relevant products and writing personalized messages in your marketing. Pro tip: share a bit about your brand too during the onboarding quiz, so it feels like the customer is getting to know you just as much as you’re getting to know them.
Size finder
One concern customers always have when shopping online for apparel is making sure they choose the right size. Every store’s sizing is slightly different, and it can be difficult for customers to feel confident about making a purchase when they can’t physically try an item on before buying it. The good thing is a quiz provides a simple solution to this problem. By asking customers questions about their body type and shape, you can make sure you’re recommending the right sizes for shirts, pants, shorts, dresses, bathing suits, underwear, and anything else that requires a sizing expert!
Educational and entertainment
You can use a quiz to teach customers about what your brand does, sells or supports, and make learning about your business fun and engaging so your business is memorable for each visitor. This is helpful for extremely niche brands.
For example, if you sell supplies for beekeeping, you could use a quiz to educate website visitors about everything there is to beekeeping. Based on people’s responses, you’ll have a good understanding of visitors that are new to beekeeping and customers that are more experienced. Use this information to send personalized follow-ups with valuable content based on that person’s experience level.
Choose your own adventure
For all businesses that sell products related to travel and vacation, a “choose your own adventure” quiz can help you engage with your customers to understand what their vacation style is like. You can recommend your best products based on what you learn. For example, is a customer looking for a tropical adventure that features a lot of beach lounging? Maybe they need a large beach towel. Or, are they looking to ride a four-wheeler in a sandy desert terrain? Maybe they need some strong sunglasses to protect their eyes.
Even if you don’t sell something related to travel, you can make up a super creative story where every quiz response leads to a different ending. Throughout the quiz, you can ask customers if they’re interested in email, SMS, or Facebook Messenger notifications to collect marketing opt-ins too. The options are endless!
As you can see, there are a ton of valuable ways you can create a quiz for your ecommerce store that will boost engagement, sell more products, and collect more marketing opt-ins. There’s no doubt that customers will engage with your quiz (they are fun, after all!), you should have to build one first!
Start using quizzes to drive your ecommerce sales
Now that you’ve seen a few creative use-cases for an ecommerce quiz, learn how you can drive more sales, and increase marketing opt-ins by building one on your Shopify site, it’s time you create your own. Here are a few best practices to ensure your quiz is optimized for success:
- Make your quiz fun and engaging by including images, GIFS, explainer screens, and unique language.
- For most cases, don't make a quiz super complex or long to avoid people dropping off.
- Use incentives on opt-in pages and make them optional to prevent people from dropping off.
- Personalize your quiz as much as you can and ensure every part is on brand.
By utilizing a quiz tool and collecting important customer data, you’ll increase your customer retention rate by offering unique experiences to every individual. Good luck with your quiz creation!
This is a guest post by Tina Donati, Content Marketing Specialist at Octane AI. Octane AI is an all-in-one suite for engaging quizzes, data collection and personalized Facebook Messenger and SMS automation. Merchants use Octane AI to connect, convert and retain customers by personalizing the customer journey and creating experiences customers love
