How often have you walked into a store, looked around, and then asked a store associate for help? To help, they ask you questions about what you’re looking for, what needs you’re trying to fill, and what problems you’re having that the store’s product line may solve. At the end of the interaction, you’re given enough information to make a purchase and you walk out the door with exactly what you were looking for.
Ok now, how often have you gone to an online store, looked around, and only been left with a ton of questions? Some stores sell products that are similar with different features (ie: skincare), while other stores sell so many products that you don’t even know where to start. So, where do you start?
If your online store utilizes online chat, and even better, chat campaigns to encourage customers to ask for help, then you’re on the right track. If you have a trained customer service team who knows not only how to help customers with missing orders and refunds, but who can speak to and sell your products, then you’re definitely making it easier for your online store visitors to find what they’re looking for.
With that said, not every store can afford, or just manage, properly staffing an online sales team to fill in the gaps that regular store associates normally would. Outsourcing your customer service to an agency that focuses on this (the DTCX Facebook group is a great place to find one!) can help solve this, but not all businesses feel that it’s the best option for them. So, what else can you, as a brand owner/manager do to help make online shopping a seamless experience for your potential customers?
Quizzes!
Yes, online quizzes are a surprisingly effective way to help your customers find exactly what they’re looking for. You can set up one single quiz to funnel your customers through, or you can create multiple small, specific quizzes, depending on your product offering and customer demographics.
Some quiz ideas include:
- Find your perfect fit: Perfect for fashion brands to help customers find products based on their size/shape
- Find the product based on your features: Great for brands that sell skincare or makeup products to save the customer time sifting through every product on your site
- Find the perfect gift: A great holiday quiz to help your customers buy for someone they love. (Important to note: make sure you’re segmenting out the data from this quiz, as the data won’t be about them, but about their giftee!)
- Find your next favorite product: An easy way to help pinpoint products fast is to encourage quick buying for sites that have large catalogues
How do you build the best quiz?
When thinking about what type of quizzes to add to your store, you’ll want to think about how many questions you’ll need to ask to be able to provide the answer. A quiz that’s only 2 questions may not be long enough to provide accurate answers, but a quiz with 20 questions will have a lot of customer drop-off.
The first page of your quiz can either dive right into asking a specific question or can collect the customer’s email address. If possible, collecting an email address right away will allow you to send follow-up emails to anyone who dropped off before completing it. That said, some users may prefer to finish the quiz before putting in their email address, as they want to see what products you’re offering before committing to giving you their information. Some quizzes can also be configured so that customers will only receive the answers to the quiz if they provide their email address. Try multiple different configurations and A/B test them to see what works best for your store.
The last page of your quiz, of course, should always lead to product recommendations, which will hopefully then result in purchases! You can set up a follow-up email flow that also sends the recommendations into their inbox for later.
You know your quiz is working well when you start seeing an increase in usage, quiz completions, and, of course, purchases coming from the quiz results.
One of our favourite go-to quiz apps is Octane.ai! Their quiz builder is not only easy to use and customize, but it integrates with other apps like Klaviyo and Facebook so that the data you collect through the quizzes can be used for additional marketing efforts.
Quizzes are great because you can collect zero-party data and leverage that data for personalization across your email, SMS, ads and website. Quizzes increase AOV, CVR, opt-in lists and more. But my favorite benefit of using a quiz? After learning more about your customers, you can make their experiences truly personalized and build better relationships by talking directly to their specific needs to unlock higher conversion rates. This leads to an increase in lifetime value of a customer, it’s that simple! - Olivia Harrell, Agency Partner Manager, Octane.ai
The data you collect from these quizzes is known as zero-party data, which is data that’s been voluntarily given to you by the customers directly, meaning it should be the most accurate you can get! This is especially important since the advertising ecosystem has made data almost impossible to leverage if it’s not collected from customers themselves.
With Octane.ai, the data can be used to create customer segments in Klaviyo, which can then be sent as email campaigns based on their responses (prefer product A over B), or sent through email flows based on triggers from the quiz (quiz abandonment, quiz completion, etc.).
This zero-party data can also be shared to Facebook ads and used to create custom audience lists that you can remarket to, or create lookalike audiences to prospect from.
So, how do you feel about adding quizzes to your store?
A: I want to set up a quiz right now!
B: I like the idea of them
C: I think this could improve my store’s conversion rate
D: This could definitely help my customers
E: All of the above!
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If you haven’t heard, DTCX has dropped a new YouTube show/Podcast called Exceptional Ecommerce! Subscribe on YouTube or listen on Spotify.
This article was written by Jess Grossman, contributing writer to DTCX and Founder & CEO of In Social.
